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Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Hestia (Bolen)

The quiet centre that keeps the fire lit.

Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Hestia, one of the seven goddess patterns of Goddesses in Everywoman (1984) and the third of her virgin goddesses: an inward-centred, contemplative type of woman’s personality named after the goddess of the hearth.

Bolen’s Hestia is a pattern in women’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek goddess of the hearth. In Goddesses in Everywoman (1984) it is the third of the virgin goddesses, with Artemis and Athena, whom Bolen groups as independent goddesses never overpowered by a male god or mortal (1984, p. 15). The group shares what she calls “focused consciousness” (pp. 37–38); where the other two turn it outward to a goal, Hestia’s is, in Bolen’s heading, “inward-focused”. The woman in whom Hestia predominates, as Bolen describes her, is quiet, self-contained and at peace in solitude; she finds meaning in tending a home or a sanctuary, in ordinary tasks done with full attention, and in contemplation, and she needs neither recognition nor company to feel whole. Bolen’s chapter title calls her wise woman, for a detachment that gives the archetype the quality of an elder, and maiden aunt, which is first the goddess’s own place in myth, eldest sister of the first Olympians and maiden aunt to the second. The difficulties Bolen attaches to the pattern are those of an inward life in an outward world. The Hestia woman is by nature uninterested in the persona, almost “persona-less” like the goddess, who had no image; the competitive workplace does not reward her (p. 121); her troubles arise when she ventures out of her own sphere; and the solitude she values can turn to loneliness (pp. 126–127).

Go deeper

At the threshold

Nor Saturn’s first-born daughter, Vesta chaste,Whom Neptune and Apollo wooed the last,Such was the will of aegis-bearing Jove;But sternly she refused the ills of Love,And by her mighty Father’s head she sworeAn oath not unperformed, that evermoreA virgin she would live mid deitiesDivine: her father, for such gentle tiesRenounced, gave glorious gifts—thus in his hallShe sits and feeds luxuriously. O’er allIn every fane, her honours first ariseFrom men—the eldest of Divinities.

Public domain · Aphrodite, Homer’s Hymn to Venus (lines 19–30), trans. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1862)

Vesta swears to stay a virgin among the gods, and is given the seat of honour in every house: the one goddess whom desire cannot move is the one honoured first.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 4 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Hestia at the hearth

    Homeric Hymn 24, to Hestia, c. 600 BCE

    The goddess given the seat of honour in every house and temple, who is invoked first and last.

  2. Jung’s example

    Vesta’s fire

    Ovid, Fasti VI, c. 8 CE

    The Roman form of the goddess, whose sacred flame was tended by the Vestal Virgins.

  3. Jung’s example

    Hestia’s oath

    Homeric Hymn 5, to Aphrodite, c. 600 BCE

    The goddess who refused Poseidon and Apollo and swore to remain a virgin, the one Aphrodite cannot move.

  4. Jung’s example

    Baucis

    Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII, c. 8 CE

    The old woman of the hearth who feeds the disguised gods from her small supplies, hospitality as a sacred act.

The wider sky

Where the Hestia (Bolen) has been seen

20 exemplars across 9 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

Or if the Ayr will not permit,Som still removed place will fit,Where glowing Embers through the roomTeach light to counterfeit a gloomFar from all resort of mirth,Save the Cricket on the hearth,

Public domain · Milton, Il Penseroso (1645)

Embers that teach light to counterfeit a gloom, and the cricket on the hearth, give a picture of a quiet place kept apart from the noise of company.

No one remembers who tended it, only that the house was warm.

She wants no throne, no audience and no quarrel with the dark.

What she guards is attention itself, turned inward and kept steady.

The deep layer · what was written

Hestia (Bolen): the entry

Definition

Bolen’s Hestia is a pattern in women’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek goddess of the hearth. In Goddesses in Everywoman (1984) it is the third of the virgin goddesses, with Artemis and Athena, whom Bolen groups as independent goddesses never overpowered by a male god or mortal (1984, p. 15). The group shares what she calls “focused consciousness” (pp. 37–38); where the other two turn it outward to a goal, Hestia’s is, in Bolen’s heading, “inward-focused”. The woman in whom Hestia predominates, as Bolen describes her, is quiet, self-contained and at peace in solitude; she finds meaning in tending a home or a sanctuary, in ordinary tasks done with full attention, and in contemplation, and she needs neither recognition nor company to feel whole. Bolen’s chapter title calls her wise woman, for a detachment that gives the archetype the quality of an elder, and maiden aunt, which is first the goddess’s own place in myth, eldest sister of the first Olympians and maiden aunt to the second. The difficulties Bolen attaches to the pattern are those of an inward life in an outward world. The Hestia woman is by nature uninterested in the persona, almost “persona-less” like the goddess, who had no image; the competitive workplace does not reward her (p. 121); her troubles arise when she ventures out of her own sphere; and the solitude she values can turn to loneliness (pp. 126–127).

Two exclusions apply. This is not Hestia the goddess, whose cult at the hearth of every house and city is described here only as the material Bolen read. And it is not one of the classical figures of Jung’s psychology: Bolen calls her goddesses archetypes, but what she describes is a type of person, recorded here as hers, one of seven goddess patterns for women dated 1984.

History

The pattern first appears in the chapter “Hestia: Goddess of the Hearth and Temple, Wise Woman and Maiden Aunt” 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 in each goddess chapter, the myth comes first and the pattern is then followed through a woman’s life.

Hestia has almost no myth, a point any account of her has to start from. The public-domain sources give her a genealogy and a refusal. Hesiod names her first among the children Rhea bore to Cronos (Theogony 453–454). The Hymn to Aphrodite tells the rest: wooed by Poseidon and Apollo, she swore to remain a maiden, and Zeus gave her instead the centre of the house and a share of honour in every temple (Hymn 5, ll. 21–32). The two short hymns to her add that no feast is held without a libation to Hestia first and last (Hymn 29). Plato gives the image of her stillness:

Hestia alone abides at home in the house of heaven — Plato, Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE), 247a, trans. B. Jowett, Gutenberg #1636

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Bolen’s choice of Hestia as one of seven is a departure from her Jungian predecessors. Philip Zabriskie’s “typology of the feminine” (1974), an article Bolen lists among her references, had in John Sanford’s summary (1980) five goddesses of the upper world and left Hestia among the “lesser goddesses”; Jennifer and Roger Woolger’s six-goddess scheme, The Goddess Within (1989), also omits her. The closest parallel is Ginette Paris’s Pagan Meditations (1986), which gives Hestia a full study alongside Aphrodite and Artemis, though as a value in culture rather than a type of woman. Bolen’s claim to build on Jung holds only loosely here: Jung wrote of the self as the centre of the psyche and of the mandala as its image, but never of Hestia as a person.

The debate

Among the classical figures, Bolen’s Hestia has no counterpart. The nearest is the self as an inward centre: the hearth at the middle of the house is an obvious image of a still point, and the pattern’s emphasis on contemplation and wholeness without partnership echoes Jung’s language of centring. But the self in Jung is the totality of the psyche in everyone, not a disposition some women have more than others, so the comparison marks a difference of kind. None of the four forms in Toni Wolff’s earlier typology (1951) corresponds to a contemplative, unpartnered woman.

The criticism that falls on the whole taxonomy falls on Hestia in a particular way. Feminist readers objected that goddess typologies return women to the home under a sacred name; Andrew Samuels (2001), without naming Bolen, wrote that women had been ill-served by literature requiring them to be containing, nourishing goddesses, and Hestia, keeper of the hearth, is the figure such a reading most easily domesticates. Patricia Perri Rieker and M. Kay Jankowski (1995) cited Bolen as the popular example of essentialism, the notion of one female essence that ignores differences of race, class and ethnicity (as quoted in ’Iolana, 2016). 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. Steven Walker (2002) found goddess books of the period an incitement to archetypal inflation, citing Bolen among others (as quoted in ’Iolana, 2016); ’Iolana replies that Bolen offers a pantheon precisely to avoid identification with a single goddess, while conceding that neither Bolen nor Christine Downing describes the later step of de-identifying from it.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Hestia 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 introversion and on solitude as a positive state is the nearest mainstream work and makes no use of the figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s instances are the hearth fire, the goddess without an image, the first and last offering, and Hestia’s Roman form, Vesta, whose sacred fire was tended by the Vestal Virgins; Bolen describes their life at some length and sets nuns beside them as sharers in Hestia’s pattern. The perpetual fire tended by nuns at Kildare in the Brigid tradition is often read beside it, though not by Bolen. Images often offered as this pattern include Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (c. 1658), John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem Snow-Bound (1866), and lives such as that of the anchoress Julian of Norwich; in popular culture the hearth-spirit Calcifer in Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) and the online “cottagecore” aesthetic have been read the same way. All of these 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 6, “Hestia: Goddess of the Hearth and Temple, Wise Woman and Maiden Aunt”, pp. 107–131 (pp. 121, 126–127 cited); also pp. 15, 35–45 (chapter 3, the virgin 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.
  • Hesiod, Theogony 453–454; Homeric Hymns 5 (to Aphrodite), 24 and 29 (to Hestia). In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
  • Plato, Phaedrus 247a (B. Jowett, Trans.). Project Gutenberg #1636.
  • 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).
  • Woolger, J. B., & Woolger, R. J. (1989). The Goddess Within: A Guide to the Eternal Myths that Shape Women’s Lives. Fawcett Columbine. ISBN 978-0-449-90287-5.
  • Paris, G. (1986). Pagan Meditations: The Worlds of Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia (G. Moore, Trans.). Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-330-9.
  • Samuels, A. (2001). Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life. Profile Books. ISBN 978-1-86197-219-4. Chapter “The secret politics of the internal family”.
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • Walker, S. F. (2002). Jung and the Jungians on Myth. Routledge. P. 128, as quoted in ’Iolana (2016), p. 324. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/7313/
  • ’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. 324, 327. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/7313/
  • Hudson Archetypal Goddess Scale, online version with disclaimer and attribution to P. A. Hudson (2004). https://psytests.org/typo/goddessen.html
  • Vermeer, J. (c. 1658). The Milkmaid. Oil on canvas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-2344
  • Whittier, J. G. (1866). Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl. Project Gutenberg #20226.

Leaving

What matter how the night behaved?What matter how the north-wind raved?Blow high, blow low, not all its snowCould quench our hearth-fire's ruddy glow.O Time and Change!--with hair as grayAs was my sire's that winter day,How strange it seems, with so much goneOf life and love, to still live on!Ah, brother! only I and thouAre left of all that circle now,--The dear home faces whereuponThat fitful firelight paled and shone.

Public domain · Whittier, Snow-Bound (1866)

The hearth-fire holds out against the storm, and in memory it is the fire, rather than any person, that gathers the faces around it.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey✺ SelfThe centre and the whole circumference.Return to the void