The Queen’s Path and Becoming Sovereign: An ancient archetype for a new understanding of women’s narratives

From psychotherapy to blockbuster movies, we have been schooled on the myth of the hero as THE monomyth of human experience. For more than 80 years we have sought out the hero’s mythic journey as a map to our own experience, hoping to find our own path to greatness in the process. But the hero’s story isn’t written with women in mind. In fact, most women are denied access to the Hero’s Journey as soon as they set foot on the road. Women have sought to correct this by looking at our own mythic trajectories, but often these come up short as well. Despite brilliant and deep work by writers like Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Maureen Murdoch, and Jill Carriger, the Heroine’s Journey fails to fully describe what women experience on their own path to achieve their goals and become the protagonist in their own story.

In research that took almost ten years, Dr Stacey Simmons uncovered a pattern of women’s narrative that has been hiding in plain sight for thousands of years. In this path, a woman learns early that the world will keep her pulling between her roles as  either a demure, passive, wife and mother, or a brazen magical temptress. Women are taught that these are the poles of our existence, and we are entreated to work out a complex dance where we weave between them depending on the needs of others and the pull of the moment. But both these archetypes are a trap. Whether a woman is placed on the path of the obedient trad wife, or the powerful witch, she is trapped in a role that society makes for her. A woman cannot take a hero or heroine’s journey until she first becomes sovereign over her life and experience.

The journey to sovereignty is very different from the journey of the hero. The goal of sovereignty is to uncover all the places where a woman has become a captive to the roles placed on her by culture and reunite her deepest Self to her true nature. In doing so she can choose which (if any) of the roles or their behaviors are true to her identity. Along the Queen’s Path an individual woman will endure trials and difficulty. But the most important transformation comes from claiming the territory of her embodiment. When the power and joy of her full embodied self is finally realized, she is ready to claim her throne and don her crown.