Amazon Archetype

why does the girl-anima-princess need the amazon belt? And why does Hera constellate the fight? This Admete, the princess, was a priestess of Hera. We have yet to work out something on Hera and the amazons.

Hillman’s unpublished correspondence poses the Amazon archetype as an unresolved riddle linking the anima-princess, the girdle as psychic object, and Hera’s role in provoking conflict — signaling the archetype’s theoretical incompleteness within archetypal psychology.

Russell, Dick, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023thesis

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Lorde’s rhetorical question about the Amazons of Dahomey convinces readers of her self-change because this change is not new but represents a recollection. Lorde has become what she always has been, but empowered by the full knowledge and the now embodied scars of that identity.

Frank argues that Lorde mobilizes the Dahomey Amazon as an archetypal metaphor of recollection rather than invention, rendering post-mastectomy self-transformation an epiphanic return to an already-present identity.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis

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The Amazon Penthesileia, the daughter of the war god Ares, newly arrived to help the Trojans, is slain by Achilleus.

Lattimore situates Penthesileia within the Trojan cycle as an archetypal warrior-woman whose defeat by Achilles positions the Amazon as a mythological foil to the masculine hero-archetype.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011supporting

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the polytheism that acknowledged the soul in nature was eliminated by the assimilation of Orpheus into Christ… which may be new to Christ but where nature gods similar to Pan and Orpheus have always been present.

Though treating Orpheus rather than the Amazon directly, Hillman’s lament over the erasure of polytheistic figures contextualizes the broader loss of autonomous feminine and martial archetypes within Western religious history.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007aside

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