Heavy Reflections on Athene and Arachne

When I think of Athene, I think of strength, determination, and stubborn tenacity. She is the Goddess born from Zeus even after he swallowed Metis, her mother, and her birth is a symbol of the resilience and persistence of birth, life, and womanhood in the face of tremendous adversity — being swallowed by history and swallowed by time, forgotten as contributors and creators.

Because she is a Goddess, she was able to retaliate against a woman who tried to belittle her for not being feminine enough and having too many interests stereotyped as masculine. She is the one who capitulates to femininity in dress, but who wears armor over it; she is the Goddess whose personality is gender-nonconforming.

When people nowadays denigrate Athene, they often call her a traitor to women, usually after a large media franchise releases some kind of movie. Even in the academy, Deacy’s Athena compared her to Margaret Thatcher, and every few months, people discuss some of her wrath myths with the implication that, at least mythologically, she is a tool of men who doesn’t have her best interests in mind. She is a Goddess who keeps women in our places, and her gender-nonconformity hides Hephaestian chains that bind women to patriarchy.

Because I am a polytheist, I worship many Gods. Because I am Platonizing, I believe that every God is good, and to pull from the Chaldean Oracles, that being too trapped in myths requires one to sober up to divine realities. As a Platonizing polytheist, the fact that Arachne fixates on obscene myths is an allegorical way of discussing how the soul binds itself ever-deeper into embodiment to the point of becoming inhuman (bound to the irrational) because the psukhē/soul ensnares herself in the beautiful lies of the poets instead of the stark, redeeming truths of the Goddess who awakens the soul to holy wisdom; the takeaways from the myth are similar to what Proclus wants us to take away from his comments on interpreting poets in his fifth and sixth essays on the Republic. As a gender-nonconforming woman, the traces of my current life have ensnared me in Athene’s myths in another way, and that is where this piece becomes first-person, contextualized, and non-generalizable.

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Hearken to me, child of aegis-bearing Zeus, sprung forth
from the paternal source and from the top of your series,
male-spirited, shield-bearing, of great strength, from a mighty sire,
Pallas, Tritogeneia, lance-brandisher, golden-helmeted,
hearken; accept this hymn, mistress, with a kind spirit,
do not just leave my words at the mercy of the winds,
you who opened the gates of wisdom trodden by the gods
and overcame the tribe of the earthly Giants which fought the gods;
you who guarded the unconquerable girdle of your virginity
by fleeing the desire of the amorous Hephaistos; […]

lines 1-11 of Proclus’ hymn to Athene, translated by van den Berg

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In the Arachne myth and in others, I feel so many cuts women make against her for having a stereotypically masculine personality. After dealing with decades of passive-aggressive and hostile digs from other women, regardless of how much I try to stamp out my anger because being angry is wrong, a part of me just wants to scream.

I usually dissipate the anger by crying uncontrollably once I am in a private space where nobody can see it so they cannot use my tears explain to me why I am a bad person who could be making more of an effort to fit in. On occasion, I have wondered if the way I dress is actually the problem. Maybe if I didn’t wear knee-length dresses or blouses with pants, people would be more psychologically prepared for me to not act femininely, and they wouldn’t expect me to be into makeup (which I believe is a scam that prematurely ages the skin) or nail polish (my nails are short and the paint flaking is gross) or heels (which are correlated with preventable mobility issues later in life).

I do like the aesthetic of dresses because they remind me of the movie Carol, but apart from that, my main goal is to look as polished as possible in five minutes, which is also why I have short hair. I saw myself as “femme” for part of my mid/late 20s, and I ignored the dissonance between myself and that label; I was so mistaken about what it meant. “Femme” wasn’t about wearing dresses and being tolerant of floral patterns; it was about personality, too, and I was becoming increasingly aware that my personality didn’t pass and that this betrayal of expectations was a major source of interpersonal friction.

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Male and female,
shrewd begetter of war,
she-dragon of the many shapes,
frenzy-loving, illustrious,
destroyer of the Phlegraian Giants,
driver of horses,
victorious Tritogeneia,
O goddess, you free us from suffering,
day and night,
ever into the small hours.

Orphic Hymn to Athene, ln. 10-14, trans. Athanassakis

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I’ve fed writing passages into AI — the same kinds of AI that munch on public content to figure out how to advertise to us — and learn that I am a “the epitome of masculinity” in how I write, with a 95% probability. I did a gender stereotype assessment once and found that I was in the far upper right corner of the square, with a lot of masculine traits and a fair number of feminine ones.

Poking at those assessment brought back unpleasant memories of being the only girl in physics and calculus in school — the only average-intelligence person there, too, because I was taking classes with gifted boys — and how I had learned to argue aggressively and speak forcefully in order to be heard while feeling immense pressure as the only girl to show that I was capable of understanding the content. It reminded me of all of the comments boys would make about girls’ bodies and intelligence and agency. (“It smells like fish in here,” “give her the license at 20 and take it away at 40 because women need to take care of the kids but are bad drivers,” “you can’t do math,” “you were created from a rib and are less than men” {yes, in public school}, and “all that matters is being capable enough of managing your children.”) It reminded me of the time my youngest sister, who had just started wearing makeup and dating, screamed at me in the yard while we raked leaves about how I was secretly a boy before she listed every sin against femininity I had ever made. It reminded me of the woman who became my supervisor during a reorg who went on about loving something called “jewel tones” and tried striking up conversations about hot celebrities and who was so unhappy with my personality (and, to be honest, the habits I learned when being the only girl in high school classes; some of those habits were bad habits, and it is correct for me to work on them) that she made me feel like I was walking on glass shards. There was one particular time that I walked home, closed the door, and collapsed against it in tears. While she was my supervisor, I learned to use more qualified speech (it may be, perhaps we could, we might recommend, if I understand), to ask fewer questions, and to avoid eye contact, and she praised this as positive personal development.

Most of the feminine-coded traits I selected on that second quiz were related to being aware of others’ emotions and being willing to do emotional labor, but I am also a prude, which likely contributed to the score based on several questions. I tried fitting into a peer group in college and never understood how to be less prudish, but I recall feeling a lot of shame whenever people laughed at me for being sheltered and very desperate to prove that I wasn’t as childlike as they seemed to think I was while simultaneously being completely clueless, so the end result was a disaster of cringe. I honestly think I fundamentally lack some understanding that they all shared. In graduate school, a roommate and I were discussing a webcomic, and my roommate said that the way the friend group talked — filled with references to sex, desire, and the like — was how women actually talked to friends and that I was just bizarrely reserved. I didn’t know if she was joking or if she was telling the truth, so I decided not to ask.

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Plato’s dialogues, during sections that discuss reincarnation, place incarnating as a woman below incarnating as a man because womanhood is somehow a boot camp for virtue development. Sometimes I wonder if those statements were compassionate, a recognition of both suffering and the tenacity required to be functional when faced with challenges that were once even harder than the ones I have described here.

Where I’ve landed in my early 30s is the realization that most of these stereotypes are absolute bullsh–t. They matter in the sense that there are certain expectations I need to meet, but apart from that, the people trying to enforce standards of femininity when I was younger were insecure or instinctively knew that I was an easy target due to learned helplessness from school bullying and a bad home environment. It still cuts when people (usually white men with body language that reminds me of the assholes who bullied me in school) maliciously call me sir in the grocery store or when people react badly when I stop using qualified speech. I have also realized that I am not alone — many of us experience friction just like what I have described long into our adulthoods, and regardless of how aware we are that a community guideline is bullsh–t, rejection causes psychological pain because human beings are a social species and our brains just do that.

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There are, therefore these three vivific monads, viz. Diana, Proserpine, and our mistress Minerva. And the first of these indeed is the summit of the whole triad, and which also converts to herself the third. But the second is a power vivific of wholes. And the third is a divine and undefiled intellect, comprehending in one ruling manner, total virtues. Timæus, therefore, manifests this, calling the third monad (Minerva) philosophic, as being full of intellectual knowledge, and true wisdom; but philopolemic, as the cause of undefiled power, and the inspective guardian of the whole of fortitude. And again, the Athenian guest calls her Core, as being a virgin, and as purifying from all conversion to externals.

If, however, you are willing, we will survey the triad of Core, from what is said in the Cratylus concerning Pherephatta [Persephone]. She is called, therefore, wisdom, and is said to come into contact with that which is generated and borne along: she also produces fear in those that hear her name, and excites astonishment in the multitude. With respect to the appellation of wisdom, therefore, it is evident that it is a sign [of the characteristic property] of Minerva, and the summit of virtue. For if in us all the sciences are the first of the virtues, how is it possible that wisdom should not be rightly denominated, the first-effective cause of all the virtues? And if philosophy pertains to her, so far as she is wisdom, and immaterial intelligence, but not because she is [lacking] wisdom, (for no one of the Gods, says Diotima, philosophizes), on this account, therefore, she is not [destitute] of wisdom; and the intellectual good of the ruling order entirely pertains to her. 

Proclus, Platonic Theology, Book 6, Ch. XI, trans. Taylor

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My reaction also points to the power of myths that we can all have such visceral personal responses to them. They are etched into us in a million and one ways, and the seeds of our interpretations are germinated in us as children. At the same time, like Arachne, we can risk becoming ensnared by myths’ images instead of diving to the core of them, oxygenated by the holy words of the wise and our own souls’ guiding compasses, newly empowered to unlock the puzzles left to us by poets who were just as swept away by ambient cultural currents as we are today. It is also easy to be trapped in a hall of rumination like a mirrored maze with no clear way in or out, our self-reflection becoming poison rather than leading us to constructive places.

Athene is the Goddess of holy wisdom who unlocks purifying philosophy, working alongside her half-brother Apollon, and she is part of the triad in the quotation above. She is also depicted as a woman, gender-nonconforming in her intellectual and warlike interests, yet the patroness of the types of work and industriousness women and girls were trained to do from an early age in Ancient Greek society. She gets a lot of flack for that in the myths — joked about, reviled, or put onto a pedestal, depending on the disposition of who is doing it. Yet, truly, she is the Goddess who teaches us to look beyond appearances and stereotypes, to exhaust ourselves learning how to weave and unweave anything uttered in sound, image, or song, and to prepare our minds for opulent light.

And ultimately … do we really want to cling that much to something the way it was transmitted by Ovid?

🦉