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!
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 »
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.
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!
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.
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.
Despite the fact that we so often refer to the ancient Greeks for our whole obsession with Democracy here in the U.S., most of us acknowledge that it wasn’t all Skittles and Slice. Beyond the obvious difficulties of actually involving the populace, and the relatively short time the radical idea was implemented, exactly who the demos was was also in question. Women were not citizens (so forget Sarah Palin for VP), and thus could not vote (among other things), and the definition of a citizen male wouldn’t be exactly obvious to a contemporary democrat. For example, Barack Obama would not be a citizen in Ancient Greece because his father was not a citizen. Even if he was eligible by lineage, upward mobility from landless, impovershed kid to landed (and horsed, for that matter) man would have been nearly impossible and thus, again, he would not have been a citizen.
And now that I’ve shared that little tidbit, I’m back to my “real” work.
I was playing on Gender Analyzer and discovered that I am a man.
I’m actually not (although I’ve gotten emails from wingnuts telling me I can’t possibly be a woman), but I am extremely curious what the heck it is that makes me sound manly.
I’m taking a class in sociolinguistics now, and really enjoying it. This program would be an interesting thing to write a paper on (not mine though). But I think it would be fascinating to find out what’s involved? And what would such a study have looked like in ancient Greece?
Sadly, I doubt there are enough extant texts to make such a call, but wouldn’t it be interesting to know?
Watch out, Paleothea is about to get partisan. What little readership I have does not come here for this, but this is how I see the world, and yes, I think it relates to ancient Greece.
Women’s health, it is helpfully explained to us, is not like men’s health. For one thing, simply being a virgin past the “appropriate age” (14-17?) makes a girl susceptible to hysteria and suicidal insanity. Hippocrates’ solution to this: “My prescription is that when virgins experience this trouble, they should cohabit with a man as quickly as possible. If they become pregnant, they will be cured.” There are plenty of variations on this them, but it all reinforces the idea of women as, essentially, mothers.
That said, even Hippocrates recognized that pregnancy held many dangers for women. If abortion was anathema (and it wasn’t for everyone, Galen gives a useful prescription of jumping up and down to expel a fetus which he says actually worked in his office when his kinswomen brought in a slave-girl she was prostituting - it wasn’t an act of kindness, the kinswoman just didn’t want to lose her money-maker), it was at least partly because abortifacients were generally so dangerous, including severe bloodletting and “sharp-edged” things that wounded adjacent parts.
Remember, these are people who thought that the womb moved around the body like a furry animal and could be moved back into place (if it had traveled too low) by giving her sweet-scented wine to drink (the carrot) and burning “foul-scented vapours below her womb” (the stick). But damn, at least these people were trying …
Aphrodite, on the other hand, offers Penelope New Life. The myths of the Goddess of Love are in many ways the most applicable to Penelope’s situation. Think, for example, of the fling she had with Ares, the God of War while she was still Hephaestus’ wife, or the fact that it was her intervention that caused Helen to leave Menelaus and elope with Paris, thus beginning the Trojan War. These are examples of Dalliance as described by Nancy Felson-Rubin.
Nevertheless, Aphrodite does not merely advocate free love in this scenario but new marriage. This is particularly noticeable in the quotation below where it is she, and not the Protectress of Marriage (Hera), who petitions Zeus for the marriage of the daughters of Pandareos. When Penelope washes her face in the ambrosia of Aphrodite (18.185), the hardship, the old weighing life she had, falls away and she is born anew, just as the Goddess of Beauty ritually renews herself in the sea.
So if Aphrodite is running the show, Penelope would do well to go ahead and choose one of the Suitors for her husband and start a new life with him. Likewise, if Artemis is running the show, the only option that will bring her relief is a chaste death. Hera, as we saw in a previous post, is not well-equipped to help women in Penelope’s position and indeed, barely manages when her own husband isn’t in eye-sight.
It’s also worth noting that Aphrodite is a powerful goddess, and more of a personality in the Odysseythan Artemis - who, as you may recall from the last post, represents the chaste-death option for Penelope. Helen, who comes down the stairs looking like Artemis, of all people, is the one who makes that power most obvious. Helen takes no responsibility for her behavior; she was forced, she says, by Aphrodite. Poor Penelope. She knows the story of Helen, and that of Klytaimnestra, and so she knows the influences that Aphrodite can have on women’s lives when she chooses to interfere. But she does not know which goddess is running the show in her own life, and is caught in between trying to decide on the correct direction.
Artemis, the Virgin Goddess of the Hunt, is directly, and somewhat confusingly, compared to Penelope. Artemis, most frequently described as hagnê, pure, is alternatively depicted as possessing a particularly lofty stature and as being incredibly deadly, most especially to women . This isn’t surprising, since she is often understood to represent the time in the life of a parthenos, or virgin, directly before marriage: a time as desirable as it is off-limits.
In the quotation I mention Part 1, Artemis offers her “lofty stature” to the daughters of Pandareos but ultimately the daughters died. Penelope actually prays to be destroyed her like them. Felson-Rubin calls this plot-type the Bride of Death but I would combine it with Tease because of the parthenos, or virgin, aspect of the Goddess and what that means. It is worth pointing out that, ultimately, Penelope cannot ask Artemis for the marriage that a virgin girl would be looking forward to. Her husband’s big house and her grown son Telemachus are constant reminders that the only gift Artemis can give to Penelope is the violent one. Death can keep her from “not only an unwanted marriage, but betrayal and infidelity as well” (Felson-Rubin, 181).
If Penelope is like Artemis in the Odyssey, it must be in her longing for Death.
You may have heard by now about Nailin’ Paylin. It’s being made by Larry Flint and that’s really all you need to know.
Although I understand people’s anger, I think that’s exactly what Flint is challenging. I see it as a critique of Palin’s and the West’s (especially the U.S.’s) hypocrisy about sex and sexiness.
What is it that makes her sexual portrayal of herself in beauty contests more acceptable than her portrayal in porn except for societal values about the lines of acceptable sexuality? (Well, that and consent - but that’s why it’s a critique.) As a beauty queen she is like Artemis, irresistible but untouchable (think of Actaeon, people). But make her Aphrodite’s devotee, as porn star/sex worker in this scenario, but it could as easily have been as sex education advocate (remember Jocelyn Elders‘ ideas about masturbation?), and she would be perceived as vulgar. As she is now, beautiful and inaccessible but also the “ideal” mother, Palin is a walking reinforcement of patriarchal standards of acceptable womanhood; she’s a friggin’ Hestia for goodness sake.
As for the inclusion of Condi and Hillary, these two women have generally been cast in our culture as Athena and Hera, respectively. Condi as the asexual woman who is the Man’s scion (Bush as Zeus here) extending His power; Hillary as the long-suffering wife who cannot be sexy except in the context of her stereotypically sexist relationship (Bill Clinton as Zeus here) and longs for ultimate power in her own right. And yet, sadly, they are both the symbols of success for woman in this culture. This video turns that on its head, challenging public conceptions, expectations, and values that are sadly consistent with some from ancient Greece.
By thrusting them without consent into Aphrodite’s realm, Larry Flint reminds us of the violence inherent in our current portrayals of acceptable gender and sexuality. If we could embrace Aphrodite - the erotic - in our public and private lives, it would take us far closer to the equality we long for.*
I figure most of my readers are going to disagree with me, and that’s fine. One of the best things about a video like this, no matter where you fall on the issue, is the discussion that it motivates. Passionate discussion. Because sex matters and gender matters and they matter even more in politics, the public forum for our national identities.
*And there, too Aphrodite is should be our teacher as longing, himeros, is under her jurisdiction.
Hera is in some ways the least obvious connection to Penelope. Penelope is not described as being like her, and Hera’s part in the Odyssey is much smaller than in the “prequel,” (six mentions to the Iliad’s 115 or so) having no active role at all and only passing mention in metaphor. That said, it is still possible to construct a specific identity from the examples.
It is significant that three out of the six examples are formulaic phrases actually referring to Zeus: “Zeus, mighty husband of Hera.” It seems from the construction that the Father (that would be Zeus) gains power from his association with her, and reinforces the common theme of homophrosyne - this awesome idea of being-of-the-same-mind - and the unstoppable power of a strong couple. The other two examples are describing the protection that Hera has provided for other heroes, specifically Agamemnon (you remember his wife Clytemnestra?) (4.512) and Jason (impossible to forget his fling with Medea) (12.55). These examples emphasize the savior aspect of the goddess, and one that is particularly focused on a safe nostos, or homecoming.
In many ways, it would be easy to imagine this story as the brainchild of the Queen of the Gods (Hera) instead of the virgin Goddess of Wisdom (yep, Athena! the real power in this story). This connection is only heightened by the passage quoted in part 1, where Hera gives Clytie and Cameira (the daughters of Pandareos) form and prudence, the two things for which Penelope is most renowned. In fact, it would be easy to see the relationship of Penelope and Odysseus as mirrored in the relationship of Hera and Zeus (at least as far as that relationship is portrayed within the Odyssey).
But Hera’s domestic power, while able to keep kings safe through scary straits, is not equipped to aid women with long-term separation from their partners (as is the unfortunate case of Penelope). In fact, as we see in other myths, Hera is often involved in tracking her wayward hubby down - something that is certainly not an option in Penelope’s position. Because this plot-type is not even among the options listed for Penelope, Hera’s role in the Odyssey is relatively minor, but she still serves to remind the audience of the “connubial fidelity” both she and Penelope embody.
This book is the bomb. Really. If you are truly interested in ancient Greek myth, you should own this book. It’s typically used as an college textbook in Mythology classes and has 1105 pages, but if you need just one reference, this should be it.
It has everything. It quotes big chunks of original text (including the complete Medea and the Bacchae), it relates Greek stuff to other cultures (Egyptian, Babylonian, etc.), it puts a significant amount of information about the goddesses into the patriarchal framework of the culture, it talks about the feminist alternatives, it has new archaeological and anthropological studies on the Great Goddess, it has a section on modern European and American art, it even has a website where you can go for chapter outlines, quizzes, and learning objectives making it a fantastic resource for teachers.
And yet, for some reason, I virtually ignored this book for the past 7 or so years. I don’t know why. I was young and foolish and thought I knew all there was to know (hey, I was literally a sophomore). I didn’t even include it on this site’s References page.
It has theory, it has original sources, it has information about worship, it has pretty color pictures. My goddess, what is NOT to adore?
So please, if you read this blog because you are genuinely interested in Classical Mythology, do yourself a favor and go buy this book. It cost me $100, but you can get it used for $30 over at fetchbook.info. I swear that I’m not taking bribes to write this, I just care about your access to quality stuff.
There are a bunch of fascinating women - human women - in Greek myths. Though the overwhelming majority seem to be tragic figures (when they’re not totally insignificant), there are plenty of exceptions to the rule. If you’re not already familiar with people like Andromeda, Danae, Niobe, and Semele, you should go spend some time reading up on the famous ones. If you don’t believe me about the tragic part, then you should go read the Catalogue of Suicidal Females over at Diotima. If, however, you are like me, and slightly depressed by reading the myths of the mortal women, read on.
I’ve come to some dangerously general conclusions about Goddesses, Amazons, Monsters (especially the female ones) and Nymphs, but thusfar any major generalization about the mortal ladies has escaped me. Some women - like Clytemnestra and Medea - have got the scary woman with power thing going on. Lots of ‘em - like Jocasta and Pelopeia- have got the tragic victim thing down to a science. But there are plenty that do not fit into these common roles at all.
Let me give you a few examples to consider. Semiramis was raised by doves and became a great adviser to a king and, despite some crappy stuff in her personal life, lived a long life in which she dispensed wisdom until she died. Penelope, the wife of Odysseus of Odyssey fame, faced the challenge of being a single parent while her man was at war for 20 years and dealt with the complicated situation of remarriage with aplomb and craftiness. Helen (of Sparta and Troy) was such a complex mythical figure that she continues to stump young students and crusty old professors alike (read up!). And even some of the simpler stories like that of Iphis and Ianthe and Leucippe (with pirates!) are impossible to reduce to mere reflections of a patriarchal storytelling.
It seems like the majority of people visiting this blog are looking for archetypes rather than entertainment, and it is true that when it comes to essentialism the human chicks have less to offer. However, I invite you to give those stories a second read; the mundane dames of Greek myths have a depth that the goddesses often fail to achieve and offer much to the understanding of the human experience.
Carol P. Christ, author of (most recently) She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World and (most famously) Womanspirit Rising, has been blogging over at Women and Spirituality for some time now and I think she’s great. Over the past month or so she’s written a series of posts (1, 2, and 3 with promises of more) on the dismissal of the Goddesses of prehistory that I think ought to be extremely relevant to those who makes their way to Paleothea.com. Although her posts inspired this one, I’m not going to attempt to summarize her; I strongly recommend reading at least one of her entries yourself (those who took part in the Dualism synchroblog might be particularly interested in the second part).
It makes a great deal of sense to me personally that separating one’s worship from oneself physically - either by worshiping an utterly non-corporal deity, or locating the deity far from one’s experience of the world (e.g. in Heaven), or theologically denying physical experience (such as death) - might put the feminine divine at a disadvantage. As a woman, I root a number of my conceptions of my own gender in my body’s (hypothetical) ability to produce life. I am extremely aware that this has been a crucial definition for my foremothers. Thus it seems “only natural” that feminine deities - particularly the Great Ones - should include as a crucial element of their identity the creation (and potentially destruction) of physical life.
However, I cannot escape nagging doubts on a couple of points: 1) menstruating and having a uterus are cool and all, but they are not all that is required to give life any more than sperm is (as those ancient Greek doctors I mentioned last week seemed to suggest), 2) the relegation to the principal role of Mother and only secondarily anything else (if at all) feels like something feminists should be rejecting, and 3) different cultures have vastly different ways of connecting things like birth, death, and eternity with their spirituality. The final point is the most important. Although it is obvious to me (again, personally, feel free to see things differently) that conceptions of the divine in religions such as most branches of Christianity reject both the Feminine and the Physical as one, that does not mean that embracing one (such as having a Great Goddess) inherently requires the celebration of the other (the physical body, birth, etc.).
Ironically, my last entry was all about how the two concepts are inextricably caught up in each other in ancient Greek mythology, particularly for women and goddesses. But here I want to take a step back and think about what a Great Goddess, or simply a non-patriarchal goddess, might have looked like or felt like to the women and men who worshiped her. And though I am pretty convinced that some experience of Athena was as I described it in the last post, I am equally sure that there were others who experienced her utterly differently.
This was a tough post for me to write and I’m afraid I finish with more questions than answers. I am interested in any thoughts anyone else might have on this or a related topic and hope I’ll get a couple of comments on this one.
Go online, and it is easy to find scores of sites dedicated to Athena as the patron Goddess of good feminist neo-pagans. In my opinion, however, Athena was more of a product and purveyor of “the patriarchy” than any other Goddess in the Olympic pantheon. There was no other goddess with such power in the (Athenian) populace, and this came from the very fact that her power was not that of a feminist revolutionary, but rather the embodiment of the patriarchy as the parthenogenic daughter of The Father (Zeus). The oppression of women had been Athena’s realm since she founded Athens (and decreed that women shouldn’t vote or be citizens). Sex was an important tool for that oppression (keeping in mind the fact that gender identity and erotic desire can and should be distinguished) as illustrated in the myths surrounding the House of Athens. Read the rest of this entry »
The dictionary definition I like best is, “[thon-ik] of or pertaining to the deities, spirits, and other beings dwelling under the earth.”1 This doesn’t mention death, but the whole “under the earth” part should clue you in. I use “chthonic” as frequently as I can in real life, although I generally avoid it on the site because it’s not a terribly well-known word (the spell-check on my blog refuses to recognize it) and the site’s supposed to be ACCESSIBLE. Nonetheless, people who come to the site should know the word, because it has everything to do with why I made the site in the first place.
The principal myth2 of Demeter and Persephone, for example, is all about how the daughter of an earth and fertility goddess is taken into/under the earth to become the queen of the dead. It’s hard to get more chthonic than that! Stories like these, where female deities are the mysterious connection that humanity has with its mortality - birth, sustenance, and death - are excellent examples of how divine feminity has been presented by all kinds of people, both patriarchal and feminist. Some are identifying the feminine with bestial nature and evil in contrast to the supremity of heavenly gods while others are “reclaiming” our connection to a tangible power.
There is plenty of danger in both readings since the interpretations are virtually two sides of the same coin, but it seems likely to me that such connections are as old as the chthonic myths and deities themselves. An enormous difference between contemporary Western celebrants of such dark, earth, death goddesses and our ancient Greek counterparts is that we just don’t have too many examples to work with!
This site is dedicated to the feminine characters of Greek mythology principally because these have been neglected and forgotten. But as the women have been forgotten, so have the chthonic deities and myths that have formed such a crucial part of so many cultures’ religions.
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!
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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!
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!
Artemis
hology classes and has 1105 pages, but if you need just one reference, this should be it.
