Athene - Ann Shearer

Images of the Greek goddess Athene tell us something about "the feminine", and so have relevance to our current debates on gender and the nature of women and men. This book traces how the original power of these images (themselves created by male-dominated Greek society, so perhaps already altered from an original archetype) have been watered down and made respectable over the centuries. It also demonstrates particularly how this mattered in the 19th century, when women were beginning to storm male citadels and when a certain version of Athene - as protectress of civic virtues - was widespread.;By tracing the relationship of Freud and Jung to the goddess - both interested, yet neither using her image to expand ideas of feminine strengths - it will show how our views of the feminine today are still constrained by those of the founding fathers of depth psychology. Finally, it will look at how Athene, most complex of the Olympian deities, might appear to us today.