Stories have power. The stories we tell ourselves shape our world. They shape what we honor, what we seek, and what we believe it means to live a good life. When a civilization forgets its stories, or replaces them with flatter, smaller ones, or even good stories that are the wrong stories, it forgets itself.
Once, women knew a different story about who they were. It was not a tale of rivalry or conquest, but of descent, endurance, and transformation. It began, as truth often does, with pain.
Long ago, a mortal girl named Psyche was so beautiful that men worshiped her as a goddess. Enraged by this rivalry, Aphrodite sent her son Eros to punish the girl, but he fell in love instead. Psyche was carried to a hidden palace where unseen hands served her, and a gentle, invisible husband came to her each night. She was happy until her jealous sisters whispered that love without proof must be a lie.
So Psyche lit a lamp to see the face of her beloved. A drop of oil fell upon his shoulder, waking him, and he vanished. Her palace dissolved into air. Cast out into the wilderness, Psyche wandered the earth, begging even her enemies for mercy. Aphrodite set her impossible tasks: to sort a mountain of seeds by dawn, to gather golden wool from rams that would kill her, to descend into the underworld and return with a box containing the beauty of death itself.
She endured hunger, humiliation, and despair. Each task broke her pride a little more, until all that remained was endurance and love. And in that humility, she was transformed. Eros found her again, and the gods made her immortal, the soul restored through suffering.
Today’s Psyche never descends. She has the degree, the promotion, the apartment with perfect lighting. She is competent, respected, self-sufficient — and quietly hollow. She has avoided dependence, pain, and surrender so thoroughly that she no longer knows what joy feels like. At night, she scrolls through curated lives and wonders why success tastes like ash. She doesn't understand why, with all her friends, she is so lonely.
The ancients knew that the soul must descend before it can rise. That descent and return, the Heroine’s Journey, was once understood as the natural pattern of a woman’s life: the movement through loss, endurance, faith, and renewal that gave her strength and wisdom. Feminism forgot that truth and told women to live a different way. And in trading one pattern for the other, many women have gained autonomy but lost fulfillment, power but not peace.
What Feminism Promised: The Hero’s Journey in Disguise
When second-wave feminism took root, it did not invent a new story for women. It simply borrowed the man’s. The Hero’s Journey, that mythic pattern of departure, conquest, and return, became the blueprint for a woman’s “liberation.” She would no longer serve, nurture, or reconcile; she would leave home, slay the dragon, and claim her freedom.
That pattern has power, but it is not the feminine pattern. The Hero fights chaos to build order. His task is to civilize the wilderness, to master the material, to bring fire back to the tribe. His growth comes through action and conquest.
The Heroine’s Journey, by contrast, begins when the world’s structures have already hardened. Her task is not to conquer but to restore, to heal the fracture between seen and unseen, self and soul, heaven and earth. Her victory is reconciliation, not domination. She doesn’t bring back fire; she rekindles it where it has gone cold. She bears the young, nurturing them with the stories that teach courage and mercy long before the world tests them. She keeps the hearth that civilization returns to when the battle is done. And when the Hero comes home, wounded, weary, and uncertain of what his victories were for, it is she who restores his humanity.
This is the meaning Éowyn must rediscover in The Lord of the Rings. At first, she mistakes valor for worth and scorns the healing work of women, because the poisonous voice of Wormtongue has whispered in her ear that only conquest proves strength. Yet her true victory is not on the Pelennor Fields, but in the Houses of Healing, where she chooses love and renewal over despair. Her courage does not vanish; it deepens, turning outward toward life.
It is no accident that Tolkien named the whisperer Wormtongue, nor that Lewis’s tempter in The Screwtape Letters is Wormwood. Both men understood that the serpent’s oldest weapon is the corruption of language — the twisting of story. Evil does not merely tempt through appetite; it persuades through narrative, offering a false tale that sounds nobler than the truth. Wormtongue tells Éowyn that service is slavery and valor is freedom. Wormwood tells his “patient” that self-assertion is strength and humility is weakness. Both demons whisper the same lie: that meaning lies in domination rather than in love.
Tolkien and Lewis grasped something our culture has forgotten: that story is the shaping power of the soul. The tales we believe become the lives we live. When the true myth is replaced by its counterfeit, both men and women are unmade from within.
Feminism told women they could have meaning only by imitating men’s striving. It redefined strength as denial: of dependence, of faith, of fertility, of the desire to be known and loved. It taught women to ascend but never to descend, to chase glory but never to surrender.
And the result, half a century on, is visible everywhere: for women, unprecedented autonomy — and unprecedented despair; for men, a slow erosion of purpose. When women no longer embody the call to reconciliation, men lose the reason their courage exists. The builder becomes a wanderer; the protector becomes directionless. The two halves of the myth, once joined in creation, now drift apart in competition, and both wither.
C. S. Lewis Saw It Coming
In Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis retold the myth of Psyche and Eros from the vantage point of Psyche’s older sister, Orual, a woman who has everything feminism celebrates. She is intelligent, capable, and self-governing. She rules a kingdom with justice and iron discipline. And she is utterly miserable.
Orual loves Psyche possessively, rationally, and without faith. When Psyche claims she has seen and married a god, Orual demands proof. Unable to tolerate mystery or surrender, she pressures Psyche into disobedience, the very act that destroys her happiness. Orual gains control and loses everything else.
Decades later, ruling her realm alone, she learns that her mastery is hollow. Her independence has not made her whole but sterile. Only when she finally confronts the gods and confesses the truth — that she loved wrongly, through fear and pride — does she begin to heal.
“How can they meet us face to face,” Lewis has her ask, “till we have faces?”
That question is the soul’s cry for integration. Until the masks of competence, grievance, and ideology fall, we cannot know who we are or what we were made for.
Orual’s story is the modern woman’s myth. She has achieved every goal the world calls empowerment and found it barren. She has gained the world and lost her face. Psyche’s descent into darkness and Orual’s descent into truth are the same journey: the movement from pride to humility, from self-definition to self-revelation. Their suffering is not punishment; it is purification. Only through the loss of illusion can the soul become capable of love.
Feminism stripped that descent from the feminine script. It promised eternal ascent with ever higher degrees, salaries, and status, but ascent without descent leads only to airless heights. The mountain peak offers no water; the wellspring lies below.
The Cultural Consequences
When the Hero and the Heroine drift apart, the world itself loses balance.
The Hero’s Journey builds, while the Heroine’s Journey renews. Without her, his achievements dry into monuments: towers without light, empires without children, victories without joy. Without him, her compassion collapses into sentiment, her mercy into passivity. Civilization needs both: the sword and the cup, the fire and the hearth, courage and grace.
Modern feminism severed the bond and called it freedom. Women were told to become conquerors; men were told to apologize for being what they are. The result is not equality but estrangement. Marriage becomes a negotiation instead of a covenant. Motherhood becomes a detour instead of a destiny. Men, stripped of purpose, retreat into fantasy worlds and addictions; women, stripped of meaning, drown in busyness and anxiety.
The mythic language for union has vanished, replaced by the sterile dialect of power. Every domain — home, art, politics, even faith — now speaks in terms of control and grievance. We have forgotten that the purpose of strength is protection, and the purpose of compassion is restoration.
The cultural damage runs deeper than economics or demographics. A generation raised on conquest alone no longer understands reconciliation. Our stories reflect it: heroines who act like soldiers, heroes who never mature, romances that end in loneliness disguised as triumph. The shared rhythm of descent and return in uniquely male and female journeys, the dance that once gave life its shape, has gone silent.
We can see the cost most clearly in our children. They are too often directionless and passionless, empty vessels waiting to be filled by the first cause or ideology they stumble across in adulthood. Their play has been tamed, their risk sanitized. Because it is easier and less painful for mothers to keep their children safe, supervised, and endlessly busy, they are denied the small, necessary apprenticeships of courage: the backyard adventures, the free-range afternoons, the pirate kingdoms built in dangerous junkyards. Childhood itself has been stripped of its practice hero’s journeys, the little tests through which the soul learns both daring and care. And we tell ourselves they are fine.
The world has grown efficient and hollow, as if we’ve built the body of civilization and misplaced its soul.
Restoration: The True Heroine’s Call
The Heroine’s Journey was never about passivity. It was about power transfigured by love, the strength to descend into darkness and bring life out of it. That pattern still lives, written into the marrow of the world, waiting to be remembered.
To restore it, women must reclaim what the age of conquest taught them to despise: faith, service, mercy, endurance, and the will and courage to love what cannot repay. The Heroine’s descent is not submission to tyranny; it is obedience to truth. It is the refusal to harden one’s heart even when pain would make it easier. It is the quiet bravery of creation, the courage to bear and to care when the world sneers that such work is beneath notice.
When women recover that call, men will recover theirs. The true Hero finds his meaning not in domination but in defense of what is sacred. The Heroine’s grace gives the Hero his purpose, just as his courage gives her safety. Together they form the complete pattern: courage that serves, love that endures, and life that renews itself.
The restoration of civilization will not begin in legislatures or boardrooms. It will begin in the home, the classroom, the studio, and the parish — wherever a woman chooses reconciliation over resentment, faith over cynicism, truth over performance. Each such act is a small descent into humility and a small resurrection of grace.
The ancients understood that without descent there is no ascent, without sacrifice there is no redemption, and without love there is no life. The Heroine’s Journey has always been the soul’s quiet rebellion against despair. It begins not in glory but in the willingness to go down, to enter the darkness, and bring back the light.
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