Episode 33: Reclaiming Eve: Female Archetypes in the Bible
with author Monette Chilson
Amy is joined by author Monette Chilson to discuss the biblical figures of Sophia, Lilith, and Eve, unpacking these figures as female archetypes and learning how we can reclaim them.
Additional Resources
The Girl Child & Her Long Walk to Freedom
Sophia Rising: Awakening Your Sacred Wisdom Through Yoga, by Monette Chilson
Original Resistance: Reclaiming Lilith, Reclaiming Ourselves: A Girl God Anthology, edited by Monette Chilson, Trista Hendren and Pat Daly,
My Name is Lilith, by Monette Chilson, Illustrated by Arna Baartz
Eve, Our Mythic Mother: Exposing the Lies of Patriarchy, by Patricia Lynn Reilly
Our Guest
Monette Chilson
Monette Chilson founded WomanSpirit Reclamation to support women in navigating their awakening from patriarchal indoctrination through online courses and community. She's written and spoken about the divine feminine for the past decade, authoring Sophia Rising: Awakening Your Sacred Wisdom Through Yoga, and My Name Is Lilith. Chilson also edited Original Resistance: Reclaiming Lilith, Reclaiming Ourselves, and developed its companion curriculum.
Amy Allebest: Let's look at the gendered language in the Bible. In the new inspired version of the Bible, which is the most popular translation, the word “mother” is used 312 times and the word “hers” is used 46 times. Meanwhile, the word “father” is used 1,374 times and the word “his” is used 5,386 times. More than 99% of the Bible's language reflecting ownership is rooted in masculine language and thus in masculine imagery. For every one time we read about something being hers in the Bible, we will read 117 references to his possessions, his attributes, his desires, in essence to his story, also known as history. How does this affect women? I pulled this data and this concept from a pamphlet called the “HERstory Toolkit”. This is from a group called WomanSpirit Reclamation, founded by Monette Chilson. And I am so excited to welcome to the podcast Monette Chilson. Thanks for being here today, Monette!
Monette Chilson: Oh, thank you, Amy. I am thrilled to be here. I am a big fan of Breaking Down Patriarchy and the work you do.
AA: Thank you so much. I should mention, too, that Monette was a contributor to season two of the podcast, so we're actually welcoming you back to Breaking Down Patriarchy. Thanks for being here again.
MC: You're welcome.
AA: As usual, I'd love to introduce you to listeners. I'll read your professional bio first, and then you can tell your own story in your own words afterwards. An excavator of our sacred feminine lineage, Monette Chilson founded WomanSpirit Reclamation to support women in navigating their awakening from patriarchal indoctrination through online courses and community. She's written and spoken about the divine feminine for the past decade, authoring Sophia Rising: Awakening Your Sacred Wisdom Through Yoga and My Name is Lilith, in addition to editing the Original Resistance: Reclaiming Lilith, Reclaiming Ourselves and developing its companion curriculum. I'm going to want you to tell us a little bit more about that, Monette, because that's just so fascinating. I have these books actually sitting on my desk. They just arrived and I'm so excited to read them. Here's Sophia Rising and here is My Name is Lilith, which is written kind of as a children's book almost, right, Monette?
MC: It is. And the illustrator is phenomenal in that book.
AA: Yeah, it looks beautiful. They just arrived, so I've been flipping through them and I'm excited to really dig in and read those. I highly recommend them to listeners. I also want to add for your bio that Monette's work has been featured in national magazines, including Yoga Journal and Integral Yoga Magazine, and in the anthologies Yoga Wisdom and Whatever Works: Feminists of Faith Speak. I love that title. So, Monette, tell us more about these books that you've written. Maybe you can start at the beginning, where you're from, your family of origin, and what brought you to be on the path that you're on today.
MC: I would love to. I am an unlikely candidate for being where I am today. I grew up in deep South Texas, near the border of Mexico, and it was a conservative part of the country. I was always a little odd. I was a vegetarian, I was enamored with yoga – although I didn't start doing it until my twenties – and I grew up in a Southern Baptist church. And I can remember meeting with the pastor before I got married and I was very clear even then, I said, “I do not want to obey and do not tell that rib story, whatever you do.” So there was something in me from the beginning that knew that what I was being taught and what was being preached from the pulpit was not aligned with the truth as I knew it. But I'm pretty persistent and competitive, so I think I spent the beginning of my life trying really hard to make myself fit into that mold. I mean, I got baptized like two times. Once as a kid, once in college thinking, “Maybe this time it'll take.” And then finally, after college, I kind of threw up my hands and said, “This is not for me. I don't know what is for me, but this is not it.” And I started practicing yoga, I think when I was 25.
The first book I wrote, Sophia Rising, is about taking what I learned as spiritual practices in yoga and trying to meld them with at least part of what I had inherited from Christianity. I wasn't ready to throw it all out. And it's been ten years since I wrote that, and I actually taught from it maybe a year ago, and it was very surreal to see my words and hear where I was then and now. So I just want to encourage your listeners, like this isn't a static process. Where you are now is not where you're going to necessarily be in a year or ten years. If you read Sophia Rising, you'll see that I was really trying very hard to make the yoga spirituality, the inner wisdom fit, and that's why I came up with Sophia. I mean, I didn't come up with Sophia, she found me. I really wanted a feminine, deep, wise voice to meld with my yoga wisdom, and when I found that and dove into who she is, that was the right message.
From there, I think somewhere in my research I uncovered something about Lilith, who I had never heard of ten years ago, and I was fascinated by Lilith from the get-go. And that book, the children's book, I wrote because I thought, what if little girls could internalize the beauty of being able to say, “No, that's not for me. I'm leaving the situation that is not respecting me. That is dangerous to me.” What if they had that from the beginning? So I wrote the children's book. And it's a very simple book that encourages and applauds little girls for using their voices, and that it's not a bad thing, it's a beautiful thing. So, that was Lilith. And I edited the anthology, which is like 80 women, I think they range in age from 18 to 80, who talk about the subversive feminine and the power of that and embracing that and how freeing it is. And that takes me to now. I spent the time writing the books, and then during the pandemic, when the world was going to our screens and Zoom, I founded WomanSpirit Reclamation. We gather in circles and we vow faithfulness to ourselves, we support each other, we bring in authors and converse with them. So that has been the last three years, is taking that wisdom off the page and into women’s lives in meaningful ways.
AA: Amazing. I actually first encountered your work when I was starting my YouTube channel and I was putting in all the search terms that I could to see what was already on YouTube. And I think whatever words I put in there led me to a video on The Girl Child & Her Long Walk to Freedom, and that was produced by WomanSpirit Reclamation, right?
MC: It was. It was produced in concert with The Girl Child & Her Long Walk to Freedom. Emily Nielsen Jones, who founded The Girl Child, has been a member of WomanSpirit Reclamation since almost the beginning. And one of our mentors who poured a lot into our community, Patricia Lynn Riley, who wrote the book that the video is based on: Eve, Our Mythic Mother: Exposing the Lies of Patriarchy. And I'm going to get into that more when we talk specifically about Eve. But there's a really critical element of the way the Eve story was told that allowed patriarchy to actually build. I don't know if it could have without that story, so Patricia has been instrumental. She wrote back in the ‘90s and I read A God Who Looks Like Me in grad school. She actually called me right before I got on the recording, and I said, “Hey, Patricia, can I call you back? I'm about to get on with Amy.” She's been instrumental in letting me carry parts of her work to a new generation.
AA: Oh, that's fantastic. That's really exciting. I didn't realize all those connections, that's so cool. For the topic of today's episode, I opened with that little nugget that was from the HERstory pamphlet.
MC: It was, but I will say that it was originally in Sophia Rising. That was my way of opening the door to people who said, “I don't think the Bible is gendered in any way.” So I pulled that out to be like, “Okay, I'm going to show you this and then we can talk.”
AA: Ah, I see. That's great. Because sometimes what actually helps is just data. It's just facts, right? Because people can dismiss your feelings, people can dismiss your interpretation of scripture, but sometimes a chart or a spreadsheet with numbers on it, sometimes that's actually what is the most compelling.
MC: It is. You can't argue with it.
“what if little girls could internalize the beauty of being able to say, “No”...”
AA: You can't argue with it. So if you have – what was it? – the word “hers” is used 46 times and the word “his” is used more than 5,300, you can't argue with that. So we opened with that as, like you said, a way of establishing what we're dealing with when we look at the Bible. This is a massively, massively lopsided account, religious text, in terms of gender. We're starting with that as our basis, but the topic of this conversation is going to be some things that counteract that narrative, right? Some things that mitigate that and that are in conversation with that, that are more empowering to women. You're going to teach us about three female or feminine archetypes that exist in the same religious tradition. Tell us who these three women are going to be and then let's launch and start talking about each one of them.
MC: I would love that. Today we're going to talk about Sophia, we're going to talk about Lilith, and we're going to talk about Eve. And I would venture to say that most viewers are super familiar with Eve and much less so the other two. But what I think is interesting about these three, that takes us outside of just a biblical interpretation, is the way that these archetype stories have been changed, which is really applicable to how women's stories and women's voices every day are changed. I want to go through those three because I think it shows this tricky nature of how sometimes it feels like our stories are just sucked away from us. I was talking to friends a few minutes ago and we were talking about how when we’re doing research, many women’s names were just erased from important research documents. Some of Jung’s people who collaborated with him, it's hard to find them because their names were erased. So these three have different ways that they were diminished.
Sophia is kind of hidden in plain sight because she's in the Bible. Now, the translations we read don't say Sophia because that's Greek. I like to say Sophia because it sounds like and it is a name and it gives an embodied image. The way it's used in a lot of the translations is “wisdom”, lowercase w, right? So you're just like, “Oh, that's wisdom. Moving along.” The best ones might capitalize “Wisdom” so you're like, “Huh, that's kind of like an entity. Interesting.” And then my favorite – not my favorite – Lady Wisdom. So she's there, but the way the translation was put in place was very much diminished. We don't get the full force of her.
And then Lilith is literally demonized. We often say that women are demonized for this or that, but Lilith’s story was taken and actually, if you Google her now, she is a demon. And she was not a demon, she was merely the first woman who stood up for herself. And for that, she was literally turned into a demon. In the last 10 years I've had people tell me that in Mexico, they still hang in the baby's nurseries, the amulets to ward off Lilith from stealing the newborn babies’ souls. So, you know, demonized.
And then Eve is the classic scapegoat for everything, the fall of the whole world, the fact that we don't live in the Garden, it's all Eve. And we'll get into that in a minute, too, but like I said, I really don't think that patriarchy would have been as successful as it has been had it not had a sacred story that people couldn't argue with, because thus saith the Lord, you know, to build it upon. So she was a scapegoat. And you can see this, and I encourage your listeners and your viewers to, when you're hearing a woman's story told through the media, just think for a minute: How is that translation happening? Are they scapegoating her or are they changing the translation a little bit? Are they making her the bad guy when really she's not?
AA: It's so important. As a historian too, to always be looking with a critical eye at the sources. Who wrote it? When did they write it? What would be the influences? Do they have a vested interest in a certain story being told in a certain way or an ulterior motive? It's so important to be a critical thinker in our sources, always. So, let's dig in a little deeper on each of these archetypes, and I'd love to start with Sophia. And you're definitely right that everybody knows who Eve is, even people who haven't been raised in religion. But even people who have, their whole lives, might not be familiar with Sophia or Lilith. Let's start with Sophia. Tell us who this person is originally, and how do we know about her?
MC: Well, Sophia is such a beautiful feminine embodiment because she really defies definition, which is kind of the flowing part of the feminine. I will read you the best description of her. Now, this is from the Wisdom of Solomon. You will not find this in most Bibles. This is my best definition of Sophia: “She is the light that shines forth from the everlasting light, the flawless mirror of the dynamism of God, and the perfect image of the Holy One's goodness. Though alone of her kind, she can do all things. Though unchanging, she renews all things. Generation after generation, she enters into holy souls and makes them friends of God and prophets. For God loves the one who finds a home in Wisdom. She is more beautiful than the sun and more magnificent than all the stars in the sky.”
We don't hear that a lot. That's not something that's going to be preached from most churches. And I just think that in that passage I just read, she's so powerful and she was with God from the beginning. But then we get this wispy airy thing and it stands in such contrast to the male archetype, who is solid and strong and an old man in a white robe and literally telling you what to do on a stone tablet. And then there's this airy fairy, Sophia Wisdom. The way I have incorporated Sophia – and the beautiful thing is that because she is so nebulous, everyone gets to do it their own way. And for me, when I was discovering yoga and figuring out that, oh my goodness, I can sit and be still and I can start to hear my inner voice, that became Sophia to me. When I have an intuition, when I have a knowing, that is Sophia. And the more we acknowledge the truth and beauty of that, the more we hear it, the louder it gets.
AA: That kind of answers the next question I was going to ask, which was, do you conceive of Sophia, and do other people, as an actual person or even an actual deity or just as an idea? It sounds like there's room for however anyone wants to interpret it, I guess.
MC: I think there's room. I don't know. I just think that so much of religion has been indoctrinating us out of listening to the god-, goddess-given, whatever-given wisdom that's in us. So it's a portal that is kind of known to people that they can reconnect with. It doesn't feel like I'm borrowing from some tradition completely outside of myself, some shamanic thing that doesn't connect to me. No. If you grew up in Christianity, Sophia is part of your heritage.
AA: Can we also talk a little bit more about historically who would have written Sophia into the sacred text in the first place, and then who wrote her out of it? Do we know any of those answers?
MC: Anytime you're dealing with oral stories that are codified, the person doing the scribing and those above them, they have an agenda. They're humans and they're in a world that needs things to work a certain way, and if it helps the cause of one male god, one male god, one male god to lowercase the W and make her seem like the crazy woman, go for it. All of the stories we're talking about today, we need to look at them as an oral story that was written down by people and there were things that they were trying to accomplish with this work.
AA: I'm curious how we know, then. How do we know, if our records aren't very clear, that this does refer to something that we can understand as a female deity, if all we have is wisdom and Lady Wisdom? How do we know that there was something?
MC: Yeah. When we talk about the Bible, we're not talking about all the sacred texts, we're talking about the ones that made the cut. And again, like the editing, they made the cut for a reason. They supported the narrative that needed to be supported. If we went back and looked at the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Book of Wisdom and all these pieces, we could amass a deeper, richer version of Sophia. I think that the problem is that the lens that is approved to look at is so small. It's what those people sitting at that table deemed went in. So it's not the full body, it's not like the Christian heritage and it’s all handed down in this beautiful flowing river. There are people creating a dam and very little of it got through.
AA: That’s a great analogy. Well, let's move on to the next one then, and you can tell us all about Lilith. I would love for you to share the story of Lilith through your book, My Name is Lilith. Could you do that for us?
MC: I would love to do that. I will read a section that explains her story. “Most people believe that the first woman on earth was Eve. But what if she wasn't? What if I told you there was one here before her? How do I know this? Because that woman was me. Once upon a time, I lived in the most beautiful garden. Perhaps you have heard of it. It was called Eden, which means paradise. And it was that, at least in the beginning. It was filled with the most exotic plants and fantastical array of animals that lived peacefully with each other and with us. Yes, us. For I was not alone, I was with Adam. Are you feeling skeptical, wondering why you have heard only of Eve, but never of me? I don't blame you. Those who came after me did quite a good job of erasing all traces of me. And what they couldn't erase, they twisted into the darkest kind of evil. And it is time for me to shed some light on that darkness. And that's where we will start, with the light.
If you've read stories from the Bible, you might remember a line near the beginning where God says, ‘Let there be light.’ Then the story goes on to tell how God made the heavens and the earth, and the water and the land, and the plants and the animals, and the people, men and women. But if you look closely, you'll see there are two different versions of the story. In that first one, man and woman are created together from the same earth. That woman was me. In the second one, woman is created after man, from one of his ribs. That woman was Eve. Eve was my replacement after I fled the garden. ‘But why would you leave paradise?’ you might ask. The truth is that I left because by staying I would surely have lost myself. Let me explain. God gave us only a few simple instructions: have children to populate our sanctuary, take care of all the plants and the animals, and eat the fruit for our nourishment and delight. There was no divine edict elevating one of us above the other. But Adam began acting as though he were in charge. He called me a helpmate, and my skin prickled. He said it was such kindness, though, that I ignored my body's knowing response. We both had so many ideas about how to care for our garden home, but I soon tired of helping to carry out his plans while he deemed mine impractical. I didn't understand why we couldn't be the joint heirs of the garden that God proclaimed us to be. Surely, there was more than enough work for us to do side by side. More than enough divine inspiration to go around.
I kept hearing God's words in my head: ‘In my image, I create you. Male and female, I create you.’ They were spoken in a parental voice that carried both mother and father within it. I knew that I would not be able to mirror God's goodness if I stayed in that place. Outwardly, I was in paradise. Inwardly, I could feel Adam's desire to control me through his love-cloaked words. I didn't want someone constantly trying to do what was best for me, I wanted a partner, an equal, who would live life with me. Maybe God knew this was coming, for I don't think much of what happens surprises God. In any case, God had given me a special word that only I knew, and called it ineffable, which means it was too sacred to speak. God gave it to me in a dream, and I knew I was only to use it if my life depended on it.
One day I woke up and I knew it did, for the truest part of me was dying. Sometimes people think that being surrounded by beautiful things, wearing fancy clothes, and living in lavish style seeps in and makes them happy inside. Let me assure you it does not. My surroundings could not have been more ideal, yet inside, my soul was crying out. I won't lie, a tear trickled down my cheek when I suddenly knew this was the end of my time in the garden. I would not miss Adam's dismissiveness, but I was sad because I was afraid I'd let God down. That the plan for men and women to live in harmony with plants and animals would be ruined once I left. Soon enough, I realized that I was not powerful enough to ruin God's plan. If humanity was not yet ready for living in harmony, God would find another way until people were ready. God is patient. If they needed to live in hierarchy rather than harmony for a while, so be it. And with that, I uttered the unutterable, still not quite sure if I said it out loud or simply as a silent offering to God, and was whisked away from the garden as if by magic. For when God works, it often feels like magic.”
“Outwardly, I was in paradise. Inwardly, I could feel Adam’s desire to control”
So Genesis One and Genesis Two, there are two versions of when men and women were created. And in the first one, God created them both from the earth simultaneously. In Genesis Two, woman was taken from the rib. And we actually have to credit our Jewish brothers and sisters for really bringing Lilith to light, because they were much more encouraged to debate and figure it out than Christianity, which was just “Follow it, believe, obey.” So when people ask them, “Wait, why this discrepancy? Which one was it?” They basically theorized that the first one was Lilith and they were made from the same soil, so she knew she was equal. She would not submit, and the whole story goes from there. She either flees the garden or is ejected, depending on which version. Then she has to be replaced, right? There has to be a woman. So then Eve is taken from the rib. That's in a nutshell.
And then from there, there are all kinds of tales. If you read Isaiah 34:14 in any Bible, it sounds like a bunch of wild animals out in the desert. It's a lot of metaphor. There are owls, hyenas, wild goats, and night creatures, but it doesn't say demons. The Aramaic Bible in plain English, this is how they translate it, which would be the reference to Lilith: “And spirits shall hold meetings in it, and an evil spirit shall be called to his fellow. There is a female night demon who is rested there, and she has found rest for herself.” So, you know, we're already busy demonizing Lilith even though we're not saying her name. And I just think that anytime you see a woman who stands up to the status quo and does something unexpected, they're showing their Lilith. In fact, we did a nine-week class – and it totally organically evolved, I didn't plan it – and we started every week by sharing “What would Lilith do?” and we'd bring up some story in the news about a woman who did something big or small just to claim her truth.
AA: Can you give us a little more detail about what the circumstances were that made Lilith run away? Was her rebellion against God, and then where did she go in the story? What happened?
MC: It wasn't really against God, it was really truly against the idea that she should be subservient.
AA: I love it. Okay, shall we move on to Eve? This is the most familiar one, but oof, this is the doozy. Like you said, I feel like this was really the foundation upon which so many patriarchal structures and systems were built and continue to be justified.
MC: Yes. I think that those of us, not even those who grew up in Christianity– it's such a cultural phenomenon. We are going to spend our lives undoing that story within us. I actually pulled from Patricia, who does such a beautiful job in her book, Eve, Our Mythic Mother, of making it relevant in that we're not just excavating this ancient story. There are remnants of that story that are impacting practical things and playing out in real time. And I wrote a few of them down because I didn't want to forget, and it's sad that I don't have to go back that far. The furthest one I go back to, because I think it's really astounding, is 2022 when Roe v. Wade was overturned. And in his brief, Justice Alito actually referenced Matthew Hale, a 17th-century jurist who did not believe that married women could be raped. He wrote all kinds of things that I won't even go into, that are built upon this notion that women are inferior, they are not to be trusted, they don't have self control, they reach for the apple. You can trace it directly back to Eve. That is happening now.
That thinking, that lineage is impacting our laws. And I know that you've been doing this fabulous series, Dear Trad Wives, and Lilith would never be a trad wife, but Eve was trying to play the game. Eve was trying to be the good girl. And I think that you addressed this in one of your videos too, the next step is a stay-at-home girlfriend. This whole idea that we are so different and so separate, taken from his rib, that we are the supporting character. And all of that is to say that this is not just an old story, it's still playing out very deeply in our lives in many ways right now.
AA: It sure is. For sure. To talk about Eve, I would love to actually let listeners and viewers see the film that you produced about Eve. Let's cue that up and listen and watch that, and then we can discuss it afterwards. Does that work?
MC: That works.
AA: Perfect.
MC: So we're going to be watching an animated short. It's 7 minutes that we co-produced with The Girl Child & Her Long Walk to Freedom. This is a follow-up to an original animation piece they did explaining patriarchy, and because Eve is such a pivotal part of that, we knew that we had to do a story explaining her. And Emily, who founded The Girl Child & Her Long Walk to Freedom, was in our Eve class taught by Patricia Lynn Reilly. We went through the book Eve, Our Mythic Mother, and Emily was so inspired that she knew we needed to do it. So Patricia and Emily and myself met with the producers, worked on the script, took pieces from the book, and brought it to life so that it's a really, really easy way for us to, in seven minutes, examine the Eve we were given and maybe what was lost in translation.
AA: Hmm. I love it. Perfect. Okay, let's watch.
MC: All right.
AA: That's wonderful. And Monette, I'll just add, for those who are listening and not watching this, that the end of the film says, “For centuries, the idea that women brought evil into the world and are cursed by God has done great harm. Let's break free from these harmful patriarchal beliefs and reclaim Eve as the mother of all living.” That's so powerful. Monette, thank you so much for sharing this with us today. I'd love to hear from you what some of the main themes of this film are and how they've affected you personally, and what you hope that listeners and viewers can get out of this.
MC: I think my own relationship to Eve has been profoundly transformed. When I was working with Lilith early on, I made this choice in my mind, which is what women have been taught to do, to pit against each other. Am I in Lilith's camp or am I in Eve's camp? When in reality, they were both manipulated for different ends. So now I don't have that break in my psyche and in my spirit anymore. Somewhere I wrote that if I had been in the garden, I would have reached for the apple too. I really respect that about Eve. There are lots of different theories other than the prevailing narrative that that was the fall of mankind. Perhaps that was actually the awakening and the enlightenment, and would we have stayed in this infantile state and not evolved at all had we not had access to that wisdom? Interestingly, we tend to think that these stories are so unique and so special and different. But the Greeks’ version of a creation story would be Pandora's box, a very similar thing. Prometheus was charged with creating man, he fell in love with them, God got mad because he was sharing the heavenly gifts with them, and as a punishment he created these women that are going to be evil but alluring. And again, the forbidden thing, it was the apple for Eve and it was the box for Pandora. She dared and she couldn't help herself. That curiosity got the best of her. She opened it and released all the evils. It's the same thing. It's another way of scapegoating everything onto women.
AA: And demonizing a woman's curiosity and making it a morality tale or a cautionary tale for women to not ask questions, which is exactly the ethos and the ideology that you need if you're going to have a patriarchal society, right? Is to say, “Little girls, listen up. If you open this box, if you reach for this fruit, if you want more knowledge about the way the world really is, then only bad can come of that.” That's exactly the fable that you would want girls to be internalizing.
MC: Exactly. Yes. I had a conversation with women today and we were talking about our sacred curiosities and how hard it is for us to follow them instead of listening to those 'should's that come down from the Eve. I should be doing this, the logical way would be to do this. And this is a work in progress for all of us. Every time I write what I call one of my ranty blog posts that has no reason, I'm not doing it to support this class or because we're talking about this in this group, no, it just comes to me and I write it. It makes no sense in the patriarchal way, but it lets something true out of me and it lets me follow a curiosity for a while. And I think that when women do that, they find something deeper than they will ever find by checking the boxes and checking the things off the lists.
AA: I'm curious, as I watch this film and again taking it in, I'm wondering what the takeaways would be for people who are still religious and devout and are theologically minded in terms of recasting this story in a different way? That's one question. The other question is, is there any application of this concept for those who aren't religious or who have left religion? What's the usefulness of having archetypes even if you don't believe in their literal truth?
““For centuries, the idea that women brought evil into the world and are cursed by God has done great harm.””
MC: I think the key first is, whether you're in or out of religion, not to believe in the literal truth because that's just not how these myths came about. They were never meant for that, they were meant to teach things. And you get to choose, to some extent, once you're not a child anymore, what they teach you. I think we've established earlier in this that there are a lot of translations, it's kind of like that old game of telephone where stories are passed around. So you can trust, whether you're in religion and you're feeling like, “Oh, my gosh, I can't do this. I'm not allowed. It might go against what I believe.” If you picture that these stories have come down in the way they have, and that your actual spiritual work now is to take them and trust that they're living stories and they will speak to you, that would be what I'd say to people in religion.
For people out of religion, especially with Eve, as we've talked about, you could have never set foot in a church and you are being impacted by that legacy. And the more that we can reclaim – not just these archetypes, there's so much for women to reclaim, but today we're talking about these archetypes – if you can begin to trust that wisdom in you, that Sophia, that is true and real. And if you can look at your female lineage and in your mind's eye go back to Eve and not see– like, I used to see this woman who messed everything up. What I like to do, what I did when I was writing My Name is Lilith, is having a meditative time. Whether you listen to music, you write, you draw, feel what it would have felt like to be in a situation without all the ways things have been interpreted, but what we actually know. With Lilith, all we knew is that there's this version, there's that version, how do we reconcile them? So, sitting in that.
With Eve, we know that she took the apple and bit it. Other than that, everything else is conjecture. And I'm laughing because I just realized that I'm wearing, you can't see it, but I'm wearing a snake goddess necklace right now that I got in Crete last year. And that's a part of the story and it almost seems like the natural truth that snakes are bad and that we should be afraid of them. It seems like, of course, I'm afraid of snakes. Let that go. Let the things that have been imposed on you go. Are you really afraid of snakes? I had my whole team up here a few weeks ago and we went hiking in the woods, and some of these people are not naturalist people, and we encountered a snake and we all just stood. Well, the New Yorkers stood further away.
AA: Haha!
MC: But the rest of us stood and watched the snake like, “Oh, what do you have to teach us? How interesting.” Come at it with, ironically, curiosity. Curiosity is not bad. What is a snake really? When I was in Crete, I did a lot of learning about the early snake goddesses, and the roles that snakes had were so different. So many of the symbols – like crows now, I've been reading a lot of Lucy Pearce's work about crow wisdom – these things that are told to us to be a certain way, the vast majority of that is interpretation. And you get to take it apart and you can love crows and you can love snakes, and you can reclaim these symbols of the feminine that are yours.
AA: I love it. That's wonderful. Well, I've learned so much and I'm so grateful for this conversation, Monette. I'm wondering if there are any last takeaways that you want to leave with listeners and viewers.
MC: I think that the one thing that I learned from all these archetypes is to trust yourself and follow your curiosities. They are good. Like we say when we do apple communions in our community, we take it and we bite it. “You are good. You are very good.” Because for so long, women have been told, “You are bad” or “You are a supporting character. You are not important.” You can do your own, again, this is not like, “Oh, it's not done this way in church.” You can go get an apple out of your fruit bowl, tell yourself you're good, take a bite, and celebrate your curiosity and go on with your day. There are little ways that we can bring our rebel spirit and reclaim what was taken in the translation of these stories.
AA: It's fantastic. It’s a reminder, too, that any ritual, any sacred rite that we've ever practiced– well, sacred or not. I'm about to go to my daughter's high school graduation. All of the caps and the gowns and moving the tassel from one side to the other, somebody made that up at some point, so we're free to make up our own, right?
MC: Yes. Empower yourself to create your own rituals and they will be so very meaningful. Yes.
AA: Fantastic. I'm going to do that apple one, I'm going to do that as my ritual. Well, Monette Chilson, thank you again. Thank you for your work, thank you for your books, thank you for this film, and thank you for this episode today. I so enjoyed having you.
MC: I really enjoyed being here, Amy. Thank you.
