The journey to ‘Finding Athena’

The year was 2014 and my then partner (now husband) and I were visiting Greece. For him it was the first time. For me, it was a return after ten years in self-imposed exile.

Ten years earlier I had come back home after 18 months in Athens, carrying all my stuff and a weight of disappointed expectations. I had moved to Greece to follow my beating heart (and a crush), but mostly to shake my life up. Even then I knew something wasn’t right. I was 28, climbing the ladder of a career that already bored me senseless and struggling to figure out why life felt bereft of meaning.

In Greece (and my crush) I determined I would find my answer.

My best friend and I moved over there on a wave of optimism. I promptly went about finding a job. It turned out to be you guessed it… the exact same type of job I’d literally moved across the world to escape.

What I discovered was that if you don’t reckon with your personal baggage, you simply recreate the conditions you were trying to change. So it was for me.

I called time after a year and half and ran back to Australia, tail between my legs.

Fast forward ten years.

My now husband Chris came into my life and suddenly I had a reason to respark my relationship with my parents’ birth country. And it was a reason that had nothing to do with my failed attempts to become a full-time Hellene.

Chris wanted to experience the birthplace of democracy. I deeply wanted to be the one to introduce it to him.

So back we went.

We explored Athens and touched the stones of the Parthenon. We read Byronic poetry at the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion. We got stuck for a whole beautiful week on Milos, where we danced and swam at every beach we could reach. We visited my dad’s birthplace, Molaoi in Lakonia, and immersed ourselves in the wonders of Monemvasia. We explored my mum’s hometown Aghios Nikolaos on Crete and walked the streets of Knossos. We saw the caldera on Santorini and decried how overun with tourists it was.

I fell in love with Greece again.

Finally, stepkids in tow, we made our way up to the foothills of Delphi - for a Delphi-selfi. One the way we stopped at a place I didn’t even know existed - the Temple of Athena Pronaia.

Literally Athena ‘before the temple’.

The moment I stepped foot on that sacred land, I could feel how old it was. Scholars think it predates Athena herself and could have been a place of worship for Gaia, the original Mother Goddess and the Earth herself.

It was serene. Eerily quiet. I could easily imagine the pilgrims there, walking up to pay their respects to the mighty goddess of wisdom as preparation for their visit with the Pythia at Delphi.

And it was as I was walking around the main temple site on my own, soaking up the feel and scent of the place that I felt it.

A nudge at the back of my brain. It’s the same heavy wave of energy that washes over me whenever I come into contact with something other. Something not me. A voice that is not mine.

“You have to write my story,” she said, very clearly. “You need to tell them the truth about me.”

Now let’s make one thing clear here - I liked the idea of Athena well enough. I was always very proud of the Olympian gods and Greek mythology. I know many of her stories - how she competed with Poseidon for patronage of Athens and won by gifting them the olive tree. How Hephaestus split Zeus’s head open with an axe and out flew Athena, fully clothed and in full battle cry.

But if I was to have chosen a goddess to connect with, if I had even thought such a thing possible, Athena would not have been my first choice.

Why?

The patriarchy.

She felt to me an emotionally distant deity. A champion for male order. A weird, queer, proto-feminist figure that had popped out of a man’s head and prioritised men and male interests and been appropriated by them for that purpose.

No, I wouldn’t have chosen Athena.

But she very clearly chose me.

And in hindsight… of course she did.

Folks, when a goddess gives you a job to do, you do it.

Except I didn’t.

Oh, I wrote about it. I journalled. I even started making notes. And then it went to the back of the draw and I forgot about it and moved on to The Bones Beneath and other things.

(ADHD will do that to you.)

So, when I sat down to do a Goddess meditation twelve years later (count them) with Online Witch School, I did not imagine that it would be Athena who turned up. In hindsight, it should have been obvious… but for whatever reason (ADHD), she just wasn’t in my head.

Until she was.

In my vision, she sat beside me in full regalia and without scolding or fanfare simply said:

“About that book.”

About that book.

Holy mother of the gods.

The book. The one I’d said I’d write.

Folks, I’d forgotten about the book.

But she hadn’t. She’d patiently waited for me to be open enough and then at the first opportunity calmly reminded me of my promise.

So here we are.

We’re working on it together. I’m calling it ‘Finding Athena’.

And it’s not just a book about her - although she is a main character.

And it’s a book about my grandmothers, and about me, and about the Athena in all of us.

It’s about what the patriarchy costs us - from the oppression of Athena’s matriarchal origins, to the dreams of my grandmothers, to my own self-esteem and gifts.

It’s quite something to be co-writing with a goddess, and I am still learning to trust, but you know what they say:

If she asks you once, you should listen.

If she has to ask you twice, you better make sure there’s not a third time.

This is me making sure she doesn’t have to ask me again.