Zeus (Bolen)

Definition

Bolen’s Zeus is a pattern in men’s psychology that the psychiatrist and Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek god of the sky. In Gods in Everyman (1989) it is the first of three father gods, with Poseidon and Hades, and her chapter title sums it up as the realm of will and power. The man in whom Zeus predominates, as Bolen describes him, wants authority and is good at getting it: he takes the long view, decides quickly, builds alliances and expects to head a family, a firm or an institution. Two of her section headings give the core of it, Zeus as the archetype of the king and as the archetype of decisive action. The costs she attaches are the costs of that position: emotional distance, a habit of treating people as subjects, and, above all, a father’s wariness of the sons who might replace him.

That last point carries the book. Bolen reads Zeus as the latest in a line of Sky Father gods, after Uranus and Cronus, who are hostile to their children, and she sorts the next generation by his attitude to them: he favoured Apollo and Hermes, rejected Ares and Hephaestus, and was both father and surrogate mother to Dionysus. Two exclusions apply. This is not Zeus the god of Greek religion, whose myths enter only as Bolen’s material. And it is not one of the classical figures of Jung’s psychology. Bolen calls her gods archetypes; what she describes is a type of man, recorded here as hers: one of eight god patterns for men (1989), companions to the seven goddesses of Goddesses in Everywoman (1984), among them Hera, Zeus’s wife, and Athena, his daughter.

History

The pattern first appears in chapter 3 of Gods in Everyman, published by Harper & Row in San Francisco in April 1989 and in paperback by Perennial Library in 1990. The book’s two opening chapters set the frame: chapter 1, “There Are Gods in Everyman”, and chapter 2, “Fathers and Sons: Myths Tell Us About the Patriarchy”. In them Bolen describes patriarchal culture as a Procrustean bed that rewards a few patterns and cuts off the rest. Part II, “The Father Archetype: Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades”, follows, and its first chapter treats Zeus in the book’s standing order: the god, the archetype, the man, his difficulties and ways to grow. A twenty-fifth-anniversary edition (Harper Paperbacks, 2014) changed the subtitle to Archetypes That Shape Men’s Lives; the figure itself has not been renamed.

The myths Bolen retells are public domain. Hesiod gives the succession: Cronus swallows his children because he has been told a son will overthrow him, Rhea saves Zeus, and after the war with the Titans the gods ask Zeus to reign and he divides their honours among them (Theogony 453–506, 881–885). Homer gives the other version, which Bolen also uses, in which the three sons of Cronus drew lots for sky, sea and underworld (Iliad 15.187–193). The detail that matters most to her is Hesiod’s account of Metis, Zeus’s first wife, whom he swallowed on the advice of Earth and Heaven:

for very wise children were destined to be born of her, first the maiden bright-eyed Tritogeneia, equal to her father in strength and in wise understanding; but afterwards she was to bear a son of overbearing spirit, king of gods and men. — Hesiod, Theogony (c. 700 BCE), ll. 886–900, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

That unborn son is the subject of the book’s last chapter, “The Missing God”, where Bolen imagines the successor who never came as a ruler of a different kind. Her own sources for the father gods include Karl Kerényi’s The Gods of the Greeks (1951) and Arthur and Libby Colman’s Earth Father/Sky Father (1981), from whom she takes the contrast between the remote sky father and the father who is present day to day. Her claim on Jung is that the gods are inherited patterns in the sense of his archetypes; Zeus as a kind of man, a style of fathering and a corporate type is her reading.

The debate

Bolen’s Zeus overlaps two published entries without matching either. Jung’s father archetype is the inherited image behind the personal father, the reason a real father has more power over a child’s fate than his qualities explain; it belongs to every child’s psychology, not to one kind of man. Bolen’s Zeus is one way of being a man and one way of being a father among several, and she says as much when she notes that a man may follow one of the Olympian sons instead, each with his own style of fathering. Nor is it the wise old man, Jung’s archetype of meaning, the figure who brings knowledge the conscious mind lacks. Bolen’s Zeus is will rather than wisdom, and in her scheme wisdom is precisely what he swallowed in Metis; the wise ruler belongs to the missing son, not to him.

The comparison with the men’s movement is closer. Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990) praised “Zeus energy” as male authority accepted for the sake of the community (pp. 22–23), and Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (1990) made the King one of four foundations of the masculine psyche. Bolen’s figure is more ambivalent than either. The Yoga Journal reviewer Shepherd Bliss (1989), himself active in the mythopoetic men’s groups, noted that she is critical of patriarchy while granting Zeus his capacity to negotiate. Moore and Gillette in turn criticised her method: she tends, they wrote, to identify the gods with human personality types, whereas “no human being is an archetype, and neither is any God or Goddess” (1992, notes to chapter 2, n. 17).

The trade press was harsher. Publishers Weekly (1989) quoted Bolen’s line that the Zeus man prides himself on seeing the bigger picture as an example of a system “at least as simplistic as sun-sign astrology”. The religious-studies scholar William G. Doty (1993), who recommended parts of the book, disliked the way Bolen plasters elements of myth “so freely onto contemporary types of people”. Andrew Samuels (1993) saw the men’s movement split between essentialists, or archetypalists, and those who treat sexual difference as cultural; a fixed set of inherited gods for men stands on the first side.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Zeus as a psychological construct, and no instrument based on her eight gods has published psychometrics. Research on leadership and fathering makes no use of the figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s own examples come from film, business and scripture. Darth Vader, the father who sees his son as a rival in the Star Wars films, stands in her account in the Sky Father line of Uranus and Cronus, and “to a lesser extent” Zeus; Lee Iacocca, the chief executive who rescued Chrysler, is her case of Zeus-like decisiveness; and Abraham, willing to sacrifice Isaac, is her biblical instance of the father’s claim on the son. Her vocabulary circulates in popular psychology, for example in a 2018 episode of the Personality Hacker podcast on the father gods. Apart from Bolen’s own examples, these identifications are readings, and the guide’s own exemplars are marked as such.

Sources

• Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250098-4. Chapters 1–3 and 12; part, chapter and section titles checked by full-text search of the Internet Archive scan, https://archive.org/details/godsineverymanne0000bole
• Bolen, J. S. (2014). Gods in Everyman: Archetypes That Shape Men’s Lives (twenty-fifth-anniversary ed.). Harper Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-06-232994-3.
• Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3.
• Hesiod, Theogony 453–506, 881–900. In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
• Homer, Iliad 15.187–193 (S. Butler, Trans., 1898). Project Gutenberg #2199.
• Kerényi, K. (1951). The Gods of the Greeks. Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-27048-6.
• Colman, A., & Colman, L. (1981). Earth Father/Sky Father: The Changing Concept of Fathering. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-223024-7.
• [Unsigned review of Gods in Everyman]. (1989, 27 February). Publishers Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780062500984
• Bliss, S. (1989). [Review of Gods in Everyman]. Yoga Journal, May/June 1989, pp. 72–76. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_vOsDAAAAMBAJ
• Bly, R. (1990). Iron John: A Book About Men. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-51720-0. Pp. 22–23.
• Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1990). King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. HarperSanFrancisco. ISBN 978-0-06-250606-1.
• 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); the same note in The Magician Within (1993), ISBN 978-0-688-09594-9.
• Doty, W. G. (1993). Myths of Masculinity. Crossroad. ISBN 978-0-8245-1233-0. Annotated bibliography entry on Bolen (1989).
• Samuels, A. (1993). The Political Psyche. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-08102-3. Chapter 8, “Reflecting on men”.
• Personality Hacker (2018). Podcast episode 0236, “Gods in Everyman: The Father God Archetypes”. https://personalityhacker.com/podcast-episode-0236-gods-in-everyman-the-father-god-archetypes/