When my belief in the Mormon church changed, I realized that Mormonism might work for other people, but it didn’t work for me. I could no longer subscribe to that belief system, and I saw the church in a new way. But I had no idea yet what it meant not to be Mormon. What would life look like now? …
Many thanks to the Joseph Campbell Foundation for publishing my newest MythBlast essay! Here’s how it begins:
To Radiate and Create
As the sixth of seven children, I grew up surrounded by people who towered over me and performed feats of astonishing creativity and capacity. My brother was a centaur riding his motorcycle. Dad designed a car wash machine, penciling mysterious schematics of circuitry onto flattened cardboard boxes, as Hephaestus might if he owned a gas station. Mom floated on air when she executed swan dives into the lake, and, in winter, on the frozen pond behind the house, she skated circles around me—forward and backward—like a water spirit of the north.
Following in the footsteps of the Bechdel Test for gender inclusivity, here’s my Gardner Goddess Quiz for determining the presence of the sacred feminine in a piece of media.
Joanna Gardner, PhD is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist whose focus areas include myth, creativity, wonder tales, and goddesses. Joanna serves as adjunct professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program, and as director of marketing and communications for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, where she also contributes to the popular MythBlast essay series. She is the lead author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide and a co-founder of the Fates and Graces, hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. Joanna’s work appears in a variety of venues, available on the Publications page. You can reach her at joanna at joannagardner dot com.
This post has been rated DO NOT READ if you have not seen seasons 1-4 of Stranger Things. If that’s the case, Fire Angel Baby urges you to hasten over to Netflix and let the binge begin.
Contents
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I’ll say it right here: the Netflix series Stranger Things creates a goddess mythology centered on the sacred feminine.
I won’t dwell on the show’s images from Greek myth (Steve Harrington’s liver pecked like Prometheus, Victor Creel blinding himself like Oedipus, Eddie Munson’s Orpheus moment playing a guitar solo in the Upside Down).
Nor will I examine religious allusions such as One/Henry/Vecna as the beautiful first son who is cast down into the hell of the Upside Down which only increases his power—no! I’m not going to talk about any of that.
Instead, let’s talk about how Stranger Things works as a myth in its own right, one that honors the feminine divine.
When I first started watching Stranger Things, I felt dismay at the female characters. They seemed weak and whiny, devalued and dismissed by their male companions. Here we go, I thought, another show by men about men for men, where women function as narrative props.
Nancy looking for Barb.
Gradually, however, I realized something else was going on. These female characters wore normal clothes that fully covered their bodies. They spent little time styling their hair, didn’t use much make-up, and navigated age-appropriate feelings and experiences around sexuality. They seemed like real, complex people with minds, hearts, and bodies of their own, and some of the men in their lives were honestly trying to figure out how to create relationships with them. In other words, this was the opposite of sexist objectification.
Not only that, Joyce’s son had gone missing. Barb was taken by the demogorgon. Nancy lost her best friend. El was traumatized, cold, alone, unhoused, and so socially malformed that she could barely speak. Stranger Things was spotlighting women dealing with extremely difficult situations imposed on them by outside forces.
What’s more, the problems these characters faced all arose, one way or another, from patriarchal systems of oppression. And male characters who treated women as lesser beings—Papa, Billy, the jerks at the newspaper office—were portrayed as some combination of wounded, evil, and tragic. Stranger Things was showing the impact of patriarchy on women.
But there was another layer at play, too. Many of these normal-looking female characters had more-than-normal traits, which clearly signaled the presence of divinity. That means Stranger Things offers an opportunity to apply the Gardner Goddess Quiz for uncovering the sacred feminine. Here’s how some characters score on the quiz, with a score of one indicating no goddess attributes at all, and six meaning gigawatt goddess energies.
Joyce, ready to fight a monster to save her son.
Speaking about Mrs. Sinclair, Mr. Sinclair tells his son Lucas, “She’s never wrong, son,” in an elegant moment of fathering his child, husbanding his partner, and honoring the feminine divine, who is, of course, never wrong. Mrs. Sinclair’s goddess score: 2.
Max Mayfield possesses the powers of beating the boys at video games, riding skateboards, and driving sports cars without a license, and she ventures willingly into Vecna’s mental hellscape to distract the monster so her friends can mount their attack. Max’s goddess score: 3.
Joyce Byers refuses to be ignored, denied, or gaslit, and instead trusts her own truth no matter what anyone else thinks. Plus, her maternal commitment to saving Will is elemental. Joyce’s goddess score: 3.
Then there’s Suzie, the genius who meets Dustin at science camp. When Dustin tells the group about how supernaturally brilliant and beautiful Suzie is, they doubt she actually exists—much the way people doubt that goddesses exist.
Suzy at the ham radio.
Suzie, however, like goddess energies, does indeed exist, and she responds to Dustin’s call right when the world needs her most. The Russians are about to open a gate to the Upside Down. Hopper and Joyce need Planck’s constant to access the Russian control room, so Dustin calls Suzie on the ham radio. Of course she knows Planck’s constant; the goddess knows the workings of the universe. But before she divulges this information, she requires an offering of music from her supplicant, Dustin. More about that scene in a minute. Suzie’s goddess score: 5.
But the most powerful goddess in Stranger Things is, obviously, El. El moves objects with her mind. She psychically travels into the minds of others. She brings Max back from the dead, much like other deities of whom you may have heard. And “El” is an ancient word that means “god” or “deity.”
She also needs a bath of salt water at body temperature for her powers to work at peak efficiency. In other words, she needs a womb-like tank of amniotic fluid. Her divinity derives from a maternal influence.
“You’re bigger than Madonna to them,” Dr. Owens tells El when scientists gape at her in wonderment. The double meaning here suggests that El is bigger than the Madonna, the Virgin Mary. He continues in this religious language: “They believe in the cause. They believe in you.”
El exerting her goddess powers.
Henry/One also tells El he believes in her, and then, when El is about to die inside Vecna’s mind, crucified over a stained-glass window of a rose (to drive home the imagery of the sacred feminine), Mike calls to her from the everyday world.
“El, El, El,” his voice echoes across the dimensions as he addresses the deity. “I love you! I love you!… You can do anything! You can fly, you can move mountains, I believe that, I really do!” This is more than a boyfriend’s encouragement. This is a prayer to a goddess, and it’s a beautiful image of how prayer works within the psyche, summoning and activating otherwise inaccessible powers.
But El is traumatized. The patriarchy, in the form of the towering psychopath Dr. Brenner, took her from her mother. Held El captive. Experimented on her. Conditioned her to obey and to call Dr. Brenner “Papa”—a cute little nickname for pa-pa-pa-patriarchy.
Papa, ie the patriarchy, scheming.
As his name suggests, everything Papa is, says, and does represents the patriarchy. When Papa electroshocks El’s mother Terry, the patriarchy silences the great mother. When Papa imprisons El, the patriarchy locks up the feminine divine. When Papa tells her he knows what’s best for her, the patriarchy is trying to train goddess energies to submit, behave, and question their own instincts and wisdom.
The patriarchy is the sum of all the social structures that keep women subordinate to men. But those structures also make it difficult for men to relate to anyone except other men, including children, women, and those who don’t fit patriarch-prescribed gender norms and sexuality.
Think of Lonnie, the absent father of Will and Jonathan. Ted, the oblivious father of Mike and Nancy. Max’s step-dad, a brute of an abuser. These fathers are too conditioned by the system that wounds women—and everyone else—to let them to be present for anyone else.
In Stranger Things, monsters take many forms: demogorgon, demo-dogs, demo-bats, a massive spider-shaped shadow monster, a gleefully gory giant spider made of goo, the evil wizard Vecna, Papa, governmental systems of control. Many kinds of monster means many metaphors for the challenges of life.
Goo monster staring down at Billy.
And these forces of evil have some interesting messages. Zombies and the giant goo spider stomping around the mall speak of the mindless, destructive aspects of capitalism. Vecna muses, not inaccurately, about the toxic nature of human civilization. Papa says to El, “You speak of monsters, superheroes. That’s the stuff of myth and fairy tales. Reality, truth, is rarely so simple. People are not so easily defined. Only by facing all of ourselves, the good and the bad, can we become whole.”
Papa’s words sound reasonable, but they can also slide all too quickly into moral relativism. To deny the existence of monsters and heroes could also deny the monstrous and the heroic. The monstrous and heroic exist in fiction because the monstrous and heroic exist in life. And despite Papa’s words, he is a monster: a narcissist drunk on power who wants to imprison the feminine divine.
The word “monster” comes from roots that mean “one who warns.” Some of the warnings Stranger Things monsters deliver: There are scary things in the world and in our minds. Sometimes fear can gain the upper hand. But not always.
No goddess mythology is complete without at least one underworld journey, and Stranger Things has many. Most of them happen in the Upside Down.
The Upside Down is a shadow-realm below the everyday world. It’s an alternate dimension and a mirror image of the reality we know. Both worlds contain the same objects—roads, buildings, bikes—but the Upside Down is stuck in a decaying version of the past. There’s no sunlight or water. There are monsters, however, and slimy, twining vines that choke the life out of anyone they capture. Pale flakes float in the air like glowing nuclear ash.
Humans can visit this realm, but they can’t live there. Not for long. Sometimes, like Will, they get stuck there, like getting stuck in anxiety or depression.
Will Byers back in the Upside Down.
The Upside Down holds power and fear. It’s a place where uncomfortable feelings and memories live, such as shame, guilt, and trauma. Like the subconscious, it’s a place to confront the forces that hold you back. It’s also similar to what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, because it affects everyone, and everyone can visit it. It’s personal and collective, both at once.
Will’s abduction into the Upside Down is another metaphor of the damage the patriarchy inflicts on those who don’t conform to its rules—people such as sensitive, creative, young gay men. No, patriarchy says, you can’t be who you are or we will hurt you. Then terror sends the soul tumbling into the depths where it suffers despair, paralysis, cold, creative starvation, and loneliness. That kind of soul needs the help of friends and goddess energies to make the return trip.
Which brings us to Sheriff Jim Hopper. Hopper wants to be a father to El and a lover to Joyce, but his stumbling attempts to connect show how difficult the patriarchy makes relationships for men.
In many ways, Hopper reminds me of my dad in the 80s. The functional, unlovely work clothes. The ramming around town in a lunky truck that smells like sweat, motor oil, and fast-food wrappers. Collapsing in front of the television every night after work. The default air of simmering frustration which sometimes boils over in an angry outburst.
Hopper, however, goes to war against the patriarchy. First, he commits the heretical act of believing Joyce, when the system wants her silenced. Then he fights monsters and Russians alongside the rest of the group, until the fateful explosion of the Russian machine.
Hopper trying to shine a light in the darkness.
That’s when it seems like the patriarchy won.
After Hopper disappears, everyone believes he’s dead. They hold a funeral.
But actually the Russians have taken him, injured but alive, to the living hell (another underworld) of a Siberian work prison, where he suffers horribly and must die to (let go of) almost everything about his former self: name, occupation, language, hair, weight. The only thing he holds onto is his love for El and Joyce. That’s enough to keep his soul alive and enable his rebirth, newly able to love and be loved, having shed the patriarchal conditioning that held him back.
Even though my dad didn’t do any of that, Hopper’s transformation lets me imagine Dad shedding his anger, his defenses. Opening up to the family he worked so hard to support. Relaxing, laughing, talking things over. I can’t change the past, but I can change my imaginings about the past, which can change my feelings about it. Hopper helps that happen.
Stranger Things lets me relive the 80s in many ways—Trapper Keepers, Lite Brite, riding around in the way-back of a station wagon—but this time in the company of goddesses and lovable, monster-fighting nerds who, after a little initial skepticism, never question when someone says they saw a demogorgon or an evil spider wizard.
Barb has the whole 80s look: the hair, ruffly collar, and of course the Trapper Keeper.
The patriarchy thrives on doubting, devaluing, and dismissing people who don’t fit the system until those people learn to doubt, devalue and dismiss themselves. That’s how the system keeps going.
But in Stranger Things, our band of intrepids believe each other and believe in each other. They forgive each other’s trespasses, and are never really happy until they’re reunited.
This goddess-powered version of the decade makes my memories feel more real, more valid, more handle-able. It helps me accept and appreciate things about my youth that I used to reject and deny—and we all know how well that works.
One of my favorite aspects of this 80s replay is how Stranger Things turns the decade’s music into something sacred. Peter Gabriel’s “Heroes” captures the pathos of saying yes to the adventure and failing. “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim” becomes Hopper’s personal anthem of triumph and tragedy. “Runnin’ Up That Hill” holds so much of Max’s vast courage and sorrow that it opens a portal from Vecna’s mental hell for her to return to the world of love and friendship.
And then there’s the soundtrack to The Never-Ending Story, which Suzie requires Dustin to sing over the walkie-talkie before she’ll share Planck’s constant.
Turn around, Dustin sings, haltingly at first, as the rest of the party does in fact turn—Murray in the boiler room of the Russian base, Hopper at the control room door, Robin and Steve in the back of the station wagon as it speeds away from the thundering goo monster. Look at what you see-ee-ee-ee… in her face, the mirror of your drea-ea-ea-eams—et voilà, the goddess is summoned.
Suzy singing with Dustin over the ham radio.
Make believe I’m everywhere, Suzie joins in, because when you sing to a goddess, she’ll sing along with you—given in the light—and she’ll remind you where and how to find her.
The two of them continue their duet, so hauntingly true that everyone else experiences that shared beauty as well, as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
Even smart-aleck Erica is transfixed, sitting on the hilltop with Dustin in the light of a full moon—a highly appropriate place to sing a hymn to a goddess.
There are stories in my life I return to again and again, stories I revel in. Stranger Things has joined that list. This fascination must mean the show has things to teach me, that it functions with the force of myth in my psyche.
In case it isn’t already clear, I no longer feel dismay at the characters in Stranger Things. Now it’s more like charm and delight. And I wonder, is this how the Greeks felt about their pantheon? Did they adore their goddesses and gods? Did people sit around re-telling those tales simply for the joy of returning to the company of their favorite characters?
I’ve heard some viewers object to the show’s scary, violent scenes, and I get it. Those scenes are hard to watch. But patriarchy is scary and violent. Patriarchy spawns monsters, devours lives, silences more than it supports. Stranger Things shows that reality metaphorically in order to say things don’t have to be that way. We can fight back. We can call on goddess energies. We can change.
By presenting a cast of characters with a range of powers, the show also says, “You have powers, too. How will you use them? How will you team up? Given the horrors of life, how will you not be a stranger?” Then it answers:
Believe each other. Believe in each other. Fight those monsters together.
“In the form and function of play, itself an independent entity which is senseless and irrational, man’s consciousness that he is embedded in a sacred order of things finds its first, highest, and holiest expression.”
Queen of the Night, Burney Relief, Iraq, 19th-18th century BCE, British Museum
Some religious traditions imagine divinity as male, rejecting all goddess figures.
In my experience, this approach overvalues traditionally masculine traits and undervalues those that have traditionally been seen as feminine. It also results in some nasty internalized misogyny on the part of all genders. To reject the feminine divine is to reject important parts of everyone’s souls.
But goddess energies don’t go away just because the patriarchy wants them to. Goddesses still appear in movies, shows, and other media, but disguised in forms other than literal deities. These hidden goddesses function as metaphors for actual goddesses, who in turn function as metaphors for the sacred nature of the universe.
To spot these goddess dynamics in the wild, it helps to have a few guidelines.
With gratitude to Alison Bechdel
The goddess Parvati, late 900s CE, at the British Museum
I’m following in the footsteps of the Bechdel Test here. In 1985, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel proposed three questions about a film or show or comic book to determine its level of gender representation:
Are there two or more women? If yes, then:
Do they ever speak to each other? If yes, then:
Do they discuss something other than a man? If yes, then the work in question has achieved a bare minimum, baseline level of representation.
That’s it. That’s the whole Bechdel Test. If the answer to any of these questions is no, then the work has failed to reach anything resembling gender equality.
The Gardner Goddess Quiz
The Bechdel Test, useful though it is, doesn’t indicate whether media achieves goddess representation. In other words, does a given character portray the sacred feminine, and if so, how strongly?
So here’s a similar test for goddesses. These are the questions I ask to determine the presence or absence of the feminine divine:
Is the character a girl/woman or girlish/womanly—including cis, trans, and gender-fluid people? If yes, continue. If no, they might represent divinity, but probably not the sacred feminine.
Is this character royalty or of noble or unusual parentage? For example, queens, princesses, heiresses.
Is this character inherently exceptional in any way, such as extreme beauty, ugliness, tallness, shortness, or anything else? In other words, was this character born special?
Does the character possess an unusual skill, talent, or power? From an invisible jet to a magic wand to the ability to prophesy, has this character gained special attributes since they were born?
Does the character’s name or title contain any words that refer to divinity or high status? Examples: godmother, Venus, Princess Diana.
Does the character have other traits or possessions in common with any traditional deities? Think of Aphrodite’s magic wrap, Durga’s tiger, Hestia’s sacred hearth and flame.
To score the quiz, every yes equals one point. The more points a character gets, the more they embody the feminine divine.
One point means the sacred feminine is absent, and we are in the realm of the mundane. Two to five points means mighty metaphors are at play. Six points means buckle up for some serious goddess hijinks.
Why goddess equality?
Ariadne, Roman, 2nd century CE, British Museum
Why spend time and energy watching for hidden goddesses?
For so many reasons.
To bring them out into the open. To counteract the internalized misogyny that keeps everyone cut off from their full selves. To celebrate sacred goddess energies, which include fertility, childbirth, love, death, war, hunting, healing, animals, and many other cosmic forces. To gain more access to those energies in my life, and hopefully make it easier for others to do the same.
