My guest tonight is Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD. She's a psychiatrist who specializes in the study of Jungian archetypes and mythology. She's an author of many books and the one that I'm bringing her on to speak about, in particular, is her newest one titled, Artemis: The Indomitable Spirit in Every Woman.

::::::::

Transcript of podcast to be found here: Archetypal, Mythic Strong Women and Patriarchy -- A Conversation with Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD

Thanks to Tsara Shelton for helping with the transcript editing.

Rob: Welcome to the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, WNJC 1360 AM out of Washington Township reaching Metro Philly and South Jersey, and online at opednews.com/podcast or at iTunes where you'll look for my name, Rob Kall, K-A-L-L.

My guest tonight is Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD. She's a psychiatrist who specializes in the study of Jungian archetypes and mythology. She's an author of many books and the one that I'm bringing her on to speak about, in particular, is her newest one titled, Artemis: The Indomitable Spirit in Every Woman. Welcome to the show.

JSB: Thank you Rob, it's good to be with you.

Rob: So I wanted to start off...you titled the book Artemis, but most of the book is about Atalanta. And we'll get into the details of that, but maybe we can introduce it by explaining the differences.

JSB: Well Artemis was the goddess of the hunt and goddess of the moon, and as a goddess, her interests...she came to the protection of the young girls, rescued women, had brotherly egalitarian relationships with men and was a ?????competitor, a runner a hunter. She's kind of the Katniss Everdeen of the Hunger Games in modern imagery. And she also has the goddess of the moon side so that reflective seeing the world by moonlight, which brings up beauty and oneness -- she's an amazing archetype and she's certainly one that I have felt in myself over the years. So as an archetype, it means that she's a potential pattern in all of us. And some of us come into the world with stronger gifts in one direction than the other, and so some of us come in as...with Artemis as a major pattern that we live. So that's Artemis, she's the goddess and she's the archetype.

And Atalanta is an amazing mortal who without having....if I hadn't found her I wouldn't realize how big a place she has...she had in actual Greek mythology -- that she has two major stories that were big in the realm of the Greeks, and then in Ovid of in the Romans as well. And she is a woman, mortal woman, who resembles Artemis the goddess, and is a stand in for us as stories can be. You know that stories resonate with us when they ring true, and Atalanta is a mortal who got abandoned on a mountaintop and left to die just because she was born a girl, so she's very much in the pattern of how the patriarchy, how the king in this story reacted to having a girl instead of a son and heir. Only, Atalanta was found by a mother bear -- she was considered under the protection of Artemis and she was suckled and raised by a mother bear, which is one of Artemis's symbols. You know you don't cross mother bears when she is guarding and looking after her young. So she's a bit of a ferocious archetype.

Rob: What does that mean being...in terms of a person growing up being suckled by a mother bear? I know some moms who are like mother bears...

JSB: Well, archetypally, often it means that you raised your...you were a little girl who found Mother Nature supported you. Often a girl -- indomitable is a word that in the title of the book that has stayed...I did change the name at one point from Atalanta to Artemis, but indomitable was always part of it because indomitable means untamed and unsubdued. And when I see girls and women who have been victimized and one would think that they were victims, but they, in effect, there's a part of them...you could say, for example, a raped non-victim -- yes she was raped, yes she was abused, but there's a part of her, an indomitable part of her that is not touched by that...that has some part of herself that...I love the one line by the poet Mary Oliver...who referred to "What shall we do with our one wild and precious life?" Well indomitable is that one wild and precious part that no matter what else has happened, still has energy and vitality and that's the part that was...that Atalanta personified and that so many of the women that I have seen leading NGOs at the UN have had. For example, they may have been abducted and sold to a brothel and gotten free and turned around and rescued other women and girls...that kind of a spirit, that doesn't give in and go under is a quality that I'm celebrating in the book Artemis.

Rob: So, what is the message? What's your elevator pitch for this book? What's the short message of what this book is about? And why should people get it? And it's a wonderful book and I really enjoyed it and got a lot out of it.

JSB: Well this is the deeper element in every activist. Every activist, especially a feminist, an environmentalist -- the part...when you recognize yourself as the girl who when you were young said 'it's not fair' and stood up for somebody that was being bulled and now maybe through the years you've done various things but been pretty much caught up in life of, especially if you had both children and work in the world. And then somewhere after 50 or 60, here she comes again...this Artemis energy that now can look at what needs to be done and actively step out to do it.

I realize Rob that I didn't quite get around to saying what does it mean to be suckled by a mother bear -- it is a metaphor and so much of what I appreciate and people do appreciate is the depth of a metaphor... So suckled by a mother bear would be the same as raised by Mother Nature. The kind of childhood in which a girl is in a dysfunctional family, is being maybe abused...but she goes out and out in nature, often with a pet dog or a horse, finds solace and stays in touch with her strength in spite of the fact that at home or in school the world is really not good to her. Yet, there's a part of her that remains strong and loving, often through her love of animals when humans have not been good to her. This is someone who has been raised by mother bear.

Rob: Okay, what about mothers who are like mother bears? That's a whole different thing I guess?

JSB: Well it's interesting, the mother archetype in Greek mythology could not protect her children -- the ones who are primarily mothers. Demeter, who is a goddess of the...you know the mother of Persephone...she couldn't do anything about Persephone being abducted into the underworld.

And I really came away from reading Eve Ensler's book -- and Eve Ensler is indomitable, you know, her doing the Vagina Monologues and then her doing One Billion Rising...and then revealed to us in her autobiographical memoir that her childhood was one of severe abuse, sexual and [physical]...and only when she could identify with the victims in the Congo who had been raped in war and her own cancer...and her own...did she...was she able to speak about how, in spite of all of that, she has been a real force for women and girls. And that's very much indomitable Eve...Eve Ensler.

And so what it means to be the mother bear part of...unfortunately is not that strong in a lot of...the woman who is a true mother bear has an Artemis and she will leave a bad relationship if her daughter or her sons are molested or beaten. But a woman who is like archetypally Hera's, whose being with this powerful man is the most important thing in her life...she unfortunately will not stand up for her abused children. So a protective mother usually has some mother bear/Artemis qualities in which she really says 'Don't mess with my kid,' and it may be to her mate... it usually is actually -- domestic violence being the most common violence there is in the United States.

Rob: Okay, so...yes now you talk about rape culture in the book...

JSB: Actually Eve Ensler introduced me to that word in her book.

Rob: Yeah.

JSB: I hadn't seen it before, and then I thought way back when I was writing...30 years ago I wrote Goddesses in Every Woman and it became a best seller and it just got reissued. Gods in Every Man is 25 years old, and it also got reissued, both in July. And I talked about Zeus as the archetype of the philanderer -- that was how I was perceiving him in Gods in Every Man....you know, that he is the CEO of Mount Olympus and he can do what he pleases and take what he wants. And if he...and he in this mythology the second generation Olympians were all his kids, and kids that were the result of his seductions or his rapes. You know, so he really was a very incetu...well he was a rapist, pure and simple. But with the kind of coverage of the Greek mythology being our mythology in western civilization, and it's about the click -- you know when something clicks, you know, you've been sort of looking at it and taking it in and it's just what it is, and so philanderers, so all the Gods of ancient Greece used to rape everybody except the three virgin goddess -- every other...was game, was fair game. If you were attracted to a nymph, a goddess, whomever -- it didn't matter. If you wanted her you could take her -- that was Greek...that's Greek mythology. That is the basis of the mythology of western civilization. And I didn't see it as rape culture until I read Eve Ensler. And then to have the Prime Minister Modi of India in his major first address, which was from the Red Fort in New Delhi when...in Delhi when he spoke to...spoke and said the shamefulness of India having a rape culture and it's time to stop violence against women. So it's entering our consciousness that there's something about patriarchy as exemplified by Mount Olympus going way back that could be...could define our culture, really, as a rape culture, which is awful and sad.

Rob: Yeah but, I guess what I'm processing this is....Greek and Roman mythology are the...are what civilization is built upon just about, aren't they?

JSB: Yes it is, it really is. And out of it came democracy and our literature, and a lot of wonderful things. And there was another click, this one more than 40 years ago, when I realized that the history of western civilization that I took and...when I was in college that was a required freshman year course, we all took history of western civilization. And we learned about the origins of democracy and all good things like that. And then to discover that yes, it applied to men only. At the time that the cradle of democracy was happening in ancient Greece and in Athens, women were the property of men and fathers could sell a non-virgin daughter into slavery if her daugh...if his daughter was raped or if he incested her....as soon as she was not virginal, she could be sold -- she could become a member of the slave class. And that the women could not testify in the courts. I mean there were...the establishments of the courts were a wonderful thing...the idea of a jury, presenting evidence. But women could not testify. The cradle of democracy, the click was yes it was the cradle of democracy, but it did not apply to women...it would not apply to me. It applied to men. That was an eye-opener too.

Rob: Yes, now you write in the book about how it wasn't always that way. There have been matriarchal cultures -- I believe there still are some. Can you talk a little bit about non-patriarchal cultures?

JSB: There was an archeologist, Marija Gimbutas, who helped bring forth the reality that it wasn't just a made up story that once there was matriarchy. And for a long time, in scholarship, it was totally dismissed that there was ever a time when God was a woman so to speak. There was this excellent book by Merlin Stone back in the...probably about 40 years ago -- When God Was a Woman...and she was describing the shift from a time when the feminine was valued to patriarchy, and Marija Gimbutas's research in archaeology and all helped them establish that. And so for 5,000 to 25,000 years prior to patriarchy in the west, we apparently had, in western civilization, a mother culture -- and it made sense because if you did not know that a baby was made because of sperm and an egg came together, and an embryo was formed, what you saw -- what everybody saw -- was that Mother Earth brought everything forth from her body, women were the creators, women gave birth through her body...and it is a miracle. If you've ever been in the delivery room or if you're with the mothers -- I don't know if you were in a delivery room ever but from....

Rob: Yes.

JSB: Yeah, it's a miracle! It's amazing! This new human being comes out of the body of your wife. Or if you're the woman and this whole new person has been growing inside of you and comes out of you, it is amazing. And it's been denigrated...a lot...because men can't do it and patriarchy devalues what women can do. But really if you didn't know about the part that the masculine sperm played in...aided functioning, you'd assume that God was feminine -- the great goddess that she was the creator. And so people did. Plus, there was Mother Earth and the amazing element of that, everything coming out of the earth and things like that.

So it seems like not only is there science that says that there once was a time when there was matriarchy, it makes sense that there would have been. And really, Riane Eisler wrote The Chalice and the Blade about a time, and a time in the past and a time potentially in the future, which is the one I'm interested in , the future potential of patriarchy coming to an end and there being, not matriarchy...not just a reversal of, you know, who's in charge because they're different qualities -- masculine and feminine. To have the experience that Divinity is masculine and feminine if you're going to make it gender...relate to it in a gender way...most of what...most of the values of why men are valued over women since Christianity came along was because of the belief that men were made in the image of God and had dominion over things and could name everything, and that even though there are too two stories in the...in Genesis about the creation of women, the one...the first one that's sort of overlooked is that male and female were created in the image of the gods, and it was plural, interestingly.

Rob: It was what...I couldn't hear the word?

JSB: It was plural. It was, 'Let us...', there's something about the whole...if you read the Genesis carefully, it's interesting, there's Yahweh, but Yahweh is with other godlike somebodies in the garden, and Yahweh creates male and female in the image of Divinity in one version. And then in the version that is so used to oppress women, it's that Yahweh God has created everybody and everything, and now is talking to Adam about how Adam needs a companion. And so He puts Adam to sleep and makes out of the rib of Adam a companion, who is created solely to be a companion to Adam, and subordinate to him. So that's the story that most of us sort of get about how we were created out of Adam's rib.

Rob: So I'm interested in this time that you described, 5,000 to 25,000 years ago when there was...what did you call it, a mother culture?

JSB: It was...

Rob: Mother culture.

JSB: It was a mother divinity so there would be the great goddess, the...and interestingly wherever she was, she wasn't like this one supermom -- every place had their own kind of name for her -- the mother goddess that was worshipped locally. And she was seen as a triple goddess -- as mother, maiden...as maiden, mother, crone -- like the moon cycles -- the waxing moon, the full moon, the waning moon, and then, you know, the mysterious dark of the moon. The feminine was seen in nature and the worship of her was because she was all around in nature.

And one of the really interesting things that raised as a Protestant Christian was realizing...and then getting into the archetypes, and knowing an archetype is a kind of an inherent pattern that then helps us to recognize similarities and things that the Greeks -- back to the Greeks again -- but the Eleusinian mysteries...and the word mystery, initially, well it applies to crime stories now, although it's about life and death really. So there's something about the word mysteries that goes back to the Eleusinian mysteries where mystais was the name of the initiate and it you were initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, for 2,500 years prior to Christianity, you entered some kind of altered state after, through a ritual, you came out and you no longer feared death. And the idea was that you identified in some way with the sacred daughter, Persephone, who was abducted into the underworld and came back.

And then for the next 2500 years, we have Jesus, the Divine Son, who gets crucified and goes into the tomb, or womb. So the ancient goddess idea of the great mother was she was...everything was birthed out of the earth and went back to the earth. So the great mother as Mother Earth was the womb of all things and also was the tomb. So there was a cycle of life.

And so there were religions that honored the feminine, and the mystery of life and death and creation was seen as part of her. And the archaeology of things, and Riane Eisler's book, The Chalice and the Blade, talks about a time when there was in what we refer to as matriarchy, there seemed to be a more egalitarian element. And...where the issue is masculine...well, and that's actually where we are moving towards. I actually am not sure about the egalitarian side so much as I'm really forward-looking to the potential of, you know, here we are at a time when most people get a sense that it's a tilt time, as I call it...

Rob: Tilt?

JSB: It's like a teeter-totter. When you're standing in the middle of the teeter- totter, you can put your weight on one side or the other, and depending on what side you put your weight on, it will tilt down in that direction. And we are right at the center of the teeter-totter for humanity. And one side is destruction -- it's our end as we know it, it's ruining the planet... And the other is evolving in some way through the bringing together of masculine and feminine in individuals, but also empowering women who look after the young and who if we had...if women, if girls were treated as equals and if women were empowered in the big decisions...when life changes for families when mother and father are equal, and such things as 'What do we spend our budget on?' is decided by both -- it's just...it's different when that happens versus one person, the wife, is subordinate to the husband, who has power over everything. And this is the way we are governing the earth and its resources. Patriarchy HAS the decision making power and the big weapons, and women ARE subordinate. And research is beginning to really reveal that women react to stress differently than men and we're more likely to care about infrastructure that has to do with...with the well-being of our children and health and things like that, rather than weapons. I could go into a riff about that obviously so I think I'll stop.

Rob: I'm really interested though in the whole idea of patriarchy, and in a couple weeks I'm going to have on somebody who was raised in the Quiver movement...have you heard of that?

JSB: No I haven't. What is it?

Rob: It's a an approach to raising children where they basically do homeschooling, and they try to have as many children as they can, and it's totally patriarchal. The father is the ruler, the mother is the child-bearer and the cook...and they keep them out of public schools to protect them from the evils of what they'd learn there. This is...it's really such an extreme opposite...a total opposite of feminism it's the extreme of patriarchy, but it's real and it's happening now in America.

JSB: Oh, it is. And there are lots of...the Hasidic movement in New York City is rather like that, isn't it?

Rob: You tell me.

JSB: (Laughs) I just got the impression that within the really orthodoxy...was reading an article about has the...is the liberal progressive Jewish vote a thing of the past. As the rise of orthodoxy with Hasidic jury of New York being the example of a time...of going back to the patriarchal traditional values where, for one thing, having 8 children is...fits very well in that, and the schooling is done entirely within the...an education religious setting, where they don't teach the boys science, they teach them the Talmud. And they don't educate the girls beyond a certain point. And there are all the traditional kinds of roles that women have which are as...basically they serve the men. And...

Rob: They even have to wear head coverings, kind of like hijabs.

JSB: And...

Rob: Not the same as hijabs, a lot of them wear wigs or hats or those same...they have some similarities there.

JSB: Well partly it's because as a initiate, as a new wife, I think you have to shave your head.

Rob: Oh, I didn't know that. Hm. What's the symbolism of shaving your head?

JSB: Well if it goes back to, I mean that...the power of the feminine in her ability to be attractive...a lot has to do with the hair. It's a certain kind of power. Although it was Sampson that had his hair shorn to reduce his power. I know that you become more and more anonymous though when you...if you were to have your hair...head shorn and had to keep it covered and had to keep your eyes down and a few other subordinate behavior things like this.

Rob: You know actually, you talk about this in the book. You talk about...you wrote a book...you refer to your book, Ring of Power, and how there's an abandoned child, and when a son or daughter is expected to be an extension of a parent's needs, which sounds to me a bit like the way a narcissist parent functions.

JSB: It's true. When a culture of behave...enforces that, it's very much the same when the idea of an abandoned child in Ring of Power was that if from the moment you're born your value is determined by how you are going to serve the...in the opera, the ring of the navel on which that I use as a basis for describing this, each of the children -- male and females -- value were entirely based on whether that son could acquire what the father wanted. And so whenever a boy or a girl is born into the world and not seen as a unique individual who has a life to lead and meaning to find in his or her own life, but it's primarily to serve the ambitions of a parent or the unlived out possibilities of the parent, and overlooked is what that boy or that girl really might love to do...or be themselves, that's a narcissistic system in which the narcissism of the parent is primary and that is, of course, what's true of patriarchy...because you look at who has the most, you know, the projections that are the strongest on who you're there to be, it's in the royal families. The higher you are...

Rob: Tell me more about this tie between narcissism and patriarchy?

JSB: Well I think that narcissism and codependency are related, and in fact, one of the interesting things about the recovery movement is it's description is that if women are raised to be codependent, meaning that they are not important -- what they have to do themselves is not significant, that they're whole identity is in relationship to somebody else, and in relationship to the husband or the father. And that's what patriarchy does to daughters -- it says you belong to the father until you're married and you belong to the husband, and your role is to fulfill the expectations of father and then husband, and it's usually to serve -- I mean it's always to serve. It's to be, regardless of whether you inherently want to be a mother of...if your culture says your whole value is on having male babies, then that's what you do, and it's subordinate to any life that you might have preferred yourself. So that's being certainly co-dependent in an institutionalized way to the principle that you have been raised under. And a culture that believes in the individual development of each human being and each human being having worth...innate worth...is different.

So we have the idea of co-dependent and narcissists. You know there's a joke that at the moment in which you're about to die someone else's life flashes by the co-dependent....because the co-dependent puts all the importances on pleasing and in taking care of and in mattering to the other person. So the other person is encouraged to be a narcissist. And given those circumstances, a patriarchal culture trains its girls and boys -- it trains the girls to be co-dependent and it does train the boys to be narcissistic.

Rob: A patriarchal culture does that?

JSB: I believe it does.

Rob: Wow. And how does that manifest?

JSB: All privilege of development goes to the boys. I mean in the consideration in the most patriarchal cultures now are the ones in the middle east that are fighting to keep it the way it is. And there, the women are anonymous with their hajibs and education is denied them, so independent thinking is not allowed. And I'm, you know, when you think about innate gifts and innate archetypes, to me they do go together. So if you have an innate love of something and you never have a chance to develop it, what a denial that is. I mean if you have a fine mind and nobody will educate it because you are a girl, or you have an innate musical ability and you aren't exposed to music or art, and those are natural built into you -- loves and talents -- the idea of behind the Jungian approach to psychology that I follow is that we each have our own individuation or desire to develop fully, and that includes all of the qualities that are human, that they are....we come into the world with certain gifts, we share all the potentials. But, you know, I'm...I like music, but I can't carry a tune if I'm sitting next to somebody who is really in harmony. And then there's the people who have this innate musical gift -- you can say it's archetypal, it's built in -- and will you be allowed to develop it or not? Well not if you're a girl.

So much of what is...and I also in Artemis...one of the things about using the Atalanta myth as a story to exemplify Artemis qualities is the contrast and the explanation about how patriarchy is really tough on boys...

Rob: It's really what? I can't...it's really what?

JSB: It's tough on boys. If you are a boy and happen to have qualities that are considered feminine as natural talents then you are taught to feel ashamed of it. If you have like a basic tenderheartedness and you...and in psychological terms, that you come in with intuition and feeling -- you can intuitively feel what it might be like to be bullied or to be considered inferior -- but on the school yard if you want to get along with the crowd and not have the crowd scapegoat you along with somebody else, you are acculturated to suppress feelings of compassion....empathic compassion for someone who is being bullied or beat up. So you become a spectator to maybe the narcissist who is feeling more powerful because he gets to beat up somebody else. And also, sons are expected to live out what the family expects him to do, often in more traditional cultures, whether he has any love for whatever the family business is or not.

Rob: So, as I mentioned to you before we got on the air, I've been covering psychopaths and sociopaths and narcissists, and one of the common characteristics of all of them is a lack of empathy and what you just said that basically the patriarchal culture discourages or punishes the expression of empathic compassion in men.

JSB: I think it really, it does, and it does it systematically at age 18 when, if a young man goes into the military service, there really is an inherent 'Thou shall not kill' in the healthy psyche of people. We seem to have an inhibition against killing our own species. And, you know, they discovered that in World War II when they found that even our well-trained young men....so many of the bullets were not aimed at the enemy, that there was a going along with -- you know the being trained to shoot to kill and all that -- but when it came time to actually aim it at an enemy, they didn't.

Rob: That's right, about 80% did not...course, by the time they figured that out for Korea and Vietnam, they got it up around 95% - they figured out how to get rid of that, as you describe it, a natural compassion to let people live.

JBS: And then they come back from serving, especially if they've had multiple tours of duty, and they don't feel fit to join the human race again. The post-traumatic stress syndromes that have to do with the inner experience of feeling unfit -- that somehow they have broken a human taboo, and they have witness things or done things that go beyond the pale. And they feel depressed and ashamed, and marked by the service that they were trained to do.

Rob: It's an extreme case, killing people, but I want to go back to patriarchy discourages or punishes empathic compassion in young men. This is not just about war. This is not just about soldiers. This is about everyday life. How does that affect men and boys, and can you put that also into the mythic terms that you do so beautifully?

JSB: Well if you are trained to not feel because that's considered feminine...what happens is interesting now that we know about brain physiology as well, what happens is that you then have alpha males who are....I mean a patriarchy is essentially a pyramidal...a pyramid. The men at the top have power over everything below in the pyramid and maintaining a position at the top is important. And that is what's rewarded. And so what do you have to suppress in yourself in order to be alpha male at the top? And one of the things that does get suppressed is the entire right brain -- the right brain is...if you are a whole person you have right and left brain. You have the left brain that is rational, is logical, and sees things in terms of either or. I'm mean it's very...I'm simplifying things, but that's kind of a basic thing. And the other , the right brain, is where art and music and metaphor and compassion and feelings and things like that, reside, often without words until when vocabulary is learned. And if as a result of becoming an alpha male and coming at the top of the pyramid, the net result is that as an alpha male, as research is beginning to come forth with, you have an asymmetrical brain as a result. You have a truly a dominant left brain and a smaller right brain instead of equal sides of the brain being the same. And women, because women are educated in the west, we have a chance really, a great chance of being as smart as we want to be using our minds, developing it as far as we can develop it, and we have the hormonal kinds of reactions to stress, which involves storytelling and involves listening to people's stories and collaboration and... I mean there's this research that was done in 2000 that says women respond to stress differently than men. Women respond with what's called an oxytocin reaction, which is enhanced by estrogen while men under stress do fight or flight. So there's....

Rob: Wait, in your book you call it an oxytocin...there's more to it. What is the rest of the description -- an oxytocin...?

JSB: It's enhanced by estrogen. It just is adrenalin in the fight or flight is enhanced by testosterone, so then if you...if men and women together faced what was stressful, the women would encourage talking about it and seeing what is in common. If we could be at the peace tables, as the UN actually has these wonderful documents that have been passed, but they...

Rob: Oh I found it...I found that I had....this is another one of those pages I marked in your book because I loved it. You said women... "the old saying is the stress response is a fight or flight response." And this is a world that I lived in for many years because I worked in the field of biofeedback and stress management, so the fight or flight response is like this meme that's out there as that's the way people respond. But what you're saying, and which makes so much sense, is that women have this oxytocin response that you call a "tend and befriend." That's the phrase I was looking for -- instead of fight or flight, it's tend and befriend. That's so different in terms of the stress response. Tell me more about that tend and befriend oxytocin response.

JSB: Well that was discovered by the researchers at UCLA, headed by women -- Sally Taylor and her crew of researchers in 2000, and that's what they named it -- tend and befriend. And it had a lot to do with the fact that there were women researchers because, but for the women's movement, there would not have been. So they note that their department, which had to do with studying stress, was under stress, and they noticed that the women in the department were reacting differently than the men.

So essentially just in ordinary life, men stressed at work and corporate work or whatever they're doing, the flight or fight would be to come home...I mean you could be angry, get a road rage on the way home, and then when you get home you say, 'Leave me alone. I don't want to talk to anybody, I've had a bad day.'

Rob: Well the other thing is, you point out that the fight or flight response in men is testosterone- and cortisone-driven, whereas the female tend and befriend stress response is oxytocin and estrogen-driven.

JSB: Yes, it's enhanced by estrogen and it is the oxytocin goes up, which bonds us when we talk about what's going on and we have empathic listening, and we also can then talk about solutions. So what if...I mean my whole effort to bring about a UN 5^th world conference in India, for example, has to do with the bringing together the NGO women who, there were 40,000 in Beijing in 1995...there could be over 100,000 who would come together and share what they are doing and what they know, and what happens is a collaborative...a much more natural physiological collaboration. So that when women go to work and are stressed, and then can talk about it with their best friends or their circle of women, when they come home, the tend and befriend is that they want to hug their children -- they don't want to be irritated and say 'Go away, leave me alone.' But they do, women/wives often say, 'Don't bother daddy, he's had a bad day,' and he'll go down and retreat, which is flight. But the women's response is more to bond more with who she loves and take care of the nest, and even though she is working like he is. So that's the difference...and wouldn't it be wonderful if, as the UN would like to see us do, if women were equal and empowered, then men and women together with their differences could come up with solutions.

Rob: And yet, there are, at the same time, there are men who are also nurturing and have a kind of an oxytocin-like response, and there are women who are alpha male-types...Hillary. When I read in your book where you refer to alpha males, I wrote down under it, Hillary (laughs), because I think in many ways that's what she's trying to do and trying to be.

JSB: Except that she has had a remarkable ability to keep women friends and to have positive relationships with the people that work with her...and also keep her marriage, the kind of necessity to learn some forgiveness, and I think she has been humiliated and humbled and she's grown a lot psychologically in the course of having to live in the public eye a lot.

But first of all, to get back to what you're saying, I fully agree that what is considered stereotypical, probably is true for about two-thirds of each gender. And that has to do with the archetypes inside of them because, for example, there are a lot of nurturing men when they are allowed to be so and how happy they are to be the nurturers they naturally are. But if the culture doesn't allow them to do that, because it's considered unmanly, and there's no possibility of having enough time to be with your children, then that part of the man suffers. Men who are, who work with children and work with people....like I have many men over the years in my practice who've been psychotherapists, and many of them have a strong nurturing quality because you archetypes....I mean I say that it's...really I should have written 'Gods and Goddesses in Every Person' and not 'Goddesses in Every Woman'...by the time I wrote Gods in Every Man, I did say that most women will find at least one male archetype that's a strong one in her and the men I know who are nurturers, you know they have a...either a combination of the male archetypes that have been suppressed, that are feeling or they have a connection with Demeter, the mother archetype, in themselves. And when they get to live it out, everybody...I mean you're much happier if you get to be who you really are deeply, archetypally so. And yes, I think there are nurturing men and the example of Margaret Thatcher as a Zeus woman, who used power over -- shut down the mines, didn't care what happened to the people, declared war on the Falklands...I mean, yes, at least in her public persona, Margaret Thatcher was every bit a Zeus as any other alpha male.

Rob: So, let me digress in another weird kind of a way. You know, I'm going to go back into this whole interest I have of psychopaths and sociopaths. Where do they fit into the mythic realm? It sounds like Zeus could be certainly a narcissist, maybe a psychopath. Where would you see that...?

JSB: Any archetype, almost, but archetypes that naturally are attracted to power and in childhood never developed the capacity, you know... the Indigenous say before you understand somebody else you have to walk a mile in their moccasins. We have an education system that does wonders for its emphasis on IQ, intelligence, but there's a whole dimension of us that has been referred to as EQ, which is our emotional quotient. And the only way you're going to develop that, really, is to consider it important enough to teach it. And we learn empathic connections often through being with other people in honest communication so that when there are, like, circles of children that are well-facilitated and the understanding of what it's like to be in the other person's situation, is felt and taught, then that side of a person can be developed. So partly it's cultural bias to not develop it in boys and to allow the lord of the flies kind of boyhood....on the schoolyard in which a bullied boy, maybe one who's been held back and so is bigger, gets to do his alpha dominance on other boys and everybody sees what happens when he chooses a scapegoat and nobody wants to be the scapegoat. What you've got is a teaching experience that really makes the point, so, be narcissistic, look out for number one.

One of the reasons for appreciating Artemis as an archetype is that, in women, she is the archetype that says it's not fair, and who goes out and may, say, takes a stance to stop something that is harming vulnerable people. And men have this archetype too.

Rob: I couldn't hear the last thing you said. And then what?

JSB: And then some men have the same archetype, the same sort of sense of....I mean certainly, the men who are out there doing...saving rainforests and rescuing animals, and all are men who have this archetype that is Artemis and there's something indomitable in them that is willing to stand up for causes that other men might say 'What are you doing THAT for?'

Rob: Now you say in your book...and I call my radio show Bottom Up...and I tripled underlined and marked and starred this one line in your book, "Women gain rights in the world where power is held mostly by men, only when those at the top are motivated by feminist movements that come from the bottom up."

JSB: That's is true. And now we have research that went over 40 years, and I think, 80 countries...something like that. And they surveyed everything and what made governments change or heads of companies change policies that affected women? -- It wasn't whether it was a liberal government, it wasn't whether it was a first world country....it all boiled down to whether there was a strong women's movement at the bottom making it an issue and making it possible for the men at the top to pay attention, or made it expedient for them, one or the other.

I think there are a number of men who want to do the right thing by women and they need to have an excuse to do so. And I think there are other men who don't get it at all, that there's a basic principle here, but only that it's expedient to so now that that group of potential voters will make it harder if you don't. So either way, when there are strong feminist movements, as in India right now, India has...the women in the streets in India are combatting the rape culture...had something to do with an election of someone who then comes in and gives in his first major talk, Prime Minister Modi, that we need to stop violence against women and that what a shame it is that India is a rape culture, or its become a rape culture....

Rob: You started to say when there are strong feminist women movements, as in India right now....finish that sentence.

JSB: Then the men at the top do the right thing. I mean, first there is often the getting the activist women who get a piece of legislation or principle through. So it's stated. For example, there are now anti-trafficking laws in a great many countries, including our own, and in India, but nobody enforces it until there are a sufficient bottom up energy that makes those, beginning with their first level of authority and going right up to the top, it's when there is strong energy organized at the bottom, the people at the top, the male...usually they are male people, the male people at the top start to do the right thing in reference to stopping violence against women, stopping trafficking of women, stopping child brides at ten. Well we can say, okay this is these other countries, it's not us. Still, trafficking happens in the United States too.

Rob: And what your book, because I want to support this book because it really pulls this together, describes is the mythic archetype in Artemis the goddess, and Atalanta the mythic person, who is a women or a man who stands out from the crowd, who doesn't do things as they're told, and who stands up for what is right.

JSB: And it also, the book also describes that each of us have shadows. Artemis has one as well, and the person who can aim for what is the negative, see it clearly and stop it, is part of this drama. It isn't just a drama that's lived out in the world, which our conversation would kind of assume it was going in that direction...but it's both in, it's what's going on in the world, but it's also what's going on in the individual who has a moment of choice or many moments of choice about will, for example, will silence be consent or will you speak up for the Artemis archetype in yourself that knows this is wrong, knows this is unfair. And in the moment you step up and speak out, you are embodying this archetype that in sufficient numbers, from the bottom up and with help from the top, can change the world.

Rob: Amen.

JSB: (Laughs) Amen.

Rob: You know, I love this book but one of the reasons I love it is because I fell in love with Joseph Campbell's A Hero's Journey, and before Campbell it was called the monomyth. I mean, to the extent that I've given presentations on how it applies to healing and personal growth and things like that. And what you present here with Artemis and the Artemis stories, which you really haven't told here in this interview, is a different way of being a hero that I love. And you've done a beautiful job of it. Do you think before we wrap that you should just give a brief overview of what the Artemis story is now that we've had all this conversation?

JSB: (Laughs) What I think I need to do from what you just said was, there's a hero's journey which starts out with a call to adventure, and it's a voluntarily taken journey, in which you run into difficulties and you overcome them, and you bring something back to the culture as a result. And I say that yes that's true now and in America it's true for women too, that you can have a calling to do something from that heroic side. My going into medicine had something to do with that side of things. But the other side that applies to all of us is what I would call a heroinic journey where, like Atalanta, you didn't ask to be abandoned on a mountaintop, nor did you ask to be discriminated against or to have a boar coming charging you with your bow and arrow to face it....will you give way? Will you respond? What will you do in unchosen circumstance? And that's the something that I see that really differentiates Campbell's Hero's Journey from what I describe as a heroinic journey -- it's the journey that starts with circumstances that you did not want to happen, but it did. So now what? And that shapes you and builds character and makes a difference.

And so Atalanta's story of having to make decisions in the midst of a drama of life she didn't choose is everybody's story, too. And what we decide to do matters if this journey were honest, truly a soul journey, as I believe it is, then I think that character and what we do here...the myth we live out....Joseph Campbell made the point that we each have our own mythic journey to live out, and I know that for just about everybody it starts off with a variation of dysfunctional family. And we start out as very innocent babies and what happens to us and what we do as a result shapes the story that is ours to live. So I make a point, as lots of others probably have, that this is the great work for each of us. How do we shape the story by our choices? One of the reasons for loving archetypes in mythology is that I'm able to see the stories and help people to see the stories that they are living out.

Rob: That's a great place to finish I think. I loved this interview. We spun off from the book, Artemis: The Indomitable Spirit in Every Woman by Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD. And we've gone to some pretty amazing places. Thank you so much.

JSB: Thank you Rob. It's been a pleasure because you do bring in so many different aspects.

Rob: And do you have anything you want to wrap up with? Any....to kind of finish us off? Is there a website that people can go to to find out more about you? Any other message that you want to give?

JSB: Our websites....J-E-A-N-B-O-L-E-N.com and there's also for the 5^th world conference on women, it's simply 5-W-C-W.org.

Rob: 5-W-C-W.org, and that's 5^th world conference...what is it, 5^th world conference for women?

JSB: On women, yeah.

Rob: And where is that going to be?

JSB: That is what I'm advocating as a major possibility of helping to tilt things in the evolutionary rather than the end-destructive place that we are in history.

Rob: When is that conference going to be and where is it going to be?

JSB: First of all, it will only happen from the bottom up. And it's on the edge...if Prime Minister Modi of India will say what...will act on what he has already said is his principle, then he will have his country at the UN support a 5^th women's world conference on women, and offer to be host of it. And then it will happen within 3 years in 2018. And I think it's maybe moving in that direction. But then I thought it was moving in that direction in 2012 when the Secretary General and the then President of the General Assembly came out with a joint-statement said it is high time that we had a 5^th women's world conference on women and asked the General Assembly just to pass out a simple resolution saying let's have a women's conference again. And it blocked...

Rob: And the last one...it was blocked?

JSB: It was blocked. The United States and a couple of countries in the EU. And everybody backed...who was for it then backed off. And that was in 2012, and that was...it made me realize that how much activism is a labyrinthine journey, that there are U-turns on the way...to the center.

Rob: Yes.

JSB: That was a big U-turn.

Rob: Wow. You know, one last question....one last question I've been wanting to...I thought about would be interesting -- ISIL or ISIS -- ISIL, we'll go with ISIL because ISIS was a goddess, so we'll go with ISIL. What's your take on the people in this group in the middle east?

JSB: Well first of all, I am so glad it's not referred to as ISIS, because she was the goddess, ancient Greek goddess -- not Greek, Egyptian goddess who gathered the dismembered pieces of Osiris together and put them back together again. And so ISIL is doing just the opposite -- it's disrupting things. And the only reaction that men seem to have, because we're all alpha males, is more force, bigger guns, challenging the leadership of anybody who's being thoughtful about what might work since this hasn't worked before. And the one solution is always bigger and more powerful aggression back. And it's like, 'Oh here we go again.' It's the same idea -- that famous saying that, "We who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." And I don't think that the solution is in military might, that it has to be a change...it has to involve the people who are affected and that means the women as well as men.

Rob: They're saying that ISIL is backed by Saudi Arabia, which doesn't allow women to even drive on their own.

JSB: Well it's a fractri...all of these are fratricidal wars. And the other thing -- whether it's in Palestine, Israel or whether it's in Syria -- wherever it is -- whether it's Sunnis and the other side...

Rob: Shias...Shias.

JSB: Yeah, it's very much like what's happening in western Europe between the hundred years wars of religion -- it's a theological based....and it goes back to the basic fratricidal story of Abel and Cain. I mean we are living out tribal warfare as embodied in Genesis. I mean, really, to think that it would be possible to evolve into doing it differently. And I know it's not possible until women are involved, because right now, for example, after the genocidal wars in Rwanda and where the males of both sides were either dead or had fled, it was women who took over the governance of Rwanda and it's the only country right now in Africa where childhood mortality is way down and lots of good things are happening.

So I don't know how to get from one place to another in a linear way, but I know it always starts by women themselves valuing what we have, expressing what is needed by our children, and making it possible for men who know better to not lose face by adopting the solutions that are recommended. And the United Nations in its Women, Peace and Security Resolution, 1325, it's called the Security Council Resolution 1325....if we did that -- if every conflict had women involved as it was building up to try to end it while it was going on and afterwards at the peace table, in sufficient empowered numbers, then solutions would be different than, okay...Round 3, Round 10. Right now, yes we're going to have a diplomatic discussion, but the loser will come back with another round after that.

Rob: Well let me just take one step back because you brought up a concept that I just wanted...I have to know more about, this idea of fratricide that is tied to Able and Cain. Sounds like there are archetypes there too.

JSB: There very much so is archetypes, and this is the...I mean here are the first family of the bible. And one was a tiller of the field and the other one was the...raised cattle or sheep. And Yahweh was the Father God at that point -- tribal Father God. Each young man brought the best that he had grown or nurtured to Yahweh. And the words are, 'He had disdain for the gifts of the field,' so that Cain's gift, Abel's gift were disparaged. And the one who raised sheep was blessed. And then when the two young men -- one who had been favored and the other one who had been disdained -- were together, the one who had been disdained killed his brother. So we begin with fratricide as the first act of brothers in the bible. What if both were given their due and differences were valued? What if brother were not set against brother?

My...the equivalent of the Yahwehs that head their various religions or their various governments or...this is a kind of appreciation that I'm mostly talking about for recognizing and valuing women. It's like valuing the different types of men. We don't...it isn't what you do so much in our culture, it is if you are a hyper-masculine male versus a overly-sensitive male, and most men are somewhere in between, you still know which ones are favored by success and which ones are not.

Rob: It's interesting because, you know, you can really go dig into this. So you're saying that Yahweh favored the one who gave him the sheep, which is basically controlling animals and killing them for the service of man, versus the one who was a vegetarian who worked an nurtured the earth. (Laughs) You can really parse this out in some odd ways.

JSB: (Laughs) It still, yeah, that is the value, you know. And also, the Nomadic peoples were the ones who came with their weapons and sky gods into old...what's called old Europe. They came down with their sky gods and their horses and could dominate the goddess worshipping people who grew things in the field and probably raised some sheep as well, but they didn't...or maybe they did, maybe they didn't -- it's just that the Nomadic tribes require the animals often do in the land and they have to move on. So they're always moving on into other people's property. And because they were superior and their ability to dominate, and had contempt for people that didn't fight back as well as they could dominate, that's sort of a repeated history over and over again.

Rob: And those Nomadic people basically survived by being predators.

JSB: Yes, they did.

Rob: Well, keep on going Jean. Dr. Jean Bolen, the author of Artemis: The Indomitable Spirit in Every Woman. We're going to wrap now because we've gone way over time but it was worth it. Thank you so much. I'm going to stop the recording now, but hang on a second, okay?

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.

His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

Join the conversation:

On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution

and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation