The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (19 page)

If Ariadne's father, the old king, is the consciousness of patriarchy operating inside her, then Theseus, who comes from a distant
land across the water, suggests new ideas and attitudes. He represents Ariadne's freeing energy or the way out of her sleep.

In the story Theseus is a daring adventurer and hero who has come to Crete to liberate Athens from the curse of the old king, King Minos. Theseus's mission is to slay the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster that lives in a labyrinth beneath the palace. Because of an old debt, every seven years King Minos requires Athens to send seven youths to Crete, where they are placed in the labyrinth to feed the Minotaur. By killing the monster, Theseus will defy the old king and liberate Athens from the curse. When Ariadne sees Theseus, she falls in love and devises a way to convince him to take her away with him when he leaves Crete.

Theseus, or the liberating energy in my own life, emerged in part the day I entered the drugstore and saw Ann on her knees before the laughing men. The scene tapped my defiance. That day my intention was consolidated. Theseus also came when I mustered the will to free myself from supporting patriarchy within the church and began to align myself with liberation theologies and ideals. Theseus came when I sat in the den and explained to Sandy that our marriage would have to be undone and redone, that I would be going away. Wherever there is deliverance and release in a woman's life from the oppression of patriarchal consciousness, there is Theseus.

Often, like Ariadne, a woman cannot recognize or contact the heroic, freeing energy in herself. Instead she projects it outward, usually onto a man. Theseus may be a figure she literally falls in love with, someone who can shatter her identification with the old consciousness and help deliver her from it. For some women, especially younger women, Theseus may be a husband, the man who rescued her from the patriarchal father. For other women Theseus may be projected onto some other man—a mentor, lover, counselor, father, someone who rescues her at some level from a patriarchal husband. Or Theseus may come when a woman takes a different job or adopts a dissident cause, or he may be projected onto a new group or a new place—anything that carries an aura of insurgence, opportunity, even destiny, that brings new thoughts
and attitudes and undermines her loyalty to the “old king.” The projection—as precarious and havoc wreaking as it may sometimes be—becomes a force that acts to free her.

When a woman projects her liberating energy outward, she is acting unconsciously. If she projects it onto a man, she may be unable to initiate real independent action apart from him. She will be dependent on Theseus, not on herself. She cannot see that Theseus embodies her own unconscious potential and desire for freedom and wholeness. The hard moment will come when she needs to withdraw the projection, break the spell it has over her, and own up to what she is doing. She will have to claim the qualities she saw in these external figures as possibilities in herself. She will need to take up her own autonomous life.

The Feminine Labyrinth

During the first few weeks of looking at my life through the lens of this myth, I was trying to determine where, if at all, I presently was in the story. I'd already discovered my Ariadne, Little Princess, self. Theseus had already appeared. Now as I explored the next portion of the story, I knew I'd found the experience I was beginning to undergo. The labyrinth.

Underground, beneath the palace of King Minos, is the labyrinth Theseus must enter in order to kill the Minotaur. Besides the danger of being devoured by the Minotaur, the labyrinth is so dark, vast, and complex that no one who wanders into it can find a way back out.

Ariadne offers to help Theseus return from the maze if he promises to marry her and take her with him when he leaves her father's kingdom. When Theseus agrees, she gives him a ball of thread and tells him to unwind it as he enters the labyrinth and then to follow it back out. In this way Theseus is able to kill the Minotaur and return successfully.

The labyrinth is a centerpiece in Ariadne's story, as it was in the actual Minoan culture. In that ancient time the labyrinth was not the complicated prison of a monster, as it later became in patriar
chy, but a symbol of the divine womb. In the earlier, prepatriarchal form of the myth, Ariadne herself is the Goddess whose womb is being threaded. Entering it and returning from it were not a hero's ordeal but a ritual of rebirth.

I discovered that initiation rites in that time often involved threading the spirals of a ritual labyrinth. The initiates moved to the sacred center, where they surrendered to a symbolic death, and then returned through the passage to symbolize their rebirth.

For women on this journey, the movement through the labyrinth means threading the Great Womb of death and rebirth. As a woman moves
into
the labyrinth, she undergoes what Carolyn Heilbrun calls “the marvelous dismantling.”
¹⁶
She sheds and lets go of the old. She goes through a “dying.”

What she is dismantling is the woman who was once asleep in her relationships, her religion, her career, and her inner life, the woman who never questioned any of it but blindly followed prevailing ideas and dictates. She is the woman dependent on the masculine, whose life is composed of adaptable femininity. She is the woman severed from her own true instinct and creativity. She is the woman in collusion with patriarchy. When we enter the labyrinth, these parts of ourselves die little by little.

The solitude and descent I'd experienced at the inn in California had meant moving into the labyrinth, an initial step toward letting the dying take place. But like most initiations, mine would be a slow dying, a long succession of one small death after another as the old identity gradually sloughed off and I let go of the values and attitudes that no longer sustained me within.

Eventually we come to what Jean Shinoda Bolen calls the “core or center of meaning in ourselves, which is the center of the labyrinth.”
¹⁷
At the
center
of the divine womb we begin to connect again with our feminine soul.

We go to the core many times, in many ways. I had my first taste of the labyrinth's core when I found the circle of trees in the woods and felt myself reclaiming and celebrating feminine ground, discovering for the first time the woman I was (and would be) at soul level.

The movement
back out
symbolizes the process of rebirth. We are taking on a new life, bringing a new consciousness back into the world, bringing more and more of the new woman into being. This was the work that stretched in front of me.

But before I would thread my way back out of the labyrinth, I would go even deeper into its slow, spiraling passages.

Another New Year's Eve came, and I had what could be called a dismantling experience concerning my career. My family and I were staying at a friend's house in the North Carolina mountains. A light snow was falling, dusting the cedars outside the windows. As the new year turned, I settled down before the fireplace, intending to look reflectively over the past year. The year had begun with the poem about the unexplored gorge and had ended with finding myself ensconced in the drama of an inner myth. It had been a year of initiation.

But instead of reflecting on the past year, my thoughts floated over and over to the contract I'd just signed with the inspirational magazine I wrote for. I was feeling uneasy about it.

Lately I'd been feeling a lot more tension between my writing and where my journey was taking me, a growing incongruity between my public image and my inner truth. I poked the fire and watched a swirl of sparks slip up the flue, and I felt suddenly afraid. I was a writer deeply compelled to write out the story of my soul. But when that story collided with religious boundaries, then what? I mean, if I were to write about the demise of patriarchal religion in my life, the anger and feelings of betrayal, my dissidence, my mutiny, the tug to the Feminine Divine, where would I find an audience? There seemed little, if any, room for such writings within the boundaries of existing religion.

In truth, it was far too early to be thinking about writing any of it. Internally I hadn't completely dissolved the old or begun to heal the wounds. I didn't have enough experience, enough cohesion inside, enough of anything. But still the portending tension was there, a small seismic vibration of things to come.

I wondered, Would I have to start over with my writing career?
And if I did, what would I do? Because I'd worked at “Christian” and inspirational writing for so long with nice success, it was hard to envision any other writing taking its place.

A terrible voice inside was telling me that I couldn't do any but the old kind of writing. That I'd spent more than a decade building this particular career and public persona and that only an idiot would walk away. It urged me to stay in line and please the powers that be, or I would I drop off the face of the writing world.

I tried to tell myself that I must trust the process I was in: If I lost my career, well, I lost it. But inside, the thought was frightening. That night I dreamed:

I come upon a group of people gathered around a coffin. I wonder who's died. I creep closer, close enough to see that the person in the coffin is me. I am holding an issue of the inspirational magazine with which I'd just signed the contract. And not just any issue, either. I am holding the one with me on the cover.

The dream signaled a small dying inside my labyrinth. I couldn't admit it then, but my career with the magazine, indeed, a career doing the kind of writing I'd been doing in the past, ended right there, though it would be nearly two more years before I would be able to make it official.

This marvelous (and often not-so-marvelous) dismantling actually goes on at two levels—inner and outer. On the outer level it means confronting patriarchal patterns externally within marriage, religion, culture, and career. On the inner level it means confronting the voices of patriarchy you've internalized. Those voices are your own personal Minotaur.

The Minotaur

In the myth the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, lurks in the underground labyrinth beneath King Minos's palace. In the old religious ceremonies of Crete, the Minotaur represented the spirit of King Minos himself. One of the titles for the king was actually Moon Bull, and it was believed he was personified in the Minotaur.
¹⁸

In the female psyche the Minotaur represents negative, uncivi
lized (beastly), masculine power—that part of the old king driven underground. In other words, the Minotaur is the bullish, bullying, bulldozing force of patriarchy internalized in the cellar of a woman's psyche. It is a presence that works invisibly, hampering, limiting, driving, even destroying a woman's inner and outer life.

“It is not surprising in a patriarchal society, to find a monster like the Minotaur there at the center of the maze,” writes artist Buffie Johnson.
¹⁹
I recognized the presence of the Minotaur in my life in the belittling, driving, judging inner voice that could throw me into self-doubt or cause me to retreat. It was the voice inside that said, “You can't do that,” the voice that told me I wasn't good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, capable enough. Most recently I'd encountered it as the voice that said if I wasn't doing “Christian writing” I couldn't write at all. It was the voice that censored, silenced, devalued, and criticized, sometimes driving me to higher, impossible standards.

Jungians describe this inner voice in a woman's psyche as the negative animus, the inner masculine that has turned against her. But whether it is called negative animus, internalized patriarchy, or the Minotaur within, women know its power.

Sylvia Plath's diary describes graphic battles with the Minotaur whom she described as an “inner voice,” “a demon of negation.” He would seize her, saying, “Oh, you can't teach, can't do anything. Can't write. Can't think.” He robbed her of confidence, froze her into a “quivering jelly,” pressured her to run away from tasks where she would be fallible and flawed. Finally she described how she mobilized herself to battle him:

I cannot ignore this murderous self: it is there. I smell it and feel it. . . . When it says: you shall not sleep, you cannot teach, I shall go on anyway, knocking its nose in. Its biggest weapon is and has been the image of myself as a perfect success: in writing, teaching and living. . . . My demon of negation will tempt me day by day, and I'll fight it, as something other than my essential self, which I am fighting to save.
²⁰

In the myth Ariadne forms a bond and a plot with Theseus to kill the Minotaur. Likewise, our task is to discover and mobilize
the energy inside that will battle and slay the internal Minotaur. It is an essential work of the labyrinth—destroying the brutal power of patriarchy within.

A first step for me was acknowledging that the forces I was up against weren't just “out there.” They were also “in me.” Women, too, have the impulse toward dominance, aggression, and control, and we use it not just against ourselves, but also in our families and the world at large. Etty Hillesum wrote from a Nazi concentration camp, “Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.”
²¹

Starhawk says the voices from patriarchy, which attack our inherent worth, become internalized as the self-hater. It is the old king, she says, with five faces: the Conqueror, who treats the self and those around us as enemies to be feared and destroyed; the Orderer, who inflicts a rigid control; the Master of Servants, who demands that we deny our own needs and desires to serve others' ends; the Censor, who keeps us silent; and the Judge, who offers to restore value to us in exchange for obedience.
²²

Just let a woman start through the spirals of the labyrinth with a design on ridding herself of the Minotaur, and the self-hating voices will become a cacophony. Threatened, they rise up even stronger in the hope of holding on. They may appear with more frequency or intensity in her dreams, and their voices may harangue her in her conscious thoughts.