Who’s Living in Your House?
The Greek goddesses aren't mythology; they're our operating system. And they might just be the force driving you to Sephora. It’s time to meet them.
I wanted to be an Athena.
By which I mean I wanted to be smart rather than sensitive, rational rather than reactive, competent in ways that were legible and respected. I had decided, somewhere along the way, that I would be the opposite of too much, that I would be precise and contained and intellectual, which is a very Athena solution to a very human problem, and also, it turns out, one that doesn’t quite work in isolation. Even as I was a thinker, I am also a major feeler. I love beauty, clothes, and cosmetics. I love horses and dogs and trees and nature. But the identity I clung to and identified with was Athena, and that came with some problems.
If you have read my previous articles Dressed to Repress or The Closet Keeps the Score, none of this will surprise you, and you may in fact be ahead of me, which is a slightly embarrassing thing to admit about one’s own psychological journey, but here we are. For everyone else, the Athena identification ran deep, and it left some notable wreckage, including a good amount of denial.
Which brings us to the part of the story that involves a truly unreasonable amount of skincare.
Aphrodite was never the problem; I knew her—not directly, but in my actions. I love beauty and art and skincare and clothes with a devotion that was, in retrospect, a fairly significant clue. I am an art snob (I make no apologies, ask my husband), and I have extremely strong feelings about fragrance and a relationship with moisturizers and serums that could generously be described as committed, though some might describe my altar of creams in a more diagnostic light. Aphrodite was not absent from my life. She was present, she was active, and she had, it turns out, a Sephora loyalty card in my name.
What I did was subtler than exiling her; I ranked her as less than. Somewhere underneath the surface of a life that included a genuine love of beautiful things, I had decided that beauty was inferior to intellect. I decided that Aphrodite was a lesser goddess, and that the women who took her seriously were perhaps not taking themselves seriously enough. I could love a good cream and still privately believe that the real work happened in the mind. Athena was the one I aspired to. Aphrodite was fine; she could stay, but she was not the point. She was not, to use a word she would find deeply offensive, serious. (I am writing this and metaphorically waiting for the thunderbolts to strike me.)
Aphrodite noticed, and I don’t think she appreciated the condescension, which seems reasonable given that goddesses predate us by several thousand years and have watched empires rise and fall while we were busy deciding which of them counted. When you welcome someone into the house but quietly communicate that her contributions are decorative rather than essential, she does not simply accept this arrangement gracefully. She finds the places where the boundary is softest and she presses. In my case, the boundary was softest at the point of purchase. I had given her beauty but not depth, surfaces but not meaning, the cream but not the ritual, the object but not the full aliveness she was actually asking for, so she kept asking in the only register I had left her, which was the register of more: more products, more refinement, more perfectly curated objects that each promised, faintly, to be the thing that finally felt like enough.
I am a VIB Rouge at Sephora. For those unfamiliar, VIB Rouge is the loyalty tier you reach after spending enough money on skincare and cosmetics that the company formally acknowledges your dedication with a red card, discounts twice a year, and a level of recognition that suggests someone somewhere is mildly concerned about you. I had the card and a collection of creams that would have made Aphrodite blush (and I am not talking about the YSL or Patrick Ta blushes that live in my makeup drawer), not because she would have been scandalized but because she would have recognized herself in it and known exactly what it meant: a woman who loved beauty but didn’t fully believe she deserved to, routing that love through acquisition because acquisition felt more defensible than simply letting beauty matter. Every time I went to check out, I was mildly afraid that the moment they scanned my points, confetti was going to fall from the ceiling and someone was going to hand me a trophy and ask me to say a few words.
To her credit, Aphrodite was working with what she had. My La Mer skincare collection was not an accident. Aphrodite was born from sea foam, which means a cream whose entire founding mythology is the ocean, whose very name is the sea, is something I imagine she appreciated. I like to believe she appreciated the gesture. She would like us to know that an overpriced moisturizer, however symbolically resonant, is not the same thing as a real relationship with her, and she has been patiently sitting on her clamshell waiting for me to figure that out.
What Aphrodite actually wanted was not more skincare products but for me to stop treating beauty as vanity, as decoration, as the lesser pursuit of women who hadn’t found something more serious to do with their time. What she wanted was for me to value my love of aesthetics with the same seriousness I gave to ideas, to stop apologizing for the part of me that finds a well-decorated room or a particular quality of afternoon light genuinely moving, to understand that the capacity to perceive and be affected by beauty is not a weakness in an otherwise intellectual life but an intelligence of its own. What she wanted, in other words, was exactly what my writing is about: the marriage of Athena’s thinking with Persephone’s depths and Aphrodite’s insistence that beauty is not a distraction from the meaningful life but one of its primary languages. Not the cream instead of the idea; the cream and the idea and the willingness to take both seriously, because they are both, it turns out, trying to tell you ( or, rather, me) something true.
The ranking was my problem. If I had taken Aphrodite as seriously as I took Athena, I might have found her in more meaningful places: in the way I moved through the world, in the attention I paid to what was lovely, in a relationship with my own body that was something other than instrumental. She was never asking me to stop thinking; she was asking me to stop thinking she was less. I still love a good cream, for the record, and I have made my peace with that, but now I know who I’m shopping with. The goddesses you condescend to don’t leave; they just keep showing up in the places where your defenses are thinnest, trying to make the point you refused to hear the first time.
This is what they do when you don’t fully know them, and this is why I am writing this (and for the record, I am not just writing this for you, I am reminding myself too).
You have done the work, maybe gone to therapy, read the books, done the meditations, and something is still running that you haven’t named yet. What if that’s not pathology? What if it’s not your mother, or not only your mother, and not a wound to be healed or a pattern to be broken or a diagnosis to be managed into something quieter and more convenient? What if some of it is just her: a goddess, running on her original programming, doing exactly what she was built to do, and asking not to be fixed but to be known.
Imagine you came home one day to find that your house, the one you live in, the one you pay the mortgage on, had other people in it. Not intruders exactly, but more like permanent residents who had been there since before you arrived and had no intention of leaving. Nine of them, and you didn’t know any of them. You’d never been introduced, and they didn’t sign a lease. Nobody had ever walked you through the house and said: This one needs sky or she gets impossible. Or, this one needs beauty the way other people need air, and if you keep asking her to live without it, she will find it one way or another, usually on your credit card, occasionally in the arms of someone entirely unsuitable.
These residents had been involved in your major decisions in ways you couldn’t see. Who you married. Who you left. The career you built and the one you walked away from, asking who said I wanted this? The city you moved to on an instinct you couldn’t explain to anyone, including yourself, and the one you stayed in too long for reasons that made even less sense on the way out. The dress you bought that you’ve worn exactly once but cannot give away, because giving it away would mean admitting something you’re not ready to admit. The relationship you blew up, not because anything was wrong but because something in you needed the blast, needed to feel, even destructively, that you were still capable of want.
You thought you were deciding, and you were, technically, in the way that someone is technically driving when they’re asleep at the wheel. You had the illusion of driving the but someone else had the wheel. And the reason you didn’t know, the reason none of us know until we do, is that the introduction never happened.
You probably met them once, actually, likely in eighth-grade English class. Greek gods and godessed with unpronounceable names, family trees that made the Maury Povich show look like the Waltons (for those of you too young to remember, the Waltons were the gold standard of wholesome family values), a disproportionate number of people being turned into animals or trees, and at least one incident involving a swan that your teacher described with a straight face that deserves its own mythology. These stories were delivered in a tone that made clear they were just that: ancient fictions you needed to memorize to pass the test. And somewhere in the multiple-choice test that asked you to match the god to his domain and moved on, you absorbed the idea that a myth is a lie, a story primitive people told before they had science.
Your English teacher may have meant well, but they were wrong.
Unlike what Mr. Capp, your homeroom English teacher, may have implied, a myth is not a primitive attempt to explain the weather before meteorology existed. That is the condescending version that lets us feel superior to the people who told these stories, which is a remarkable amount of condescension to direct at a civilization that also gave us democracy, philosophy, algebra, and the foundations of Western literature, but there we are. The Greeks were not confused; they were onto something. They named Aphrodite not to explain thunder but to name something far more powerful: a force that arrived uninvited, made plans, and made otherwise intelligent people do things they couldn’t explain the next morning. Rather than asking why you got a tattoo of Venus( aka Aphrodite) on a shell on your forearm (tequila, you answer weakly), consider that the Greeks needed a word big enough to contain the forces of human psychology, a science that didn’t yet exist, and Aphrodite was that word.
You learned her name in eighth grade, filed her under fiction, and moved on to reading To Kill a Mockingbird. She did not move on—she moved in, unpacked, and has been rearranging your furniture ever since: your desires, your impulses, your inexplicable yeses and your equally inexplicable nos, while you have been walking into the moved furniture in the dark for years, wondering why you keep stubbing the same metaphorical toe.
They all did this, the goddesses. They moved in, unpacked, made themselves at home in the structure of your wanting and your fearing, and have been operating there ever since with or without your awareness, your permission, or your belief. They are not waiting for you to believe in them, any more than gravity waits for you to believe in it before it has opinions about your footing. The question was never whether they were there. The question was whether you knew it.
This is where Carl Jung comes in. Jung was the father of Analytical psychology and the first major psychological theorist who took the gods and goddesses seriously. Freud, for the record, began and ended with Oedipus, who isn’t even a god. Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who spent the better part of the twentieth century mapping the interior of the human mind, and what he found beneath the layer of personal experience, beneath your specific memories and wounds and the idiosyncrasies of your childhood, was something older and universal: patterns that appeared everywhere. The same figures, the same stories, and the same emotional structures showed up in the dreams of his patients in Zurich and in the myths of cultures that had never met and in the art of civilizations separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles.
Jung called these patterns archetypes. But to explain where they live, he needed a new concept, one that would become one of the most important ideas in the history of psychology( if you ask me). He called it the collective unconscious.
Most of us are familiar with the personal unconscious, the layer of the mind below conscious awareness that holds our repressed memories, private fears, and the particular emotional residue of our individual lives. This is much of what is addressed in therapy. This is where your attachment style lives, and your mother wound, and the belief you formed at age seven that you were too much or not enough. The personal unconscious is yours alone, shaped by the specific circumstances of your specific life.
The collective unconscious is something else. It is the layer beneath that, deeper than personal history, deeper than individual memory, a vast shared reservoir of human experience that belongs not to you personally but to all of us, to the species itself. Jung argued that this layer of the psyche is not acquired through experience but inherited, the way you inherit the structure of your nervous system or the capacity for language. You are born with it already installed. And living in it, like permanent residents in a very old house, are the archetypes: primordial patterns of human experience that have been accumulating for as long as there have been humans to experience them.
The goddesses are archetypes. They are not individual characters from old stories; they are patterns of psychic energy so ancient and so fundamental that every culture, in every century, independently found its own way to personify them, because they needed names for forces that were simply too real and too powerful to leave unnamed. When you feel the pull toward solitude that makes no rational sense given your life, that is not a quirk of your personality. It is Artemis, and she has been shaping human experience since before the Greeks gave her a name (the Romans also named them—just different names with the same energies. In Roman myths, Artemis is Diana). When you feel the hunger for beauty that no amount of acquisition can satisfy, that is not a character flaw. It is Aphrodite, running on programming that is older than civilization. The collective unconscious is where they live. It is in your life, and not Mount Olympus, that they show up.
The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, looked at this same thing in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces—the one George Lucas credited as a framework for Star Wars. Campbell showed that across every culture and century, humans keep telling the same stories over and over. Not because they’re obsessed with ancient history, but because these stories are actually about us. They are maps of the human experience, and goddesses are alive and well in the psyche, including yours, and including right now, whether or not you’ve thought about Greek mythology since the eighth grade.
James Hillman, the founder of Archetypal Psychology, who took Jung’s work and pushed it somewhere the psychiatric establishment did not enjoy, went further still. He argued that the goddesses are not metaphors or symbols to be decoded and filed away, not a poetic way of saying “I was feeling impulsive” or “I needed some alone time”. He saw them as psychic forces with their own personalities, their own demands, their own ideas about how a life should be lived, and he argued that they require not management but relationship.
What Hillman argued is that most of what we call neurosis, suffering without an obvious external cause, is a god or goddess who has not been met. The treatment is not to eliminate the force but to enter into a relationship with it, to stop asking what is wrong with me and start asking which goddess is speaking and what she needs. This is a reframe with consequences, and one we can only make if we know who is living with us.
Aphrodite, whatever my behavior may have suggested, is not a shopping addiction. She is a demand for beauty and aliveness that has found the only outlet available to her when we refuse to prize beauty as important. Artemis is not social anxiety; she is a genuine need for solitude and sovereignty that the modern world has no legitimate container for, which is why she keeps manufacturing her own. Persephone is not depression; she is the soul’s periodic need to descend, to go somewhere dark and necessary, and return with something that cannot be found in the light.
Naming these forces is the beginning of working with them. You cannot negotiate with something you cannot see, and Jung knew this, which is why he eventually picked up a chisel and carved a Latin phrase above his front door. Vocatus atque non vocatus, deus aderit. Called or not called, the gods will be present. This was not decorative, not the Live Laugh Love plaque we bought at HomeGoods and forgot about the message within a week. This was a man with fifty years of expertise in the architecture of the psyche, and he developed the idea of the Collective Unconscious, and even he needed to remind himself every single morning of this truth. Jung found this idea important enough to put it in stone, so he wouldn’t forget. And, if the founder of analytical psychology needed a reminder chiseled above his front door, the rest of us might want to write something on a post-it note at a minimum. I am currently considering whether chiseled goddess signs might be a viable side hustle, but I digress.
This series is the introduction you never got in 8th grade or likely in therapy.
Nine goddesses, so there will be nine essays. For each one, I will cover her story and the clues she may be leaving in your life, the places she has been living without a formal invitation. But we will also go further, because knowing who lives in your house is only useful if you know what to do with them. For each goddess, we will look at what it means to be in a relationship with her, and we will look at what she does when you are not: the specific flavors of chaos, compulsion, and longing that each goddess produces when she has been ignored long enough to get creative about it. Because they do get creative, and their creativity, unmet, has a way of looking a great deal like the patterns you most want to evict.
Here is a quick introduction to the pantheon of some of the goddesses who share your three-bedroom, two-bath condo, or at least your psyche:
Aphrodite: the part of you that requires beauty, desire, and aliveness, and will find them one way or another, whether you sanction it or not.
Athena: the strategic thinker who builds things, earns respect in rooms that were not designed for her, and occasionally forgets she has a body.
Artemis: the part of you that needs to be alone in the woods, answers to no one, and has been booking solo trips and needing more space than anyone around her seems to think is reasonable.
Hera: the part of you that understands the sacredness of commitment and the architecture of institutions, and will hold the container long past the point where anyone else would have put it down.
Demeter: the part of you that mothers, that feeds people and grows things, cannot rest until everyone is taken care of, and goes completely feral when something she loves is taken from her. She is Mother Earth in Greek myth form.
Persephone: the part of you that gets pulled into the underworld periodically, knows the dark better than she’d like to admit, and returns changed in ways she couldn’t have predicted.
Hestia: the part of you that tends the hearth, craves simplicity and sanctuary, and has been quietly keeping everything lit while everyone else gets the mythology. There is no place like home for Hestia.
Hecate: the part of you that lives at the crossroads, sees what others can’t or won’t, and appears reliably at every threshold moment: the endings, the beginnings, the 3 am when you finally admit you already know what you need to do.
Psyche: the part of you that loves something larger than herself, loses it by looking too closely, descends into darkness to get it back, and returns not unbroken but transformed, which is the only kind of wholeness that actually holds.
By the end of this series, I am sorry to say that you will not have found your one true self. There is no single true self to find; that is a story the self-help industry has been selling us for over fifty years, and it is, with all due respect, wrong. What you will have instead is something more useful: a full introduction to all the goddesses who live in your house and clues to whether or not you know them. You will learn what they need, what they’re asking for, what they’ve been trying to tell you in the only language available to them, your impulses, your obsessions, your desires, your feed, your wardrobe, your shopping cart, your 3 am decisions, for your entire life.
Some of them you’ll recognize immediately, and some will surprise you. However, the one you are most tempted to skip and poo-poo, the one that produces that specific feeling of dismissal or discomfort, is almost certainly the one you most need to meet.
You have been living with all of them your entire life. It is time to learn their names.
Up first in our series of meetings will be Aphrodite. She’d like a quick word with you about your bathroom shelf, your Instagram saves, and that dress you bought for a life you haven’t lived yet. She is scheduled to visit soon on my Substack, though, true to form, she hasn’t given me an exact arrival time. Please subscribe now so you don’t miss her.
If you want to go deeper into any of the ideas in this essay, start here:
Goddesses in Everywoman by Jean Shinoda Bolen. The most accessible introduction to the goddesses as psychological archetypes.
The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock. A direct response to Campbell that centers the feminine experience.
If you want to go further into the theoretical foundations:
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by C.G. Jung Dense but worth it. The introduction alone will rearrange some furniture.
Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman. The book argued that the gods are not metaphors and that the psyche is genuinely polytheistic.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. The book that shows the same myths show up in every culture and century, without exception.
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Aphrodite gets a bad rap as being narcissism incarnate, but she's also the goddess who loves love. There's a sweet matchmaker side to her, perhaps the counterpoint to being married off to an ugly man who crafts beautiful things.