Goddesses in Older Women
Archetypes in Women Over Fifty
Chapter One
Wisdom is a woman, a crone, a goddess, and a feminine archetype. In Greek mythology, she is a barely personified Metis, swallowed by Zeus. In the Bible, she is a hidden Sophia, the goddess who became an abstract and ungendered concept. Wisdom may be found at twilight where the three roads meet as Hecate, or in the hearth fire as Hestia. She may be the invisible Shekinah who enters the Jewish home for the meal that begins the Sabbath. She was once the Celtic goddess Cerridwen. She is Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of wisdom, and Erda in Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung. In the world's mythologies and in the collective unconscious, which are mirrors of each other, wisdom is feminine. Wisdom is usually an attribute of a goddess who is often not seen orpersonified, and an attribute of a woman in whom wisdom has become a conscious part of her psyche.
The archetype of the wisewoman or wise crone is a generic description for the inner development of soul qualities most associated with the third phase of women's lives. Because she is a human archetype, she i ... read full excerpt from Goddesses in Older Women ebook
