RCG-I Seasonal Salon Fall Equinox 2009

Approaches to the Study of Goddess Myths and Images

Part II of IV

Goddess Studies is not a new field. For more than a hundred and fifty years, pioneering women have examined the role that religious imagery has on people, both men and women. They have taken variant approaches, from imagining a different world to critiquing the limited religious visions offered by monotheistic religions. This 4-part series describes the lives of these pioneers, as well as the approaches to goddess studies to which they gave rise. The series is excerpted from "The Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines" (Praeger 2010).

Toni Wolff: Psychology of “the feminine”

In 1879, what had been a part of philosophical inquiry—the question of how the human mind works—was transformed into a separate science with the foundation of a laboratory for psychological research at Leipzig University in Germany. Germany and its neighbors, Austria and Switzerland, remained at the forefront of the new science as Sigmund Freud developed the theory of psychoanalysis, which applies concepts from theoretical psychology to the healing of mentally disturbed persons. Freud developed the theory of the unconscious, as well as the process of using “talk therapy” to get at unconscious motivations for behavior. His pioneering work drew several brilliant students, including the young Swiss doctor Carl Jung.

After only six years, Jung broke with Freud over their different concepts of the unconscious. While Freud viewed it as a dustbin for the individual psyche, Jung theorized a “collective unconscious” where “archetypes” resided. These archetypes are generic, universal human forms such as “mother” and “child” that populate individual dreams as well appearing in cultural manifestations like myths and folktales. Freud refused to acknowledge the possibility of such archetypes, much less than that they could be a source of religion. Jung, whose championing of the new science of psychoanalysis had been vital to its spread, resigned his posts in Freud’s organization and began to develop his theories privately.

Into Jung’s life came a client, Antonia Anna (Toni) Wolff. She had been born on September 18, 1888 in Zurich, where she lived her entire life. Her family was among the most distinguished in the city; her parents Konrad Arnold Wolff and Anna Elisebetha Sutz had two younger daughters, but Toni was her father’s favorite until his death when she was 22. Knowing of Jung’s reputation and concerned for her grieving daughter, her mother sent Toni to Jung, who at the time was a 35-year-old married man, only recently involved with a young former patient whose dissertation he was advising. He saw in Wolff not only a candidate for psychoanalysis and a potential analyst but an “anima woman,” someone who could reflect his feminine side. The next year, he invited Wolff to accompany him and his wife Emma to the Weimar Psychoanalytic Conference. Within a short time, Jung and Wolff were lovers, in a quite public arrangement. When Jung spoke, Emma often sat on one side with Toni on the other.

Wolff published little, but one important paper framed out her concepts of “feminine archetypes,” a theory often credited to Jung. During her lifetime and later, Wolff’s famous lover has overshadowed her. Wolff filled the role of animal woman admirably for at least a decade, possibly two. As Jung’s assistant, Wolff saw the same clients as Jung did. This close relationship brought Wolff into the bosom of Jung’s family. She often dined with Emma and Carl. Wolff introduced Jung to several important tools for his work, astrology and the I Ching, but she balked at his interest in alchemy.

When Wolff invited a group of students to meet Jung, she effectively ended their affair. The group included 18-year-old Mari-Louise von Franz, who became Jung’s next anima woman and, later, a prominent archetypal theorist on questions of “the feminine.” When Wolff died at 63 of a heart attack, Jung did not attend her funeral. Nor did he mention her name in his renowned autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He destroyed all his letters to her, which had been returned to him upon her death, as well as hers to him. While several works of fiction and plays have been devoted to the relationship, it remains out of reach of the historian.

Wolff’s work has been central to the development of archetypal goddess studies. She divided “the archetypal feminine” into four types: the mother, a type opposed by the “hetaera” (a Greek word for courtesan); and the Amazon, opposed by the “medial woman” (medium or psychic). Wolff argued that each woman had a dominant archetype, with its opposite being submerged or resisted. In this, she refines the idea of “the feminine” beyond a single “great mother” to allow for multiple feminine types. Much contemporary goddess literature is based on this kind of division of archetypal femininity into types. Goddess theorists who describe “the feminine” as an immanent rather than a transcendent force are often influenced by Wolff, either directly or through Jung.

Jungian writing often speaks of “the feminine,” defining it in terms that are arguably culture-bound. “The feminine,” in such theories, is connected to emotion, connectedness, and darkness, while “the masculine” is associated with reason, individualism, and light. The presumption that qualities associated with these genders in European culture are universal has been a continuing source of controversy, with feminists arguing that there is no proof of a universal “feminine” reality. Yet even those who find fault with Jungian essentialism can find inspiration in Wolff’s consideration of the connection between the individual (through dreams, fantasies and creative work) and the collective (through myths and rituals).

Phyllis Kabery: Anthropology is not “study of man”

The word “anthropology” translates literally as “the study of man,” with the last word usually interpreted as “human being.” Yet the discipline, which began as a response to European colonization and the perceived need to study cultures with whom colonists came into contact, emphasized the study of men and aspects of culture connected with men rather than women (law and war, for instance, as contrasted with weaving and child-bearing).

The discipline itself was not formally established until the early 20th century, but earlier writers and thinkers discussed other cultures, often with the assumption that pre-industrial cultures were the same as the European past. These early theorists are now often dismissed as “armchair anthropologists” because they based their works on reading rather than fieldwork, the latter being the mark of an anthropologist today. Among such early writers was Sir James George Frazer whose multivolume study of fertility rituals, The Golden Bough, is replete with references to goddess traditions. He argued for a universal ritual of kingship in which a man serves a goddess to whom he is sacrificed. Among the hundreds of sources he cited, only a few were written by women.

Such “armchair” works tended to presume a universal religious understanding that often reflected the patriarchal monotheism of the writers. However, the concept of cultural relativism began to erode such interpretations. By the beginning of the 20th century, anthropology emphasized fieldwork as its primary method, with months or even years spent among non-Europeans (the more “primitive,” the better) establishing one’s credibility. The earliest field workers were almost without exception men who, in some cultures, were unable to speak to women or to gain access to women’s lives. Even where such access was not restricted, the resulting ethnographic writings tended to focus on men’s lives and interests. Much early anthropological writing revolves around religion, but the work is marked by unexamined presumptions about gender roles. For instance, goddesses are often interpreted as “mother goddesses” even when no reproductive fertility is evident, while gods are typically understood as preeminent even in cultures where goddesses were primary.

The concept of distinct, incomparable cultures was argued by American anthropologists such as Franz Boas, who trained the first widely recognized women anthropologists, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Early women in the field shied away from the kind of controversy that dogged women like Margaret Murray. It is notable that neither Benedict nor Mead documented any goddess traditions. Such caution did not guarantee academic advancement. Benedict was edged out of a position for which Boas had promoted her, and Mead never held an academic appointment, working at a museum instead.

It was within this context that Phyllis Kaberry entered the field. Born in 1910 in California to British parents, she moved in childhood to Australia, where she attended the University of Sydney, earning her M.A. in anthropology in 1934. She then departed for London to earn a PhD with a leading ethnologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, at the London School of Economics. Early in her graduate school career, Kaberry did fieldwork in New Guinea, where she studied cross-cultural interactions and legal issues affecting indigenous residents. After finishing her doctoral work, she returned to study an aspect of life connected to women’s roles: specifically, diet and nutrition.

But her major work remained in her adopted homeland, for while working on her masters’ degree she had been encouraged by the important anthropologist A. P. Elkin to do field work in western Australia. There, she sought out articulate aboriginal women to explain their roles in traditional society. The result is visible in her first book, Aboriginal Women: Sacred and Profane, published shortly after she received her doctorate, which remains a classic of women’s studies in anthropology. Its title refers to the frequent description by male scholars of aboriginal women’s lives as “profane” compared to those of men, which were marked by encounters with the “sacred.” Kaberry argued that aboriginal women, far from being men’s domestic and sexual servants, have active spiritual lives, possessing totems and performing rites from which men were excluded.

Although her work was acknowledged as significant, Kaberry did not find the kind of acclaim that men of her level received. She received a grant to study nutrition in Cameroon, although she had not previously worked in Africa; there her work at revealing colonial bias earned her the esteem and gratitude of the ‘Nso people. From that work, Kaberry developed a book describing the contributions of women to ‘Nso society that, although it received positive reviews, was not widely read.

Because of her unpopular emphasis on women’s importance in the societies she studied and the sexism in the Australia academic world, Kaberry never worked professionally there after graduate school. She supported herself on grants for over a decade before finding work as a reader in anthropology at the University of London, a position she held until her death in 1977.

Although her work was often marginalized in her own lifetime, Kaberry’s approach to anthropological study of women and religion has born fruit in later years. Ethnographies of goddess-honoring societies now typically assume that women have rich spiritual lives. Questions of colonialism, always prominent in Kaberry’s work, have also had impact on the field, so that contemporary goddess ethnographers may study a goddess subculture within their own society rather than seeking to do fieldwork in an appropriately “primitive” society.