Two significant events are about to intersect: the millennium approaches and a huge generation of women’s movement-empowered women are entering the third phase of their lives. Some forty million American women will turn fifty in the few years preceding and following the year 2000, joining the generation that began the women’s movement, who passed this mark earlier. This personal time of menopausal transition coincides with an archetypal time of expectation that brings an openness to change.
This is a critical mass of women with the potential to change their world and the world, and reclaim and rehabilitate the archetype of the wise-woman. In the major mythologies of the world, these were goddesses of wisdom, who were diminished or demonized, as older women also were. In Greek mythology, it was Hecate, goddess of the crossroad, and goddess of the waning moon, who represented the third face of the trinitarian great goddess. Hearing Jean Shinoda Bolen tell us of Hecate, offers us the opportunity to muse upon what it could mean to have this archetype emerge into our individual consciousness and into the culture.
Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. is a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst in private practice, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of California Medical Center, and an internationally known lecturer. She is the author of The Tao of Psychology, Goddesses in Everywoman, Gods in Everyman, Ring of Power, Crossing to Avalon, and Close to the Bone. She is currently working on Goddesses in Older Women: The Third Phase of Women’s Lives.
She brings an emphasis on the quest for meaning and the need for a spiritual dimension in life to all aspects of her work, while also taking into account the powerful effects of archetypes within us, and family and culture upon us. She has been an advocate for women, women’s issues, and ethics in psychiatry. She is in two widely acclaimed documentaries: “Goddess Remembered,” the first of the Canadian Film Board’s trilogy on women’s spirituality, and the academy award-winning anti-nuclear documentary, “Women—For America, For the World.” Her words are published in many anthologies and recorded on many audiotapes. She lives in Northern California, practices in San Francisco, and has a son and a daughter.