How "The Rising of the Divine Feminine" is Different From "The Hero's Journey"

Sunday March 12, 2023

Hello Beloved Reader,

Many people have heard of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey (outlined in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces) and are aware of the fact that George Lucas based Star Wars on this enduring archetypal journey.

However, these days, more and more female writers are re-claiming the Divine Feminine as part of a kind of Heroine’s Journey.

Maria Tatar is one such writer. She was born in Germany, emigrated from Hungary to the States when she was a child, is an American academic who taught at Harvard (which of course appeals to my own Inner Patriarch) and has written The Heroine With 1,001 Faces, published in 2021 by Liveright, a division of WW Norton. (The bolding in excerpts below is mine.)

Ms. Tatar opens her book with this beautiful story:

JOSEPH CAMPBELL wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces while teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. His classes on comparative mythology at the then all-women’s school were in such high demand that he was soon obliged to limit enrollment to seniors. During his last year of teaching there, one of those seniors walked into his office, sat down, and said: “Well, Mr. Campbell, you’ve been talking about the hero. But what about the women?” The startled professor raised his eyebrows and replied, “The woman is the mother of the hero; she’s the goal of the hero’s achieving; she’s the protectress of the hero; she is this, she is that. What more do you want?” “I want to be the hero,” she announced.

Irish academic Dr. Sharon Blackie wrote the word-of-mouth bestseller If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-Changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging, published in 2016 by September Publishing. 

In this book Dr. Blackie wrote about what she called “An Eco-Heroine’s Journey” which was, she suggested:

... a path to understanding how deeply enmeshed we are in the web of life on this planet. In many ways, it is an antidote to the swashbuckling action-adventure that is the Hero’s Journey, with its rather grandiose focus on saving the world. … This path forces us first to examine ourselves and the world we live in, to face up to all that is broken and dysfunctional in it and in our own lives. Then it calls us to change – first ourselves, and then the world around us. It leads us back to our own sense of grounded belonging to this Earth, and asks us what we have to offer to the places and communities in which we live. Finally, it requires us to step into our own power and take back our ancient, native role as its guardians and protectors. To rise up rooted, like trees.

More recently, Dr. Blackie wrote a beautiful Substack post about what she’s calling The Post Heroic Journey:

Post-heroic stories aren’t focused on individual glory; they’re focused on community, and relationality. On diversity. It’s not about slaying the dragon, but about harnessing his special skills – making him part of the team. It’s about understanding, and valuing, the black, feathery, croaking wisdom of a crow. It’s about living with a half-empty stomach so you can feed some of your porridge to the hungry mice – who, if you are lucky, will help you to sort the wheat from the chaff. Post-heroic stories aren’t about winning the hand of the simpering, golden-haired princess: they’re about kissing the boar-toothed, blue-faced hag.

In her Substack post, Dr. Blackie also quotes from Maria Tatar’s Epilogue of The Heroine With 1,001 Faces:

Heroines are on quests, and the goals they set include knowledge, justice, and social connection. What drives them? Nothing more than the same spirit of inquiry and care that led Eve to take a bite of the apple, Pandora to open the jar, and Bluebeard’s wife to unlock the door to the forbidden chamber.

And in the Introduction Maria Tatar writes:

“What about the women?” This book tries to answer the question posed by Campbell’s student in a different way, by showing that the women in the mythological and literary imagination have been more than mothers and protectors. They too have been on quests, but they have also flown under the radar, performing stealth operations and quietly seeking justice, righting wrongs, repairing the fraying edges of the social fabric, or simply struggling to survive rather than returning back home with what Campbell calls boons and elixirs. They wear curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and we shall see how women’s connection to knowledge, linked to sin and transgression and often censured as prying, is in fact often symptomatic of empathy, care, and concern. Ever since Eve and Pandora, our culture has positioned curious women as wayward curiosities, investing their desire to know more with dark, forbidden cravings.

I would also add to this cannon of female writers writing about the female version of The Hero’s Journey—which can also be seen as The Rising of the Divine Feminine—the American writer and co-founder of the Omega Institute, Elizabeth Lessing—in particular her book, Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes

In Cassandra Speaks, Lesser writes:

Women have an advantage as power outsiders for most of recorded history to step in now and question some basic assumptions: that domination and violence are necessary to maintain order; that men are divinely or biologically predetermined to lead; and that the strong and silent warrior is to be revered while the emotional, communicative caretaker is second-rate. Do we really want to break the glass ceilings just to end up in that old story? If that’s all we do, we’ll just get more of what no longer works. Or, as we gain influence at home, at work, and in the world, do we want to shake the foundation of the whole story? As women claim power—as we become protagonists in the stories that shape our world—we must keep asking these questions: Power for what purpose? Influence, why? Promotion, money, leadership, to what end? What are we going to use our power for?

Perhaps this era of The Rising of the Divine Feminine is about women re-claiming their divine feminine power to first alleviate our own individual suffering; and like a single ripple on the vast ocean—as each ripple alleviates its own suffering—the ripple effect can be felt throughout the entire ocean.

By women talking and writing, there is a further potential to help to alleviate the suffering of others in our communities, which again ripples forth, perhaps allowing the alleviation of suffering in the vast oceanic expanse of the entire human experience.

Perhaps this is what our Mother Earth desperately needs at this point in our planet’s history after domination by the patriarchy for the past 4,000 years, which has brought us to the mess our planet is presently in with global climate change, a dwindling global pandemic, and war.

A medicine woman's prayer:

I will not rescue you, for you are not powerless.

I will not fix you, for you are not broken.

I will not heal you, for I see you in your wholeness.

I will walk with you through the darkness, as you remember your light.

—Sheree Bliss Tilsley, Falcon Spirit Medicine