Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess

I honestly thought that the next entry I posted was going to say, “Sorry, I’m done with this blog. See you in a few years!” But then someone sent me an email asking me to fix my entry on Medusa to reflect that Medusa was raped by Poseidon and thus the punishment was deeply unjust.

I thought about it. The emailer was correct that the word Ovid uses to describe their sexual intercourse does not emphasize consent. But, in the end I decided not to for two reasons: 1) I’m pretty sure Ovid considered Medusa responsible for the sex, and that is not a description of rape I am comfortable with, and 2) having re-read Ovid’s version, I now think that Medusa is an awesome resister of the patriarchy!

There is a third possible reason as well, namely that earlier versions of the myth describe “laying together in a soft meadow among spring flowers” and even Ovid later describes this event as a “mingling of soft embraces.” This could easily outweigh the one word “vitiasse” (which I have arbitrarily decided to translated as “spoiled”). But the reality is, I don’t think we SHOULD write off “vitiasse.” In fact, quite the opposite! I think that Ovid is making the point that Poseidon “spoiled” Medusa for marriage. I mean, Ovid’s whole introduction to this is about what a hot potential wife Medusa was! This would have been considered illegal for both parties in ancient Rome, which helps explain why Ovid continues that Athena’s mutation of Medusa was a punishment of her “filthy crime.”

So, if you believe as Ovid appeared to that Medusa was complicit and responsible for this whole sexy-sex with Poseidon (which, for those who don’t remember the details of the story, took place in the temple of Athena), then Medusa is not the pathetic victim that a current reading of the word “rape” might suggest. Instead, she becomes this totally awesome radical damn-the-man feminist! She says, “F* you, suitors, maybe I just want to have sex with a cute guy instead of sitting inside your women’s quarters for the rest of my life!” She says, “F* you, you daddy-loving, girl-power-hating Goddess! Maybe I don’t think you or any other representation of the system should get to decide where or with whom I get it on!” And, yeah, she totally suffers the consequence of breaking the rules, and, yeah, she is totally turned into this awful threat to women of “this is what happens to women who sleep with sexy men when they should be the property of their fathers,” but DAMN if she doesn’t go down fighting. Looking at it with a BIT of a revisionist eye, she lives out the rest of her life fighting against those “heroes” of patriarchal Greece. Even sitting on Athena’s shield should remind you of the dangerous power of a woman who decides to stop accepting the sexist rules and strikes out to do what she will!

Go Medusa!

I’ve been working up to writing this post for over a month, ever since Wendy responded to The Dangers of de-Mystification. I can’t address the whole thing in one post, so this will have to be a series. But by the end of this post, I hope to demonstrate a little better what the problems with appropriating myths might be.

What Wendy took issue with was not my dilemma, but the foundational concept underlying my dilemma: Are We Authentic? Her post is well written, and I suggest you read it, but there are two points that I want to respond to in particular: 1) that even if we’re not “authentic,” it’s okay to re-use other people’s stories

Are all of those mentioned above, and many more, examples of appropriation as the legends and myths travel with us to new places and times? Very possibly. But is it wrong, is it a sort of cheating? No. They all serve our very human need to explain ourselves, not just to ourselves, but to the universe, to our ancestors and descendants.¹

and 2) we very well may be more authentic than the source material we have available to us

I can’t agree that your ‘appropriation of Greek Goddesses isn’t authentic’. Oh yes, the records we have today come down to us mostly in male voices, from men who lived in a society that feared and hated women, but are we much different than that today? … I don’t believe the myths and characters from ancient Greece were born in a vacuum, but that they were revised, re-written and co-opted from earlier times, changed to appeal to the audience of the day. … So… a reinterpretation for today’s women and purpose is as authentic as the Greek myths were in their time.²

She is right, of course, that stories are constantly being reframed, and, indeed, that is how they continue to live and remain meaningful. And she is right that, “in reality, we cannot know what they thought,” and that our reframing may give voice to people we cannot hear in the textual sources. The problem comes, however, when you erase someone else’s voice to do that. And it’s really a problem, when that erasure reproduces oppression. And that’s exactly what is meant by appropriation; that’s why it’s not a neutral word. Read the rest of this entry »

I loved this book, but it’s taken me a year to figure out why. Sure, the writing was good - a more lit-y than the genre fic I usually read, something I had to chew and savor instead of swallowing down like cotton candy (which is NOT to say that genre is always cotton candy … but I LIKE cotton candy reading). The narrative itself swept me up and held me (although it took a little bit for me to get into it, I admit). I really liked the main character. I liked the way he talked about sex.  I thought it was enormously creative. Reading it made me feel light and alive.

And yet I would normally give something four stars that had all of those things. Five stars, saying, “I loved it,” needs something more. Something which is unique to my reading of it, instead of everyone else’s. A person reason. I just realized what it is.

I have read a bunch of fiction that plays with Greek Myths, from The Penelopiad and The King Must Die to The Lightning Thief and Roman Blood. I often enjoy these books, but I am almost always frustrated by them as well. The problem is that making Greek myths relevant and interesting often decontextualizes them so much that they lose what makes them truly meaningful and timeless. Of course, there are NEW ideas that have the potential for deep meaning as well, but I always grumble to myself, why did they have to erase the original meaning to do it?!

This book does not erase the original meaning of anything. It does not attempt, to explain the original meanings in their depth. Instead, it seems to simply celebrate that they WERE meaningful. But [author: Tom Robbins] doesn’t stop there. He examines history. How meaning (and identity) grows over time. How it lives. And in doing so he brings the ancient Greek characters to life again. Forever. Yay!

I recommend this book for Classicists who don’t like retellings of mythology; people interested in religion; anyone who likes good stories.

Hey guys, have you heard? There’s been a shift in Amazon Rank and stories like the ones you come to Women in Greek Myths to enjoy are in danger. That’s right, in the name of protecting kids from “adult” material, anything containing sexual, erotic, romantic, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or queer content is getting censored from the sales Amazon Rank. Although I doubt they will actually start cutting D’Aulaires, books like Lovers’ Legends Unbound might be in real trouble (you can see my review of it here). Although I’m not pleased about the censorship generally, it is the unequal application (that LGBT - queer - books get slapped with the “adult” label when they’ve got nothing erotic about ‘em, but plenty of erotic hetero books continue on their merry, Amazon Ranked, way.

As some of you may remember from my post on Age-Appropriate Definitions in Greek Myths, I am hardly a radical on the question of how to talk about sexuality with kids, but (if people stopped forgetting that greek myths are full of this sort of thing) the book I dream of one day writing (discussed here) would probably be screwed, too.

ETA: Yeah, Lovers’ Legends Unbound got stripped of its Amazon Rank. Jerks.

I loved Greek myths when I was little. I loved that Athena trounced Ares on the regular and that she cared about the same kind of book-learning wisdom that I, and my privileged family, loved. I loved that Hera, for all that she was kind of annoying, did not just lay down and take it when Zeus cheated. I loved the wild youth of Artemis, and that she wasn’t sweet or kind but was truly fierce in a way Tyra Banks will NEVER understand. And I found ways to work their worship into my life, even as a self-identified Christian, when I spoke to the moon, or did my maidenhood ceremony with my mother.

But, just as the ancient Greeks worshipped their heroes, so did I. Antigone just about blew my mind (and even if I didn’t want to end up the way she did, you better believe I looked at the way she stood up to her uncle and cheered and wished my uncle were half so awful so that I be that cool). And the monsters? The Harpies can hardly fail to inspire your imagination, and in them it is easy to see the hunger, the snatching, selfish NEED that we all must carry somewhere inside us …

When I learned about them, really learned about them, I realized that they didn’t “really” mean to the ancient Greeks what they meant to me. That my use of them, my appropriation of them, wasn’t “authentic.” And as I started to learn more about ancient Greece - and, for example, the meaning of a motherless virgin like Athena who wants nothing to do with power for women - I began to have a great respect for what the world might have looked like for them.

The myths stopped being about me. And when they did, I stopped having a personal relationship with them. And when that happened, when the mystery about their place in the world was gone, I could not worship them any more. Not even in the little syncretic way I was attempting.

Maybe I should post a disclaimer on my site so that unsuspecting worshippers won’t stumble into relativism and out of their sacred cosmoses.

The truth is, even though there is SO much more to be said about the Greek goddesses, I’m just not spending much time thinking about them anymore. In fact, other than slowly reading Kirk Ormand’s book Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome, I’m really not thinking about the Classics at all these days.

I am, however, still thinking about stories, and myths, and religion, and women, and goddesses. Hopefully, that’s still interesting to the people who make their way to this website. I’ve been considering trying another start-up like the attempt I linked to in my post on Celtic Pretties, but this time doing it on some of the myths and goddesses of Mexico and Central America. There are tons of amazing goddesses to learn about - take the goddess Coyolxauqui, the moon, who tried to kill her brother Huitzilopochtli, and whose body was broken into pieces, or their mother Coatlicue (the Lady of the Serpent Skirt). I would love to learn more about them and share the awesomeness with you.

But I face a dilemma. I do NOT want to write about this in a way that goes: look! exotic! and encourages cultural appropriation. On the other hand, I do believe that these stories - while they should continue to “belong” to the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America - should be known and respected and retold and made relevant in new ways as continues to be done with Greek mythology. That said, I don’t necessarily think that I, as a white person with very little background in the topic at hand, should necessarily be the person making the call on how to go about doing that. While what I’ve done with (women in) Greek Myths hadn’t really been done when I got started, I’m not sure that it’s an appropriate approach to other mythologies.

I know people don’t come here for the book reviews, but IF you are interested in awesome children’s books like me, you should go get Lugalbanda: The Boy Who Got Caught Up in a War: An Epic Tale From Ancient Iraq. Although this is certainly something you could (slowly) read to your child, don’t be deceived, this is a serious retelling. It’s long. And just because the illustrations are outstanding, don’t think that this isn’t a book that any grown-up interested in mythology (particularly Greek, Babylonian, Sumerian, etc) should read. You should.

The description of the book is, “older than the Bible, the Koran, or the Torah, this stirring epic [is] the world’s oldest written story.” I can’t speak to that myself, not having looked farther than this book, but it is easy to believe. Apparently, it was written in cuneiform and wasn’t translated until the 1970’s!

And, even though this story is about a boy, it is also about Inana, the most important Goddess in the Sumerian pantheon and the Goddess of Love and War. (See, I’m making the ancient goddess connections!)

Highly recommend!

(As always, feel free to join me on Goodreads.com!)

So, for a while there, I was thinking about seeing if I was inspired to do something like Women in Greek Myths about Celtic junk. So I started the same I way I did when I was 13, compiling names and writing short descriptions. Slowly expanding my repertoire and leaving it open for anyone else interested to come along. I haven’t linked to it anywhere on my main site for two major reasons:

1) It doesn’t even come CLOSE to other sites on similar topics with regard to completeness, prettiness, citedness, or funniness

2) It was an experiment I wasn’t sure I would ever follow up on. Turns out, I pretty much abandoned it.

That said, if you are still reading this blog, I feel like the least I can do is throw this out there in case anyone is really curious. So here it is:

Women in Celtic Myth

and the beginnings of a Gallery of Celtic Women.

And if you go there and then wish there was some way to get back those wasted minutes? Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Well, I’m branching out a little today. Below I’ve linked to the hour and 20 minute movie “Sita Sings the Blues.” It’s the story of Sita (and Rama) as well as the contemporary story of the marriage of animator, Nina, all set to a collection of really amazing animation styles and Annette Hanshaw’s 1920 vocals.

From what I have previously read, this movie was pretty crippled by copyright stuff with the music and the lack of money available kept it from going big. So contribute if you like it!

http://www.thirteen.org/sites/reel13/blog/watch-sita-sings-the-blues-online/347/

ETA: And here’s a link to an awesome post called Sita Pays Her Dues by bossymarmalade. It critiques the film and the appropriation of Indian stuff.

As I mentioned in the last post, I am doing a bit of introspection about why I bother to write here (this blog and this site more generally).

The answer is that I wanted to know about women in Greek myths. Duh. But, really, that’s it. I mean, I wanted to know, not just their names, but why they were interesting.

I wanted to understand why some Goddesses, like Hemera, Gaia,  and Amphictyonis were relatively simple personifications of their names when others, like say, Persephone, have names, backgrounds, and myths so deeply ensconced in the past that we may never know what the deities represented.

I wanted to understand why the Greeks, so very long ago, had Great Goddesses like Demeter when we modern people, so much further along towards enlightenment (yes, I was a Hegelian youngster), didn’t even write spunky heroines that weren’t relying on men into movies!

And, perhaps most of all, I was hungry for stories of women that I could be proud to tell. Stories imbued with the rich respect of our mythical ancestors, but stories that I could make mine, that could make me stronger, that could root me.

I realize, now, that, although I still long for such things, I have given up on finding them in ancient Greek myth.

The first blow came when I fully appreciated that, in fact, things weren’t as feminist as they appeared. I learned that, while visibility is definitely a powerful thing, being visibly powerless isn’t nearly so exciting. I also discovered, somewhere along the way, to reject a progressive history and with that I lost the need to rely on the authority of our mythical ancestors in Classical civilization.

My interests changed, and I began to find more stories I could be proud of today (go see my Goodreads shelf to find some) and saw ancient Greek myths interesting primarily as a cross-culture comparison. And, for a few years there, I was allowed to read these myths in exquisite detail. But now that I do not, and now that I am surrounded by so many more cultures with rich mythologies to learn from, I am not sure what my new connection to this will be.

So I’m TAing a class this semester called “Many Ways of Being Human,” and on the first day of class I mentioned the blog Savage Minds as a place they might be interested in heading. But then I asked how many of them read blogs; for that matter, how many of them even checked news online; how many, I asked, use the internet for anything other than email (and porn, but I didn’t know them well enough to ask them that yet).

Like one person.

So, even though I care (really, I do) about the people who have found there way here, my total lack of time to commit to this project has just been horribly reinforced by de-motivation.

In my imagination, when I am not feeling so pressed by other concerns (like, say, funding, trying to start my research, being unable to keep up with my classes, and sleeping), I will be back. But the fact that I’ve said that in the last three entries DOES NOT BODE WELL.

Suggestions? Comments? All welcome.

As it turns out, I DID get a copy of Kirk Ormand’s Controlling Desires not for Thesmophoria but just in time for Christmas. That worked out well, because I got to read it all during our Winter Break. Except that I was so totally burnt out from last semester, that I actually mostly just hid in bed and read fantasy. Now that the semester has begun again, I’m slowly being forced out of my shell again, and Controlling Desires is a new and exciting part of my life (that, of course, I no longer actually have time to read - but procrastination from real reading is a powerful thing, so I expect it will go fast now).

Ormand leads with background on gender and sexuality and how we think about such things. Although he totally ties it to specifically Classical things, in retrospect I realize that it is lessons like this that led me to go for my PhD in anthropology. But enough about me, here’s the gist of that point:

We think about sex(uality) in fundamentally different ways than the ancient Greek and Romans did.

In another post - which WILL happen eventually, fear not - I will talk more about it.

In my imagination, I will also be posting about 1) Monsters! Yay! and 2) Hera and Medea! Oooooh!

I know, I know … a real post is coming soon. But in the meantime, this is a really awesome article:

The Glory That Was Greece From a Female Perspective

Persephone Again

Everyone wants to talk
about Persephone.
Especially the poets.
How she was grabbed
and carried off,
how she was kept in darkness
so many months,
while her mother searched everywhere,
waited for her darling
to come home.

Some say
the daughter
liked what had happened
(you know the story,
how women really want it
even when they say no),
others claim it is in fact
the mother who is at fault,
that it is she
who drove her daughter
away, forced her to
leave home and
flee into that hidden world,
because of her own impossible
demands.

And then of course
there are those
who read it as a simple
nature myth–six months
of fertility and sun,
six of winter and death
over the land.

What do I think?
I think she is the soul
of each of us,
going down to obscurity,
resurrecting like a flower
over and over
as the seasons return.

Dorothy Walters

December 10, 2008

This is reposted with permission from the poet from her blog: www.kundalinisplendor.blogspot.com

Hi. This is not the Monster Syncroblog post promised. Nope. In my imagination, I will get it done. Obviously, I have already missed the deadline. However, I have another deadline. Actually, 5 deadlines. All for major real world projects. I will spend every waking moment working on these projects until December 12. Then I will return here and start up with some more good stuff, especially some monsters and some feminist interpretations of myths.

In the meantime, go read some of the awesome people on my blogroll. Mahud put up his post for the syncroblog, for example (and links to the other responsible people). And J. Harker, my old pal, wrote a neato review of a book.

What else … oh! Does anyone want to buy me Kirk Ormand’s Controlling Desires for Thesmophoria? It has actually been published (earlier than expected!) but is slightly outside of my price range (which ranges all the way up to about $3.39). An equally awesome present would be to convince the University of Arizona to buy it so that I can borrow it.

INFP - The Idealists

The meaning-seeking and unconventional type. They are especially attuned to making sure their beliefs and actions are congruent. They often develop a passion for the arts or unusal forms of self-expression.

They enjoy work that are aligned to their deeply feelt values and tend to strongly dislike the more practical and mundande forms of tasks. They can enjoy working alone for long periods of time and are happiest when they can immerse themselves in personally meaningful projects.

Okay blogpeeps, do you think that’s accurate? And also: go see what you get over at the Typealyzer.

I’ve mentioned Byblis before, I think. The poor girl fell in love with her brother which eventually led to being turned into a spring. But how she got from point A to point B is the awesomeness of the myth. And, because he is possibly the coolest guy on the planet, J. Harker over at Tales of a Wayward Classicist did a fantastic translation/adaptation of her myth from the Metamorphoses.

Here’s a selection:

It steadily got worse. She’d dream about him.
Really dream about him, you know?
The kind of dreams she’d ache to go back to sleep for.
She hated when he called her sister.
Something wasn’t right. She knew it, but couldn’t say it. Wouldn’t.

…

We have to tell him. Can you? Can you talk to him?
I’m afraid. I don’t know what’ll happen if I open my mouth.
We’ll write him a letter.

Oh the awesomeness … Go read the whole thing.

I grew up reading D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths, like lots of kids, and credit it with my early inspiration to create my website, Women in Greek Myths. But, I should add, it was a negative inspiration. I had decided that they didn’t have all the facts (a horrible crime to a know-it-all 13 year old) and worse, they didn’t tell all the stories (I shudder now to imagine a book that WOULD), and so I set out to correct it. I imagined the website as a place where I could store my notes, notes that would eventually become a fantastic book that would replace the insufficient D’Aulaires.

Now, as an adult, and having a lot more of the “real” stories under my belt, and in the original Greek, no less [Ailia pats herself on back], I have changed my tune. I am hugely impressed by D’Aulaires giving it 5/5 stars over at Goodreads, and I realize that what they did by connecting all of the different, winding tales together was genius. Sure, it makes you think that it’s how Greek myths really are - like some Biblical narrative where everything is essentially working together and rarely out and out contradictory - but the alternative, especially for kids, seems virtually impossible. And, even though I don’t think that the illustrations are up there with, say, with The Forbidden Door, almost no one’s are, and it DOES have some of the absolute best scene depictions of Greek myths I have ever seen (for example, the one with Syrinx and Daphne being chased at once).

But, in its attempt to be univerally acceptable, it has not only toned down the violence against women (which I don’t think is so bad anymore),  it also pretty much erased any mention of myths that would now be considered queer. (And I use that word as a blanket term that includes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, etc.) So, you don’t see any of the stories from my post on Transgender Myths To Know. And you don’t see any of the stories that turn up in Lovers’ Legends Unbound. And Hylas and Ganymede are turned from the beloveds of heroes (Heracles) and gods (Zeus), to mere victims of nymphs and cupbearers.

Some day, I have just decided, I’m going to write a book.* It will not be an attempt to replace D’Aulaires, but it will reject their silencing of those stories. The Greeks didn’t view Zeus or Heracles as “gay” or Caenis as “trans” but our current definitions made them invisible (at least partly). If I write a children’s book, something like The Other Greek Myths, I will attempt to do much of what the D’Aulaires did so successfully. I have no goal to shock, and my intent is not to preserve an ancient Greek way of life, but to use the myths as we have always done, to highlight stories we find relevant. There is, for the first time in a long time, room for such a book (thanks to books like And Tango Makes Three), and, with the help of an artist (maybe I could convince someone like Erika Meriaux to jump on board?) I think it could be something really special.

*The 13-year-old in my head makes me add that I’ll include a note for grown ups at the end contextualizing the thing.

This is a repost from Mahud’s Between Old and New Moons.

The Topic for the Mythology Synchroblog is Mythical Monsters and Otherworldly Entities.

The Mythology Synchroblog is open to anyone who has an interest in mythology and/or Paganism. So, Pagans, if you wish to draw upon your own experiences if you have ever encountered such beings, that fine. Personally, I’ll be coming from a purely mythological stand point.

It would be a great help if would leave a comment, letting us know you would like to participate. Thanks!

Deadline 1st December

Please post your contributions on the 1st December and include a list of everyone’s posts somewhere in your entry.

Previous Mythology Synchrobloggers

• Dream Builders
• Quaker Pagan Reflections
• Executive Pagan
• Mythphile
• Aquila ka Hecate
• Symbolic Meanings
• ReligionThink
• Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism
• When Isis Rises
• Pitch313
• FULL CIRCLE CENTRAL
• Druid’s Apprentice
• Between Old and New Moons
  
• the dance of the elements
• Manzanita, Redwoods and Laurel
• Druid Journal
• Goddess in a Teapot
• Politics and Polytheism
• Hawk’s Cry: The voice of a witch
• Pagan Dad
• Gorgon Resurfaces
• Bubo’s Blog
• Many Questions

–

My previous synchroblog posts are:

Otherworlds Synchroblog: Olympus

The Dual, Part Duo

The Dual

Motherhood, the Sychroblog

Ge, Gaia, Gaie: Earth

I’ve been tagged. It’s a meme that I got from Stregheria Pratica (an awesome witchcraft and spirituality blog that stretches my knowledge of romance languages to read without Babelfish’s help). Here’s how to play:

1. Link you the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six Random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and them link you.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave comment on to their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Random things are as follows:

I have a cat named Nikos. It’s a common enough name, but I decided to name him that after Athena Nike, except he’s a boy, so I masculinized it (is that even a word?).

When I started this website at 13, I chose the name “Ailia” because I thought it was prettier than “Stheno” (my original pseudonym choice). I later realized how close it is to Dune’s St. Alia of the Knife, but I wasn’t awesome enough to know that at the time.

For the first time in my life, I live in a place with such a black sky and so many stars that I can identify constellations other than Orion and the Big Dipper.

I really like painting and knitting even though I haven’t done either for a long time.

I have always secretly wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons.

When I was a little girl, I dressed up like Sybil Ludington on the anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment and marched around my neighborhood with some friends and my mother (dressed as Susan B. Anthony) carrying signs exhorting everyone to give us women the right to vote.

And now, I tag Lord Alford, J. Harker,  Mahud, Aquila ka Hecate, Sarah, and A. Venefica to get random. If you don’t want to play, I totally understand, but I’m trying to build community here people!