Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess

There are two festival days in the ancient Greek lunar month of Thargelion (closest to the month of May) that celebrate spring cleaning. Will it surprise you that they are both celebrated by women? I am about to pick up and move my home and - though I tend to be a total mess usually - suddenly I find myself imagining what it would take to really give my rugs a good scrub.

The first holiday is the Kallynteria in which “women sweep out the temple of Athena, and Her eternal flame is refilled and relit by the priestess.” It takes place on the 22nd day of the month, but your guess is as good as mine as to when that would fall this year.

The second, falling only three days later, is called the Plynteria and is the goddess’s bathday. The goddess, in this case, still being the Athena Polias, for whom the city of Athens is named. The very modest goddess is stripped of her clothes and jewelry by the participating women, then She is taken down to the shore and washed - but only the few select are allowed to see her naked.

Happy Spring Cleaning everyone!

P.S. Thanks to Iakkhodotos for the info on these!

Thanks to A. Venefica’s synchroblog, I now see the dual everywhere I go. So, I’m doing a second installment on the topic, this time about a more popular topic: toin theoin. That is, the two deities known to be Demeter and Persephone. As in my last post on the dual, the form enhances the inseparability of the two rather than their estrangement. And, as before, it enhances the pain of their forced separation, because it is their separation that is at the center of their myths.

The fact that these two important members of the pantheon are female is, unsurprisingly, very exciting to many women today. It definitely excites me! We are lacking feminine representation in the Abrahamic religions (you know, Judaism, Christianity and Islam), and there have been many eloquent calls to remedy that.* However, that is not what appears to have excited the ancient Greeks, Carl Kerenyi says,

Everyone knew that the two deities were goddesses. The stress, as far as the public was concerned, was more on the dual. As soon as initiates entered the sphere of the aporrheta [the law that keeps the Big Secret], they actually encountered even more deities. And it is not theoretically excluded that in the arrheton [Big Secret] the Two became One.**

I think this is a much more traditional representation of duality, with Demeter “turned outward” and her Daughter with changing (secret?) names and shame and an underworld domicile. It might be an oversimplification of Kerenyi’s message, but it appears that it is the Girl (Kore/Persephone) who puts the mystery in the Eleusian Mysteries.

Does this mean that we should extrapolate this Dualism to the rest of Greek mythology? No. There’s a reason that everyone who saw toin theoin (”the two deities”) immediately knew who it referred to, and that’s because it was a pretty unique occurrence.

*Don’t know about ‘em? Start with Womanspirit Rising, then check out Women and Spirituality where a lot of those authors blog.
**The italics are Kerenyi’s, as is all of the information about Demeter and Persephone in this post, and they come from his book Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter.

Dear student,

I am flattered that after looking at my site for maybe 45 seconds, you have decided that your paper would be improved by my help. Therefore, I try not to ignore you when you email me asking for help. However, I would like to offer you a few guidelines for your future petitions for assistance:

1) “Tell me all you know about Amazons” (or “Greek Goddesses” or a major goddess like, say, Athena) should not be the main thrust of your request. All I know about [your ridiculously broad project topic here] could fill a number of books. In fact, it DOES fill a number of books and they are sitting on my shelf. If this is as it appears, and you know absolutely nothing about the subject you are covering whatsoever, do me the favor of reading what I have already taken the time to publish on it before emailing me.

2) Please DO tell me what you already know, and give me at least a general sense of what direction you want to go in. Will you be more or less giving a general summary to your teacher? Are you planning on writing a myth of your own with Amazons/Greek Goddesses/Athena as the main character? Are you planning a research paper on a more specific topic and ifso, what is the general thrust of your thesis? In other words, the more specific, the better.

3) If you have actually got more specific questions (which is great!) please do not make it glaringly obvious that you have actually just transposed the worksheet that was your homework. I will not be responding to emails asking me, “Please list the following: give a brief description of each of the Olympian gods and include their symbols, what their powers are, and what year they were born.”*

4) Although it is sort of hilarious, please refrain from cussing at me in your request.

I’m sure there are other points to remember, but these jump immediately to mind. Of course, there are similar guidelines for people who email me asking me stuff like “what’s your name and how do I cite you” - but that’s already laid out for you in the FAQ, and if your not looking there the chances of you looking here seem slim to none. I feel I should also tell you, dear student, that while many of you actually do write me great questions that I could easily answer, I am not ALWAYS available to write back that very hour. Thus, if your report is due at 9:00 AM Monday and you are writing me a 10:00 PM Sunday, you are very likely to be SOL.

Yours truly,

Ailia Athena

*P.S. What year the gods were born is generally a very silly question anyway. Think about it for a second.

Carol Christ (awesome spiritual eco-feminist author and blogger for Women and Spirituality) just posted on the death of a (Greek) neighbor of hers. (She’s living in Greece.) She says,

My mind went immediately to the explanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries that has always made the most sense to me. According to this theory, the Eleusinian “mystery” was “revealed” when the priestess held up a sheaf of wheat and said words that are echoed in the gospel of John 12:24: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” According to Cicero, the ancient Athenians sowed wheat on graves and called the dead wheatlings. Surely the women of my village did not know any of this, yet they perform gestures far more ancient than Christianity when they place a bowl of wheat beneath the head of the dead woman and later share it with the community of the living.

Read the whole post here.

This is part of a synchroblog led by A. Venefica’s Weblog: Symbolic Meanings. See the end of the post for a list of other participants.

I realize I am taking a risk of immediately losing your attention by starting off my post with a grammar lesson, but the fact is that, in addition to a singular and a plural, ancient Greek also had a dual form. It was used for things that tend to come in pairs, like eyes or oxen. And in a couple of cases its use makes the reader pay close attention to the relationship between two people. Rather than showing great differences, it highlights the closeness of two people.

The two I am currently thinking of are Antigone and Ismene of Sophocles’ Antigone. Therein, Antigone is a pretty rebellious young woman committed to her ideals, regardless of whose feathers she ruffles, whereas Ismene’s ideals seem to be about ruffling as few feathers as possible. Ismene cannot envision how her actions might improve matters, whereas Antigone cannot imagine remaining passive. That the two sisters are only two had come about after the destruction of their house - most recently the deaths of their two brothers at each others’ hands. The two sisters are foils of each other, but what does this have to do with the dual, apart from, you know, reinforcing the bond they share and the pain of a shared fate being ripped from them.

The dual form is not used throughout, beginning, if I recall correctly, with Antigone’s description of their relationship. Its use ends when Antigone points out that each sister, in her own way, appeared noble to some people and Ismene responds, “And yet the error is the same for the both of us.” After she exits this scene, Ismene is silent. Antigone, on the other hand, finally gets her action, and dies her tragic death.

Duality is frequently used to enforce conceptions of opposites, being interested in women in Greek myths, myself, the genders female and male might have been expected. But from what I have been able to determine, those categories - if we choose to limit ourselves to two - simply do not work in a dual structure. My post, therefore, is meant as an invitation to consider duality as a way to explore 1) sameness and closeness, and 2) defining oneself within the truly unique context one lives in. Duality, here, highlights the shared experience of the two daughters of Iocasta and Oedipus, but it also shows how - in their very unique situation (really, how many of you have had a brother for a father and one of two dead brothers left out for dogs to eat?) - they make the choices that define them. Ismene takes up the role of the proper woman and lives in silence while Antigone, not in the least quietly, dies to honor the dead.

P.S. In case you don’t remember the play and want a short summary, you can read mine here.

–

Others participating in this month’s synchroblog include:

1. Archetypes in duality (When Isis Rises)
2. Is duality really a figment of your imagination? (Dream Builders)
3. Duality and Beyond (Quaker Pagan Reflections)
4. Duality - Love With Its Back Turned (Aquila ka Hecate)
5. Seeing Number 11 and Symbolic Duality (Symbolic Meanings)
6. On What Are These Things Woven Back And Forth?: Thoughts on Duality (ReligionThink)
7. Jewish Duality vs. Dualism (Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism)
8. Vertical Dualism of Mother Earth and Father Sky (Mythology Synchroblog 3) (Mythology Blog: Between Old and New Moons)
9. Duality and Creativity (Starweaver’s Corner)
10. Maybe: Pagan Thoughts on the Limits & Uses of Duality (FullCircle* Earthwise News and Notes)
11. Looking Through the Kaleidoscope: Kitchen Thoughts on Duality or Not (Goddess in a Teapot)

Apparently, this is becoming a monthly thing - I wonder who’ll take up the torch next month? So! A. Venefica over at Symbolic Meanings is the lead on this month’s synchroblog, and the topic is DUALITY. Here’s what she’s saying about it:

What do I mean by duality? What are the mythological, spiritual, or symbolic implications posed by duality? For example:

• Good - Evil
• Conscious - Unconscious
• Night - Day
• Male - Female
• Light - Dark
• Sun - Moon
• Up - Down
• Earth - Sky
• Black - White
• Hot - Cold

The possibilities are endless, as the concept of duality weaves itself infinitely throughout our specialized fields of knowledge (in our community’s case: myth, lore, spirituality, dreams, psyche, and uncommon esoteric genre).

So, to all interested & participating bloggers, let your creative writing juices flow into the possibilities of the concept of duality within your chosen niche. Deadline for this post is May 1, 2008.

Check out my post on The Dual to see a list of other participants.And, in case you are interested, we’ve already synchroblogged on Landscapes and Motherhood.

I went to Greece last year and it was amazing. I can’t tell you all about it - it would take too long - but I wanted to at least talk a little about Leto’s tree. It was on the island of Delos, the “floating island” (fixed into place in gratitude) where Leto was finally able to give birth after being chased all over creation by Python. There is some debate about whether or not Artemis was born there - she and Apollo might have been twins, but she was also credited with being midwife at his birth, and some sources say she was born on Ortygia. I like to imagine Leto in labor with her daughter supporting her, and leaning on the knees of the midwife goddess, Eileithyia, under a single palm tree.

And then I went there. The whole island is incredible - nobody lives there, so its just THERE, looking like it hasn’t been touched for a couple thousand years. But the best part of the whole thing (saying a lot because the ruins are the bomb diggity) was the one palm tree in the center of the dried up sacred lake. I sat under it and thought of Leto.

And I’ve now included a picture so that you can think of her, too.

The idea that I want to work with in this post is the role that contemporary art - from incredibly detailed fantasy artists like Howard David Johnson and Vallejo and Bell to the, dare I say, feminist art of painters like Sandra M. Stanton and Hrana Janto to the photography of people like Hein Lass and Suza Scalora - plays in our interpretations and use of ancient Greek myths.

Images on ancient pots definitely played an important role in the dissemination and long-term survival of various myths. During the Renaissance, Classical subject matter became wildly popular and accompanied a resurgence of interest in certain myths as well. And, on a personal level, I was an enormous fan of D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths as a kid (by the way, take the poll down on the right and tell me what myth book you’re most likely to have on your shelf), and always best remembered the stories by their illustrations. To explain a little more academically on why this matters, I’ll use the words of Claire L. Lyons and Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow from their own introduction (NAKED TRUTHS ABOUT CLASSICAL ART):

Because classical works of art have traditionally served as paradigms of Western European values, tastes, and styles in the visual arts, the task of revealing the iconographic messages that naturalize gender and sexual roles is an important one. Such artworks and artifacts were not only primary vehicles of communication in their own time, but continued to have a profound impact for centuries after and still have the power to shape how we see the past and relate it to the present.

As I’ve mentioned in other places, a big part of the reason I began this website is because there really wasn’t much online that combined myth and image, and nothing the way I envisioned it. When I started posting images alongside the descriptions of characters, I started getting flack. The nudity in the paintings (there weren’t photographs back then) was called porn and inappropriate for young people. Later, when I taught mythology to a group of middle schoolers, I was asked not to show them any of the Classical or contemporary art that I had picked out (such racy images as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus at right). Never mind that my focus was on the depictions of such stories through varying media!

The fact is that in ancient Greek art, women are rarely nude - especially goddesses¹ - with the sometime exception of Aphrodite, so all this nakedness appeared to be coming from the artists’ interpretations. In fact, the paintings were depicting a great deal of what their makers felt about stuff like gender and sexuality and class. And, it turns out, a lot of what I thought I “knew” about various women in greek myths, actually came from general impressions I’d gained from illustrations. I loved the strong independent goddesses Athena and Artemis - depicted with their weapons and often alone - but felt a sort of feministy loathing for the naked and weak Aphrodite, covering herself and lounging among her underlings (remember the class thing I mentioned? servants are just not part of my world), and Hera, sitting so isolated and bougie on her throne.

But you’re on the internet! You’re not limited to one artist’s - or even one website’s - interpretation on these matters. Of course, you will still be effected by general trends and what Google’s popularity rankings (or my preferences) present you with, but your opportunities for varying opinions are astronomical! If a picture’s worth a thousand words (and when it comes to mythical characters, I think that might be an understatement), then you’ve got the friggin’ Library of Congress at your fingertips. Take a moment, if you will, and visit my Gallery. Take a look at the incredible range of interpretations of a goddess like Artemis, for example, gives you a wholly different perspective on who she is:

Of course there’s more to be said. But the possibilities for discussion seem overwhelming to me right now, so I’ll leave it at this introduction to the relationship between art and women in Greek myths for today. Has this inspired any thoughts of your own? Are there any iconic images that have really stuck with you? Leave me a comment below.

You may be thinking as you browse the various titles here, why so much sex? The seductive moonings of innocent young landowners ¹, man-on-man lovin’², slave-girl sex (consensual and not)³, cheating wives who murder their husbands and are subsequently killed by their sons (I guess that might be hot to somebody)⁴, ancient lingerie (eww)⁵, sex with castration and trans-sex⁶, man, I even talk about Earth sex⁷! Am I a sex-crazed maniac?

Um, not so much.

Actually, the whole field of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome is so valid that I actually took a class with that very title as an undergrad. And, though many of our founding mothers and fathers weren’t so keen on discussing it (they much preferred to read Thucydides apparently), sex happens a lot. And, with varying degrees of licentiousness, the Greeks tended to include that important facet of their lives in their stories.

Sure, sure, you might protest, but why do you have to spend so much time talking about it? Well, for one thing, because it’s so often misrepresented everywhere. I mean, people love the idea of coming a finding an Archetypal Goddess (don’t let me stop you, more power to you!), but rarely do they bother to look into why Athena, Artemis, and Hestia stay virgins (although the goddesses’ chastity is often cited by such people as proof of their righteous independence). And let’s not leave the blame with just the well-intentioned new-fans, think of movies like the movie 300 with it’s “Athenians? Boy lovers!” comment and, like, every other contemporary homophobic and/or misogynist reframing of the heroic masculine Classical myths.

The truth is, I am personally interested in gender and sexuality outside of the Classical context (in part because people remain as shockingly badly informed about these things in our own times and places just as much as about a culture we are still trying to piece together), so that is definitely part of why I keep bringing it up, too. And, because, hey! Prude or promiscuous, learning about other people’s sex lives is titillating! And finally, perhaps most importantly, there’s so much sex in ancient Greek myths that no collection, no matter how “kid-friendly”, can avoid the subject matter completely. What’s the best way to deal with this? Enjoy it!

It shouldn’t surprise you that vanity appears to have been around as we’ve had records. But what might surprise you is that, just as butts are part of the hotness requirements for women today, butts were also totally “big” back in the day! Breasts were a good thing, too (Phryne’s got her out of a charge of impiety, for example), but today I’m interested in the butt and nothing but. It was all inspired by this picture of Aphrodite on the right.

Have you taken the Quiz to find out which goddess you’re most like? I tend to score as Aphrodite unless I’m feeling really anti-social.

So anyway, that Aphrodite is called Kallipygos - literally, Beautifulbutt. And, although no wise mortal should doubt the attractiveness of the Goddess of Beauty’s derrière, this story comes from a less divine source. Two sisters were arguing in the random way that all sisters do, regardless of what millennium they inhabit, about who had the cuter bottom. To resolve the issue, they stopped their young and rich neighbor - the son of a wealthy landowner - and asked him to decide. Well, he chose for the eldest, but one look was not enough and he decided to go back and marry the girl. He brought his younger brother along to meet her sister and, sure enough, those two fell in love, too!

Well, the two girls (totally country, imagine Elly May from the Beverly Hillbillies) were so tickled that their fannies had brought them such good fortune, that they built a temple to Aphrodite Kallipygos in gratitude.

And, since we’re already on the subject, I adore the part in the Lysistrata when the women start making butt jokes - the implication is that the Spartan men are so into other dudes, that their favorite part about a woman is when she’s facing away from them and they can look at her gorgeous assets and imagine they belong to another gender. Awesome.

The author kindly shared a copy of this book (with accompanying CD performing a retelling of the myths included) with me for my review. It has taken a long time for me to find the appropriate space to do so.

In short, it is a book that retells the Greek myths that involve love between males - god and young man, etc. It does it quite well. It is an attractive book, though not full of pictures or anything like that. The performance on the CD is a great way to listen to myths, since so many of them would have been oral. The myths are totally accessible for beginning myth-heads.

In fact, I think a person not deeply versed in Greek myth already would be the ideal person to buy this since most academically inclined people will prefer the original versions. I imagine that the majority of people buying this book also happen to be gay men. However, I will say that I think people who are expanding their knowledge of myths by reading compilations and such should DEFINITELY get this, as it will emphasize an important aspect of Greek myth that is to easily “forgotten” in other compilations of Greek myths. If you’re open-minded, get it for your kids, too! I mean, it’s no more graphic and certainly no less “authentic” or important a story than any other! And getting an audio version is a wonderful way to learn the myths.

Of course, I feel it is necessary to add that this shouldn’t be the ONLY myth book on your shelf. Beginning or not, invest in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Classical Mythology. And although I haven’t come across a beginner’s compilation of women in Greek myths that I love yet, I definitely think Sue Blundell’s Women in Greek Myths and/or Sarah Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves should be read by anyone wanting a sense of what that world might have looked like for women. I know people will tell you to read Robert Graves (including me in a couple places on the main site), but now I say skip him and Hamilton and go straight to the far hipper and better cited Complete Idiot’s Guide.

So in the U.S. (and lots of other places), we really dig the low-born (and occasionally low-brow) hero. Titanic and Shrek are good examples. But the ancient Greeks had a very different class structure than we do, and you’re really not going to find any good heroes (outside of comedy) that weren’t born seriously aristocratic. The same thing tends to go for women. So when, rarely, we actually see a female slave in Greek myth, she tends to be secretly noble. Like Leucippe and Andromache. Even Briseis - the Achilles’ slave girl in the Iliad - was the daughter of the king of the Leleges at Pedasus.

We rarely see the world from a woman’s perspective, but a lower class woman’s perspective or that of a slave-woman (born a slave) virtually never. Slave-girls were considered to be available for sex pretty much whenever by pretty much whoever (with some exceptions). Whether they were kept concubines, flute-girls (mostly a euphemism), or just unlucky house slaves, sex was wholly outside of their control. Not only were they available to their masters, they were not permitted to form their own sexual relationships without their master’s consent. (27 Pomeroy)

Maybe I shouldn’t even be talking about them, since they are so absent from myth. But they must have grown up with many of the same stories. I wonder, which gods and goddesses they saw as sympathetic. Surely not the aristocratic Athena, but I’d be willing to bet that at least some became supplicants of Aphrodite.

A lot of the important points about motherhood in ancient Greek myth are already made in the posts On Being a Virgin and Ge, Gaia, Gaie: Earth, but to summarize all that quickly, I will quote from Sue Blundell’s Women in Ancient Greece:

There is a marked tendency in Greek mythological representations to divide powerful women up into the sexually active but hostile, and the virginal but helpful. … A child-bearing woman was supposed to come under male domination, and any female who tried to evade this social truth, and to take control of events, was clearly up to no good.

Greek mythology is full of fascinating mothers, but I’m gonna mix things up and talk about a mortal mother for this post. Let’s begin with Clytemnestra. Although she is generally perceived as “bad,” Clytemnestra is a woman - a mother - who is not difficult to understand. How many women would not want to kill the man who murdered their child? And, in fact, Aeschylus (the guy who wrote the plays that tell her story in detail) shows her judgment is not an easy decision.

Clytemnestra says, “To give birth is a dreadful thing; despite suffering badly one cannot bring oneself to hate those she has born.”¹ And then her children, Electra and Orestes plot and kill her to avenge Clytemnestra’s murder of their father, who in turn had sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, in order to get a better sailing wind for heading off to war. The betrayals and deaths ripped the family apart, of course, and Clytemnestra received the lion’s share of the blame for that disruption. But the question of primacy of motherhood vs. fatherhood was painfully drawn out in Aeschylus’ retelling of the story. In the end, the virgin Athena affirms that Clytemnestra’s son (Orestes) was correct in killing his mother to avenge his father, not because of any sort of proper justice, but because Athena has no mother and therefore is on the father’s side.² In other words, it isn’t that women, or mothers, deserve less but that it just works out best for “everyone” if they are not treated equally.

The problem with sexually active women, and therefore with mothers, is that they have all of these emotions. And it makes them dangerous, as I noted initially, to the men who are supposed to keep them in check. It also makes them human.

A good wife, I think we can fairly imagine, would be distraught over the loss of her daughter but ultimately would bow to her husband’s decision. A good woman stays in the background, like Andromache.³ Passive like Alcestis, who agrees to die in her husband’s place, leaving her children with him despite his obvious inadequacies. A bad woman, a bad mother, a bad wife, overwhelmed with emotions, takes action. Medea said, “People say that we women lead a life of without danger inside our homes, while men fight in war; but they are wrong. I would rather serve three times in battle than give birth once.”⁴ And when confronted with her husband’s betrayal, she took her revenge on their most precious treasures: she murdered the children she had risked so much to bear.

Although Clytemnestra is more defensible, it is ultimately not her right to do anything. Clytemnestra acts as a hunter, trapping her husband and murdering him in retribution for killing her daughter (and cheating on her). She acts, in short, like I imagine Artemis might, except that there’s a reason that Artemis is a virgin goddess. Can we anticipate what might have happened if Clytemnestra did not try to take the death-bringer role of Artemis, but instead tried on that of the mourning Demeter? Would people have paid attention or would she have gotten shafted like the Trojan women or the Theban women, who mostly just suffered when men ignored the wisdom of their warnings?

What I think is really fascinating is that as frustrating as the sexism is, it isn’t blind. Alcestis’ decision really sucks for lots of people, even though she’s lauded for making it. Andromache’s ideal behavior looks like it’ll win her a life of slavery. And monstrous though Medea’s infanticide is, you cannot help but empathize with the total helplessness and injustice of her situation. No ancient Greek could have failed to understand, if not wholly agree with, Clytemnestra’s actions. It’s as if the ancient Greeks are admitting that the fate of women is pretty unjust, even though it seems like the best thing to do, all things considered. It keeps civilization moving. It means that vengeance is not unending. But that doesn’t mean it’s fair.

Motherhood was a dangerous proposition for mortals, perhaps a 10-20% incidence of death in childbirth,⁵ and yet, it was generally considered a woman’s most important function. She took great risks to bring children into the world, but she was no walking womb. The myths of mortal mothers remind us not to reduce mothers to frighteningly unpredictable protectors nor long-suffering martyrs. Motherhood was divine, chthonic, incomprehensible, and only a part of what made up a woman.

<sub>Notes:
1. Line 770 of Sophocles’ Elektra, my translation but click on the link to see Sir Richard Jebb’s on Perseus Project.
2.Moreover, Clytemnestra’s actions are associated with a more primal scary chthonic time and defended by the Furies, while Orestes is defended by the total Greek male Apollo. Whether her violence was justified becomes irrelevant, now it seems to be said that in order to maintain Order and Civilization, someone’s gotta get the fuzzy end of the lollipop and doesn’t it make sense that it would be a woman rather than a man?
3. In Euripides’ Trojan Women, Andromache describes her ideal behavior, including “I offered my husband a silent tongue and a calm appearance.” (line 655 or so) That’s the translation on page 11 of Maureen Fant and Mary Lefkowitz’s Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation.
4. Line 246 of Euripides’ Medea as translated in Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation by Maureen Fant and Mary Lefkowitz, page 10
5.Garland’s the Greek Way of Life cited on page 110 of Women in Ancient Greece</sub>

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This is part of a synchroblog on Motherhood. Check out the other posts (* by the ones who have already posted):
The Aquila ka Hecate *
Symbolic Meanings *
Between Old and New Moons*
Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism*
Goddess in a Teapot
Full Circle* Earthwise News and Notes
Religion Think - On the Goddess of Canaan*And even though it couldn’t have been intentionally part of this sychroblog, there’s a great post on Mother and Daughter, Demeter and Persephone over at Mythphile.

Inspired by a comment from Dan over at Xark, I decided that I should write an entry on underwear and ancient Greek myth. From time to time students ask me questions like, “What did Aphrodite wear?” I usually just refer them to vase paintings, but when I sat down and thought about it, I realized how little I know about ancient Greek garb. I am fairly confident that it didn’t look like what they dressed Alexandra Tydings in on Xena: Warrior Princess (even though I can’t resist posting that photo of her!), but was the idea of lingerie something an ancient Greek - perhaps an ancient Greek prostitute - would have understood?

What about your garden variety briefs? Sue Blundell says that ancient Greek women wore woolen rags when they were menstruating, but how would that have looked? What about underwear during pregnancy when incontinence might be an issue.

Ancient Roman women appear to have used leather bras and (wool?) briefs at least in some scenarios, but would the concept of clothes under clothes have been something the ancient Greeks understood? I think this is particularly interesting given that Greek women were not isolated or considered unclean while they were menstruating (unlike in many other parts of the Mediterranean and the world). In fact, as usual, our only discussion of menstruation comes from interested ancient Greek physicians who were drawing conclusions about women’s health. They don’t bother to identify whether their patients have to strip off something for examination.

I have reviewed my books - especially Women’s Life in Greece and Rome, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, Women in Ancient Greece, and Courtesans & Fishcakes - and found nothing (except that woollen rag thing I mentioned above). I have checked Diotima, Perseus Project, and even JSTOR with no luck either. Thankfully, I got some answers in Anahita-L. One person asserts there was no underwear, and they might be right, but my sense is that their opinion stems from a lack of evidence rather than evidence of its lack. But Caroline Tully (through Anahita-l) reports that there IS a book out there that I haven’t read called Women’s Dress in the Ancient Greek World that references G-strings, bras and briefs (also an erotic dancing costume ^.^)!

I leave the rest to your imagination.

Taking my cue from Between Old and New Moons, I want to suggest a synchroblog of my own. I would love to see all of the myth blogs get together to talk about Motherhood. And because my definition is sort of broad, I invite those who prefer to identify as religious and spiritual blogs as well!

Here’s a list of people I particularly hope will participate [there’s an * by those who have already agreed], but of course anyone is welcome:

Between Old and New Moons *
Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism *
Goddess in a Teapot *
Symbolic Meanings *
The Aquila ka Hecate *
Full Circle* Earthwise News and Notes *
Mythphile
Stone Circle
Women and Spirituality (this one seems like a bit of a long shot, cuz they’re, like, famous, but my fingers are crossed)
Frontiers of Wonder
ReligionThink

Half of you I have never contacted, but I hope this invitation makes its way to you and that you decide to play along! Due date … shall we say April 1st?

So, in case it wasn’t terribly obvious, the whole “Sing, Goddess” thing comes from the first phrase found in so many ancient Greek hymns and even epic poems (like the Iliad). The idea is that the Muse/Goddess would be relating the story that follows.

But the thing is, I’m not sure that it’s really doing the trick in terms of telling people what I do here, so I’m experimenting. As I write this, I’m trying on “Blog of the Ancient Goddess” for size (the name “Paleothea” more or less meaning “ancient goddess”), but I am TOTALLY OPEN to other ideas.

I beg you, dear reader, what do YOU think this blog should be named?

ETA: Although I am totally tempted to go with “Goddess Panties,” I’m currently trying out Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess. Still open to suggestion, though!

Really, I tell the whole thing in the Myth Pages, so I won’t retell it in the blog, but I felt I should at least mention it after that post on transgender myths. It could be seen in that light, too, because, you know, the original people of said myth were multi-gendered. But they were also stuck-together people - two souls if you will - so I think it relates a whole lot more to questions of sexual orientation than gender identity (that is, who you like rather than who you are).

But I have to admit the real reason I don’t list it below is that I don’t judge it to be a real myth. And by “real” myth I mean one that ancient Greek people had heard and formed part of their general cultural repertoire. But I might mean something totally different by “real myth” tomorrow, so don’t hold me to it. And it probably wasn’t a real myth because Aristophanes was to the Ancient Greeks what Jim Carrey is to the modern day U.S. (except, you know, much much bigger and a writer not an actor and - damn, that analogy might not work), and nothing like it has been recorded anywhere else.

One of the best ways to put your finger on how ancient Greece thought about what it meant to be a woman is to look at the fascinating myths where characters transition from one gender to another. There are a couple of places on the web that mention myths with transgender characters, most of them to do much the same thing I hope to do, except around trans empowerment instead of just women. I’m not going to tell you that these myths are particularly empowering, or were evidence of a trans-friendly culture as I don’t believe the evidence supports that, but you are free to draw whatever conclusions you like!

1) My favorite is the myth of Iphis and Ianthe. Iphis, by the way, is a gender neutral name. Like Sam. This is relevant because when Iphis was born, her daddy said he would kill the baby if it wasn’t a boy. Mama Telethusa didn’t want Iphis dead, so she told the world she was a boy. Iphis grows up and falls in love with the girl next door. Dad arranges a marriage. And the crisis begins. It ends when mom helps Iphis pray to Isis and she is transformed to the gender she always felt herself to be.

2) You should also get familiar with the myth of Agdistis. It’s a little convoluted, but also fascinating and full of drama - including sex with trees, self-castration, insanity, and a dominatrix of an chthonic goddess (that would be Cybele, by the way). In short, born a hermaphrodite but made feminine by the gods, fell in love with a boy, who went crazy and castrates himself. Agdistis and Cybele are so closely associated that they are often identified as one and the same. The whole thing about her priests castrating themselves (later Roman phenomena) is obviously related. Read the whole myth here.

3) You didn’t think I’d forgotten about Hermaphroditus, did you? You can read that story under Salmacis, but the gist is a besotted (aka, totally horny) nymph overwhelms a young man and forces him to submit to her and the gods help her magically fuse themselves into one being. Generally this means lighter skin and less muscle.

4 ) Caenis. Or Caeneus. The latter is the masculinization of the first that occurred when she claimed her recompense for a brutal rape by the sea god Poseidon. Her recompense, obviously, being that she was changed from a woman to a man “so she could not be raped again.” Since men can be raped, too, being “impenetrable” was thrown in as a bonus and thus Caeneus could not be defeated in battle.

5)Teiresias. Oddly enough, I haven’t managed to include him on my site. I say him because that’s how he was born and died and lived the majority of his life. The only time he didn’t is when goddesses (like Athena and Hera and Aphrodite) got mad at him and decided he needed a better appreciation for what it’s like to be a woman. He bore children from his (her) womb and had really beautiful hair whatnot but eventually was turned back. His main conclusion from his years as a woman? The sex is WAYYYY better for chicks.

6)Leucippus - that would be the name of the daughter of Galateia who’s story is literally exactly the same as Iphis’s above, except that Leto was the goddess responsible for her end transition in time to save the marriage. They had a festival in honor of the stripping of girly-clothes called the Ecdysia, which now is more or less the Greek word for a striptease.

What might the ancient Greeks have thought of this? and furthermore, What should we think of this today? Good questions that I try to address in response to the comments.

We still talk about Mother Earth. She’s a mom in a lot of religious traditions, not just that of the ancient Greeks, and it is also true that there are plenty of earth-related mother-affiliated goddesses in the Classical and pre-Classical pantheon who weren’t the Earth’s personification. But when Mahud, of Between Old and New Moons, suggested doing a synchroblog on Landscapes and Mythology, Gaia seemed to be the appropriate goddess to discuss.

A powerful Gaia does not seem to fit into the heady, patriarchal world embodied by philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and ruled by male gods from their heavenly thrones on Mt. Olympus. As goddesses go, she was much less about the adventuring and talking, and much more about the Being. She was, literally, Earth. Her name, in its various grammatical forms, is the word Earth whether you are attempting to be religious or not. To put it another way: she doesn’t necessarily have a personality because it is more important that she IS the earth, than that she be an actor in stories.

In fact, the only stories in which Gaia plays a really active role are pre-human, namely the creation myths wherein the power of heaven is passed from father to son to grandson, all through the machinations of Gaia and her daughter Rhea. When the story begins, it is a powerful Gaia - a goddess with opinions and the ability to give birth without the aid of a male - who is determining the course of the world. Then her partner tries to stunt that power by stuffing their children back into her womb. She wasn’t having it, and Aphrodite is born from her erstwhile lover’s severed sexual bits. Then, when Rhea and Cronos were more in charge (put there by Gaia), Cronos tries to swallow all of their children. Again, the mother goddesses weren’t having it and they overthrew Cronos and passed the reins to Zeus. When he felt threatened by the same cycle - what with having children stronger than he by virtue of a hardcore mama - he not only swallowed the child, he swallowed the mother. Athena, the product of that union, was very strong but her lack of mother kept her from challenging her father even when he transgressed against the mothers’ wishes (stuffing Gaia’s children back into Tartarus, for example). And Zeus was now doing what only Gaia could do when this started: having babies all by himself. And the cycle ended.

Outside of this creation myth, we rarely see Gaia enter stories, let alone take as active a role as castrater or King-maker. And that is because it is in this story that Zeus, as the leader of the Classical pantheon, usurps the power of reproduction, or fertility, and yes, even of the land itself.

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Other participants in this synchroblog on mythology and the land include:

The Aquila ka Hecate (King and the Land are One)
Symbolic Landscapes of the Norse Mythology (A. Venefica’s Weblog)
Executive Pagan (Nature and Me)
Manzanita, Redwoods and Laurel (The Importance of Local Landscapes)
the dance of the elements (landscape and mythology)
Druid’s Apprentice (Landscape Synchroblogging)
Quaker Pagan Reflections (Gone Away)
Pitch313 (Transcendental Experience Out Of Doors Opens The Gateway To Magic )
Between Old and New Moons
Mythprint