Athena

Athena (Ἀθηνᾶ, Roman Minerva) is the Olympian goddess of wisdom, of skilled craft, of strategic warfare, of the civic order — the goddess born from the head of Zeus after he swallowed her mother Metis, and so the figure in whom metis (cunning intelligence) and nous (governing mind) are joined. In the archetypal reading she is the configuration of psyche in which the thinking function has been integrated with practical-cunning intelligence and placed at the service of the civic whole.

Her sacred city is Athens; her sacred olive the gift by which she won the city from Poseidon; her sacred bird the owl of wisdom; her aegis the shield bearing the head of Medusa, which is to say the containment of chthonic terror at the service of ordered consciousness. In the [[aeschylus-oresteia|Oresteia]] she presides over the trial of Orestes and the transformation of the Furies into the Eumenides — the canonical Greek figure of the integration of the archaic affective order into the rational civic order. The Jungian lineage reads her as a figure of the feminine that stands outside the mother-daughter axis and in direct relation to the father principle.

Relationships

• olympian-pantheon
• metis
• aeschylus-oresteia