Serving the Goddess of Endometriosis: Transforming Loss and Suffering Through the Mythology of Medusa

Abstract

This dissertation explores links between stories and well-being or dis-ease. Focusing on the symbolic meaning of the experience of endometriosis, the project develops a mythopoesis of feminine creative and destructive power as expressed through the mythology of Medusa and the text of an afflicted body. The study employs a hermeneutic phenomenology—an interpretation of experience validating mythopoesis, embodied experience, and imaginal realms as legitimate ways of knowing—and conceptualizes reality as teleological complex systems that move into and out of harmony, and healing as the emergence of harmony through reconciliation and integration. The work is interdisciplinary, incorporating psyche, soma, and relationship; facilitating meaning-making and incubating stories that transcend victimhood and create psycho-spiritual resilience and healing.

Mythographic schools influencing the project include depth/archetypal psychology, archeomythology, and feminist critique. Insights from neurobiology, reproductive science, and narrative formation are utilized. Methods of depth/archetypal psychology interact with psycho-physiological approaches from the fields of attachment, interpersonal neurobiology, trauma theory, ritual, and shamanic traditions.

The study concludes that menstrual taboos are a subset of Evil Eye superstitions, which demonize and shame female bodies and psyches. Embodied misogyny emerges as a psychoid phenomenon expressed in disturbances of menstruation and issues of feminine identity in response to patriarchal scorn and appetite toward body/matter. Symbolically, endometriosis is recognized as a mask of embodied misogyny, rather than as Medusa’s archetypal essence.

Medusa’s sacred nature is reclaimed with a critical nuance: She must be held in the heart’s field of transpersonal love as exemplified by Athene’s Gorgoneion aegis. Medusa’s restoration reveals wisdom and compassion dependent upon acceptance of all of creation. Attitudes of reverence toward the chthonic feminine, equanimous playfulness, and blithe curiosity are prescribed as antidotes to petrifying perfectionism resulting from the dread of shame before Medusa as the Evil Eye.
Mythopoetic “re-storying” proves efficacious for transforming suffering into psycho-spiritually functional patterns of response. By personifying the disease experience as Medusan, pathology is rendered sacred. By contemplating what it means to be human in embodied relationship with the divine, the study provides a psycho-spiritual model of healing for those living with chronic illness.