Maureen Murdock - The Heroines Journey: Womans Quest for Wholeness

Though the book is rich with examples drawn from myths and Jungian psychology, it is surprisingly easy to read. The journey requires serious, often frightening, wandering before ones true identity and power are known. Like the journey Murdock describes, there are no cheap, easy lessons. There are many rich, rewarding lessons, but these are gained only through integrity, courage, and the willingness to meet challenge with all the resources one can muster.

Creation

Murdocks personal journey will surely speak to many women, but I hope also to those men willing to hear these newly awakened female voicesand of the feminine in their own souls.

Utne Reader

Combining personal experience and painstaking erudition, Maureen Murdocks The Heroines Journey shares with us the essence of the female journey. A fine, warm, and insightful book.

Carol Pearson, author of The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By

The Heroines Journey offers a map of the feminine healing process. Murdock writes in a clear and compassionate voice which draws inspiration from her experiences as a mother, artist, and therapist and from the collective wisdom of the community of women on the path of the goddess. This book speaks to each woman who longs for a spiritually alive feminine self, one who is actively engaged in the world, and who embraces the masculine principle as a mirror of herself. The Heroines Journey guides the reader in reweaving the threads of her life story into a mantle of empowerment for herself, for other women, and for Gaia, the Planet Herself.

Patrice Wynne, author of The Womanspirit Sourcebook and cofounder of the Gaia Bookstore and Catalogue Company

Maureen Murdocks important book on the heroines journey contains a wealth of insight that is of great value to contemporary Western women. It explores a rich territory of the feminine psyche and opens an understanding of female development that relates not only to personal transformation but cultural transformation as well.

Joan Halifax, President of the Ojai Foundation

A great roadmap for the changing landscapes of womens lives. Its assuring, rich in personal stories, and leads us securely to the Goddess.

Z. Budapest, author of The Holy Book of Womens Mysteries and The Grandmother of Time

ABOUT THE BOOK

This book describes contemporary womans search for wholeness in a society in which she has been defined according to masculine values. Drawing upon cultural myths and fairy tales, ancient symbols and goddesses, and the dreams of contemporary women, Murdock illustrates the need forand the reality offeminine values in Western culture today.

MAUREEN MURDOCK is a licensed family therapist in private practice in Venice, California, and teaches in the UCLA Extension Writers Program. She is also the internationally published author of Spinning Inward and Fathers Daughters .

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THE HEROINES JOURNEY

Maureen Murdock

Shambhala

Boston & London

2013

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

1990 by Maureen Murdock

Cover art: Conversation at the Wall (1950) by Wolfgang Hutter. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Murdock, Maureen.

The heroines journey/Maureen Murdock1st ed.

p. cm.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2834-6

ISBN 978-0-87773-485-7 (alk. paper)

1. WomenPsychology. 2. Femininity (Psychology). 3. Sex role. I. Title.

To my mother and my daughter

Contents

The Heroines Journey is the work of many women with whom I have cojourneyed. Id like to express my appreciation in particular to the women in my womens groups over the past twelve years. We have gone through all the stages of the journey together, functioning as allies, ogres, co-wanderers, healers, and finally becoming a cackling council of crones.

I learned about the subtle differences between the male and female quest from the participants in my workshops and classes on the hero/heroines journey. My thanks in particular to those men and women whose quest it was to heal their feminine wound. I am grateful for the opportunity to have shared the journeys of the women I led on vision quest, women in therapy, my women friends, and the women in my family. I am especially grateful to those women who have generously allowed me to retell their dreams and stories in this book.

One woman in particular has been my guide in allowing me to release my reliance on the old heroic model and in helping me heal my own mother/daughter split: to Gilda Frantz I offer my deepest thanks for being there and for encouraging the process of my creative journey.

My thanks to the people whom I interviewed during the preparation of this book: to Joseph Campbell who was there at the beginning and to the women artists and poets whose work deeply expresses their commitment to reclaiming the power and beauty of the feminine. Thanks also to the Impossible Women group with whom I first shared my diagram of the heroines journey.

Several people have assisted me in preparing this manuscript: my daughter, Heather, who functioned as my assistant with research, footnotes, editing, and general good cheer; Jeffrey Herring, who tracked down permissions; and my husband, Lucien Wulsin, my Man with Heart, who has always encouraged my journey and has been there as fair witness to my descents. The staff at the Jung Library in Los Angeles have given of their time and assistance generously, and Martha Walford has shared her slides of ancient goddess artifacts, while Sandra Stafford has drawn the illustrations.

I am especially grateful to my editor, Emily Hilburn Sell, at Shambhala Publications, with whom I shared many laughs during the final preparation of this book. I appreciated her humor, down-to-earth wisdom, and initial enthusiasm about this project. Id like to acknowledge the spiritual assistance I have consistently received from the Great Mother during the unraveling of this heroines quest. Her image sits on my computer in many guises: my thanks to Mother Bear, Kwan Yin, Mari-Aphrodite, Nut, and Mahuea. Finally, thanks to the women of my woman line for their Celtic strength, songs, storytelling, and devotion to the unseen realms.

There is a void felt these days by women and menwho suspect that their feminine nature, like Persephone, has gone to hell. Wherever there is such a void, such a gap or wound agape, healing must be sought in the blood of the wound itself. It is another of the old alchemical truths that no solution should be made except in its own blood. So the female void cannot be cured by conjunction with the male, but rather by an internal conjunction, by an integration of its own parts, by a remembering or a putting back together of the mother-daughter body.

Nor Hall, The Moon and the Virgin

Working as a therapist with women, particularly between the ages of thirty and fifty, I have heard a resounding cry of dissatisfaction with the successes won in the marketplace. This dissatisfaction is described as a sense of sterility, emptiness, and dismemberment, even a sense of betrayal. These women have embraced the stereotypical male heroic journey and have attained academic, artistic, or financial success; yet for many the question remains, What is all of this for?