Green eyed Athena, olives, snakes, owls, shawls

[Terence]

"Always divinity is a totality, a whole world in its
perfection. This applies also not the supreme gods, Zeus,
Athena, and Apollo, the bearers of the highest ideals. None
of them represents a single virtue, none is to be
encountered in only one direction of teeming life; each
desires to fill, shape and illumine the whole compass of
human existence with his peculiar spirit."

Walter F. Otto, The Homeric Gods (Boston: Beacon Press,
1964), p.60

As we know, Pynchon's characters suffer from multiplicity
(Stencil, V, Fausto, Slothrop, Greta, Katje, Frenesi, and so
on) and one of the methods (i.e. the double, used first in
Mortality and Mercy, where Pynchon's sources are, once
again, Conrad, Dickens, Eliot,) he employs to create this
multiplicity is to make extensive use of the multiplicity of
character traits traditionally ascribed to the  polytheistic
gods and heroes of myth,  so I would not scoff at any
insight into these. Green eyes, who figures large in CL, she
is the goddess of weaving after all, and she did give this
gift to Penelope, is the goddess of art and artisans. But
again,
the allusion would need be ironic, for the art produced by
the Sick Crew (the dead souls of Mortality and Mercy are the
prototype for the crew in V.) is bereft of the creative life
force attributed to Athena. R. Owlglass is a character that
I think goes through a traditional maturation, although I
agree with you David, I don't consider her the heroine, but
only one woman in the chorus, she grows, but not enough, if
I had to bet on a Heroine, I'd put my money down on Paola. 

hooo, gotta go, the wind is blowing/
the skin of the snake in shedding flakes/
the wind in the hollow of my plastic owls/
the pigeons, cooo/
the wind says who/
and the sparrows flutter the roof dust down on the olive
branches/
and my green eyes is here with a shawl and my medicine/