I’m going to say up front that while the maiden/mother/crone archetype has its applications in mythology, I am a bit jealous that the men get “to do” archetypes in Wicca while women get “to be” archetypes.1 As a woman who is definitely too old for the maiden phase, who expressly refuses to bear children and who is far from menopause, I feel vaguely excluded – or like I’m being pressured to get knocked up, and that I won’t have “value” or be “part of the club” unless I do. (This requirement for membership makes it less appealing, not moreso, at least to me.)
Men get certain things like “hunter” and “sage” although “father” and “wise old man” work their ways in somewhere. But women seem to be classified solely by their fertility except in the rare cases of traditions that include “priestess” and “warrioress.” What would be the word for a woman who is fertile, but refuses? Not a Lilith, because she didn’t refuse – oh no, she really didn’t.
Not a maiden. Maidens are considered chaste; refusal includes to some extent sex, or at least intimates an absence of sexual experience.
I’m tempted to draw from a modern archetype, such as Greta Garbo, just because children were not something sexually active women really had a choice about until the advent of birth control. A woman who clearly enjoyed her life in a constructive manner, and left a powerful legacy that involved creations other than children. I like that – a Garbo. All the same I’ll search for some mythological term, but she’s who I’ll have in mind.
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