Part one

Myths

“Women have been ignored, ridiculed, punished, even killed for their opinions forever. But without the balancing power of her voice— the female voice— things in this world end in disaster. Cassandra’s tale is your tale. It is all of our tales. We must speak, and we must be taken seriously. We must change the way the story ends……” (From Elizabeth Lesser’s book Cassandra Speaks)

Myths and ancient stories swim in our unconscious and are very much alive in our contemporary societies, even if this is not always apparent. They inform our ways of being and thinking, our literature and art, and the social discourse. They uphold patriarchal values and underpin dynamics in relationships. In a personal narrative that I have been constructing over recent years I seem to return to myths and stories salient in our culture. I also return to mythological figures in my art. The ink-pen drawings that I’ve been making this month contain characters from ancient Greek mythology: Pandora, Cassandra, Galateia and Pygmalion, Persephone, Hygeia related to the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius.

Short extracts from this personal narrative:

“Myths depict  the geography of our psyche, our life journey and also group discourse and dynamics with great economy…….. Myths, fairy tales and folklore across cultures and eras reflect universal journeys into the outer world, but also into the depths of our psyche. These short stories can be read at a subjective and objective level. The characters can reflect aspects of our psyches and the collective unconscious, as well as, the workings of outer environments. Stories have the capacity to awaken us to our own depth and the complexity of the world…..

There are many theories of the origins of patriarchy and most of them would agree that there are political and economic implications in men’s control over women. In simple terms patriarchy can be defined as the oppression and objectification of women by men through kinship relationship, culture and religion, violence, and through myths, ideas and discourse that represent social inequalities as natural……..

Through stories passed down from one generation to the next, over thousands of years, messages and roles are reinforced. When we descend into our own underworld nothing remains untouched; obscured dynamics and underlying patterns and stories are painstakingly revealed……… As I shuffled through the maze I discovered that my psyche was a rich reservoir of Greek mythology and religious archetypes and metaphors that did not necessarily preoccupy my conscious awareness, and which reflected dynamics of my life with precision, and also, linked my story to the greater wave of human experience and women’s journey across time………”

Elizabeth Lesser, whose book, Cassandra Speaks, I’ve just started reading writes: “I went back into those teaching tales that my mother had read to her girls— Adam and Eve and other Bible parables, the Greek and Roman myths, Shakespeare’s tragedies, war stories and heroic legends. I had absorbed those stories as if they were about humankind, about men and women. But here’s the thing: stories created only by men are really stories about men. I wanted to explore what would have happened— and what can happen now— when women are the storytellers, too. Whether we know it or not, whether we have read them or not, whether we believe them or don’t, our daily lives take direction from stories that are hundreds, even thousands of years old…….. In the past few years, I have thought of Cassandra’s story almost every day as more and more women demand to be heard and trusted. I have thought about other stories, too, ancient and modern ones, a whole brew of stories that people have been absorbing for centuries. Stories that tell false and destructive narratives about women and men, femininity and masculinity, and the nature and purpose of life. Stories we would be wise to scrap, and to replace with healthier ones.”