Bride of Achilles - The Heroine's Journey

I would like to refer back to The Pansophy Secret Behind Western Initiation in which Samuel Robinson discussed the hero's loss of his phallic symbol and its restoration by the goddess. My question is : What if the hero is a heroine instead ? She has no phallus to lose, though she could be (re-)united with one in the form of a god.

To be clear, my purpose here is not to dispute the pansophic view of universal western initiation, which I don't disagree with. Rather, I wish to propose a complementary symbolic scheme which I think also relates back to mythic precedent.

The basic Rose-Croix image can be seen as symbolic of the union between masculine and feminine, and we have in Christianity, for example, St. Teresa of Avila and her desire to be pierced by the arrow of God's love. But what of older civilizations that have informed the western tradition ? I believe the concept does ultimately derive from them, though it was often the case that such stories were told from the point of view of masculine desire (and abduction/rape of the object of that desire) rather than from the perspective of the feminine desire to be taken.

First we have the myth of Persephone, apparently a key figure in the Eleusian mysteries. She is abducted by Hades (or runs off with him to become the queen of the underworld?) thus passing into death and being reborn in new life, both in the form of the Earth's fertility and, in some versions, giving birth to divine offspring. There is also the example of Helen of Troy, abducted by or running off with Paris, suffering "death" at the hands of Orestes and Elektra, but in fact taken up by Apollo to dwell in the heavens. Then we have the story of Iphigenia, who goes to her supposed wedding only to face immolation at the hands of her father (Elektra complex, anyone?) but who is miraculously saved from death to be transformed into a goddess or into the bride of alpha male Achilles in the afterlife.

For me, these stories illustrate the concept of a Heroine's Journey, of a seeker who doesn't start her path missing a link to the feminine and needing to be made whole by it, but rather the opposite.

The examples are not limited to ancient Greece, either. In Egyptian lore we can look at a goddess like Sekhmet, a destructive "lost soul" who's knocked out for three days, after which she achieves reintegration with the divine realm when she wakes and falls in love with a creator god. It's known that Sekhmet's journey was celebrated with temple rites and associated with healing magic.

In ancient times, women had their own mystery schools, presumably designed for and according to their own inner journeys. The Bacchae would go up into the hills and do whatever it is they did, with a strict "no boys allowed" policy. In the Christian era, self-initiation became virtually the only path open to female esoterics, buoyed on the back of a convent education or simply by local folklore.

In the modern age, some women have gravitated back toward a segregated paradigm centered on communing with their own femininity, while others have embraced a more gender-inclusive mysticism, but one originally engineered by men for the purpose of reaffirming goddess-knowledge as part of the path to salvation. The pursuit of reintegration through a Christ figure who has not been desexed has not, to my knowledge, been a focus of widespread attention, but it's one I've long felt an attraction to, and I hope this post has shed some light on it.