Hera (Bolen)

Definition

Bolen’s Hera is a pattern in women’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek goddess of marriage. In Goddesses in Everywoman (1984) it is the first of three vulnerable goddesses, with Demeter and Persephone, whom Bolen groups as the goddesses of the traditional roles of wife, mother and daughter, whose identity and well-being depend on a significant relationship, and who in myth were raped, abducted, dominated or humiliated by male gods; their mode of attention she calls, after the Jungian analyst Irene Claremont de Castillejo, “diffuse awareness” (1984, p. 15; pp. 133–135). The woman in whom Hera predominates, as Bolen describes her, feels a deep need to be a wife: marriage is for her a sacred commitment, the role and its public standing matter to her, and she feels incomplete without a partner. Her strengths are loyalty, constancy and the capacity to keep a vow through hardship. The difficulties Bolen attaches to the pattern follow from the myth: jealousy and vindictiveness, with the rage at betrayal turned on “the other woman” rather than on the unfaithful partner, as Hera pursued Zeus’s lovers rather than Zeus.

Two exclusions apply. This is not Hera the goddess, queen of Olympus and patron of Argos and Samos, whose myths and cults are described here only as the material Bolen read. And it is not one of the classical figures of Jung’s psychology, which has no wife among its figures. Bolen calls her goddesses archetypes; what she describes is a type of person, recorded here as hers, one of seven goddess patterns for women (1984). Hera’s husband Zeus is one of the eight gods of the companion volume, Gods in Everyman (1989).

History

The pattern first appears in the chapter “Hera: Goddess of Marriage, Commitment Maker and Wife” of Goddesses in Everywoman, published by Harper & Row in San Francisco in 1984 and in paperback in 1985, and reissued with a new introduction and the subtitle Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives in 2004 and again in 2014. As elsewhere in the book, the myth is retold and the pattern then followed through a woman’s life, its relationships, work, troubles and ways of growth.

The mythic material is public domain. Hesiod makes Hera a daughter of Rhea and Cronos and the last of Zeus’s wives, mother of Hebe, Ares and Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth (Theogony 453–454, 921–923). The short Homeric hymn to her calls her queen of the immortals, sister and wife of Zeus; the Hymn to Aphrodite explains Zeus’s affairs with mortal women as Aphrodite’s work, carried on “unknown to Hera” (Hymn 5, ll. 33–44). The Hymn to Apollo shows the wife’s anger: Hera keeps the birth goddess from Leto in envy, and when Zeus brings Athena into the world without her, she protests to the assembled gods:

Hear from me, all gods and goddesses, how cloud-gathering Zeus begins to dishonour me wantonly, when he has made me his true-hearted wife. — Homeric Hymn to Apollo (Hymn 3), ll. 311–330, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914), Gutenberg #348

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The Iliad gives the wife acting on her own account, beguiling Zeus on Mount Ida (Book XIV), and Ovid gives her persecution of Io and Semele (Metamorphoses I, III). The cult supplied a life course: Pausanias records that at Stymphalus Temenus founded three sanctuaries to Hera as Girl, Grown-up and Widow (8.22.2), and Bolen takes up the same three aspects, the maiden of spring, Hera Teleia, “the Perfected” or fulfilled one of summer and autumn, and Hera Chera, the widow of winter, in her account of the goddess. Among Bolen’s Jungian predecessors, Philip Zabriskie (1974), as summarised by John Sanford (1980), had already read Hera as the feminine related to the masculine world institutionally rather than personally, guardian of throne and home; Bolen lists the article among her references. Bolen’s appeal to Jung holds only loosely: Jung’s archetypes include no wife, and the goddess as a type of married woman is Bolen’s and Zabriskie’s construction.

The debate

Among the classical figures, Bolen’s Hera has no counterpart. Two of them touch it. In classical Jungian terms a woman’s husband is a likely carrier of her projected animus, which makes the marriage the place where the animus is lived; and Hera as matron, queen and mother of the birth goddess borders the great mother. Neither is a wife. Toni Wolff’s typology (1951) has no Hera either: Wolff’s Hetaira is the companion of an individual man, not the partner in an institution, and Sanford attached Hera to none of Wolff’s four forms but to women devoted to home, community and church.

The figure is where the feminist criticism of the taxonomy bites hardest, because it presents the wish to be a wife as an archetypal need. Naomi Goldenberg (1976) had argued, before the book, that unless the concept of archetype was rethought, feminists would be left accepting patriarchal images of the feminine as unchanging. Patricia Perri Rieker and M. Kay Jankowski (1995) cited Bolen’s goddess “who dwells in every woman” as the popular face of essentialism, which treats women as a homogeneous group (as quoted in ’Iolana, 2016), and Patricia ’Iolana (2016) concluded that the paired books on goddesses and gods perpetuate gender as homogeneous groups. Susan Rowland (2002) set the book among the grand narratives of goddess feminism, readable now as speculative fiction. From the Jungian side, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992) objected that Bolen identifies gods and goddesses with personality types, whereas no person and no deity is an archetype. The book’s first scholarly reviews were by Mary Ann Mattoon (1986), a Jungian analyst, and Kay Deaux (1986), a social psychologist of gender.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Hera as a psychological construct. Online quizzes in her vocabulary disclaim validity, and the scale attributed to a 2004 Oklahoma State University doctoral thesis has no published psychometrics; we have not located the thesis. Research on marital commitment and on jealousy is extensive but makes no use of the figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s instances are mythic: the queen on Olympus, the jealous wife of Zeus, the persecutor of his lovers and their children, among them Callisto, whom Hera turned into a bear (p. 140). Bolen also offers a contemporary public figure, Nancy Reagan, as a woman for whom being a wife came first. The cult had its great sanctuary at the Heraion of Argos. Juno, her Roman form, pursues the Trojans through Virgil’s Aeneid and blesses a marriage in the masque of Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Rubens painted her with her peacock in Juno and Argus (c. 1610). Figures often offered as Hera women include Penelope, keeping her house and marriage for twenty years in the Odyssey, and, in modern culture, the loyal wife of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man” (1968). All of these identifications are readings, not Bolen’s, including the guide’s own exemplars.

Sources

• Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3. Chapter 8, “Hera: Goddess of Marriage, Commitment Maker and Wife”, pp. 139–167 (p. 140 cited); also pp. 15, 132–138 (chapter 7, the vulnerable goddesses). Pages from Internet Archive full-text search of the 1984 printing, https://archive.org/details/goddessesinevery00jean (contents, index and running heads). Chapter titles also checked against the contents of the Harper Colophon paperback (1985), ISBN 978-0-06-091291-8, https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24226567M
• Bolen, J. S. (2004). Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives (twentieth-anniversary ed., new introduction). Quill. ISBN 978-0-06-057284-6.
• Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250098-4.
• Hesiod, Theogony 453–454, 921–923; Homeric Hymns 3 (to Apollo), 5 (to Aphrodite), 12 (to Hera). In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
• Homer, Iliad XIV (S. Butler, Trans.). Project Gutenberg #2199.
• Ovid, Metamorphoses I (Io), III (Semele). Project Gutenberg #21765.
• Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.22.2 (W. H. S. Jones, Trans.). https://www.theoi.com/Text/Pausanias8B.html
• Sanford, J. A. (1980). The Invisible Partners. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-2277-6. Summarising P. Zabriskie, “Goddesses in Our Midst”, Quadrant 17 (1974).
• Goldenberg, N. R. (1976). A feminist critique of Jung. Signs, 2(2), 443–449. https://doi.org/10.1086/493369
• Rieker, P. P., & Jankowski, M. K. (1995). Sexism and women’s psychological status. In C. V. Willie et al. (Eds.), Mental Health, Racism, and Sexism (pp. 27–50). University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-3869-9. Pp. 30–32, as quoted in ’Iolana (2016), p. 327.
• ’Iolana, P. (2016). Jung and Goddess: The Significance of Jungian and post-Jungian Theory to the Development of the Western Goddess Movement (PhD thesis). University of Glasgow. Pp. 40, 327. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/7313/
• Rowland, S. (2002). Jung: A Feminist Revision. Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-2517-1. P. 150, as quoted in ’Iolana (2016), p. 40.
• Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5. Notes to chapter 2, n. 17 (pp. 245–246 by the index).
• Mattoon, M. A. (1986). A new psychology of women? [Review of Bolen, 1984]. San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 6(4), 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1525/jung.1.1986.6.4.13
• Deaux, K. (1986). [Review of Goddesses in Everywoman]. Contemporary Psychology, 31(6), 468. https://doi.org/10.1037/024853
• Hudson Archetypal Goddess Scale, online version with disclaimer and attribution to P. A. Hudson (2004). https://psytests.org/typo/goddessen.html
• Rubens, P. P. (c. 1610). Juno and Argus. Oil on canvas. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Paul_Rubens_-_Juno_and_Argus_-_WGA20280.jpg