Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess

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 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.

You may have picked up from previous entries that I really dig Penelope, but now you’ll start to understand why in this series!

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There has been a great deal of work done in recent years to “reclaim” the Goddess. Women look to Her for spiritual guidance, for wisdom, for empowerment. They call out to Her by her various names. I myself participate in this new Goddess movement to some degree and it makes sense to me to see goddesses as archetypes guiding or reflecting human behavior. Furthermore, this seems to apply flawlessly to reading the Odyssey, especially as relates to the much-debated action of Penelope.

There are many goddesses in the Odyssey, Kalypso and Kirke come to mind, but it is the Olympian goddesses - specifically, Hera, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Athena - who so nicely guide our perceptions of Penelope and the outcome of the story. These four only show up once all together, in the context of Penelope’s confusing metaphor describing the daughters of Pandareos:

Hera gave them form and prudence surpassing all other women; pure Artemis gave them an lofty stature, and Athena taught them to do renowned works. When bright Aphrodite had ascended to holy Olympus seeking the accomplishment of a blooming wedding for the girls from thunder-loving Zeus (for well does he know everything, both what shall happen and what not happen to mortal humans) the Snatching winds came and snatched them away and gave them to the hated Furies to care for.

Each of these goddesses has a different gift to give the unfortunate Pandareides and they each have a similar role in the greater telling of the Odyssey. Nancy Felson-Rubin has already done a good job of identifying plot-types, however, by seeing the role of each goddess tied into the story more clearly, the function of those plot-types takes on a different meaning. Felson-Rubin states, “Until 23.205 [the end of the Odyssey] even the knowing reader feels suspense as to whether Penelope or Odysseus will happily reunite,” but I hope to show that what the audience, and the reader, feels is not suspense but empathy, suspense being impossible in a story where the end is known. And with a story this famous, who could fail to know the end?

Felson-Rubin, Nancy. “Penelope’s Perspective: Character from Plot.” Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays. Seth L. Schein, ed. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1996

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Coming soon: Part 2 - the roles of the Goddesses

Here’s whatcha need to know:

• The Underworld is where people’s souls go when they die. All people, good and bad. It is, unsurprisingly, located under the world we inhabit
• It is not Hell and people aren’t generally punished (with a few exceptions)
• It is shady and dark and covered in boring flowers called Asphodel except for the Elysian Fields which are bright and sunny, but only really special people get to go there (like Achilles and Helen)
• It is ruled by Hades, and is sometimes confusing referred to simply with his name (or more often the genitive form of his name in ancient Greek) and he has a big scary three-headed dog
• It’s also ruled by Persephone, who got stuck there by eating a pomegranate, but neither she nor Hades judges you, they have three other guys for that.
• Once you die you get coins put in your mouth to pay the Ferryman who’ll take you to the Underworld; he will not take you back.
• Once you get there, if you’re normal, you drink the Kool-Aid the River Lethe and forget your life, which may be a blessing; also you may get back some memory if someone (like Odysseus) digs a trench and gives you some blood
• Going there and getting out is a good way to know you’re a hero

This is a little different if you’re into Orphism in which case the Underworld is just a place to go and get reincarnated until you’ve wiped sin from your soul (the sin of the Titans, from whose ashes humans are born in the Orphic tradition, eating the murdered Dionysus).

It is a fascinating place and the center of lots of chthonic power, but you alread know about that from reading Dark Earthy Death Goddesses and How To Pronounce “chthonic”.

[EDIT] Check out an awesome post about the mythic descent to the Underworld and its gender ramifications over at Gorgon Resurfaces.

I just got an email that brings up what I think is a very important point, and one that I give a great deal of thought to. Rather than attempt to summarize, I will include the email and my response in their entirety here.

From: JC
Subject: Goddess Aphrodite
To: ailiathena@yahoo.com
Date: Monday, August 18, 2008, 5:19 PM

I was very disappointed in your wording describing the most elegant and beautiful Goddess ( in my opinion), Aphrodite.  Although, the summary of her “life” is well thought out and the pictures are beautiful as well.

I began reading the  Marriage portion first and I was surprised, to say the least, that you used “low class” words such as;  “getting it on”, “pissed off”, “laughing their butts off”.  Needless to say I stopped at that point and had to write hoping you will replace the words to be suitable for the lovely and fair, Aphrodite.

I hope that when I return the Goddess Aphrodite can and will be proud.

Dear JC,

I think I appreciate where you’re coming from. It sounds - please correct me if I’ve misunderstood - that my descriptions seem to you to be disrespectful to Aphrodite and perhaps also to Her worshipers.

It is a difficult thing for me to respond to. On the one hand, the last thing I would ever want to do is insult anyone LEAST  of all a goddess. Furthermore, I certainly agree with you that Aphrodite is undeniably beautiful and classy. On the other hand, my choice of words is not unintentional, nor are my irreverent - or “low class” if you prefer - colloquialisms. I have a few different goals with this website, but one of the biggest is to engage younger and less informed readers. Secondarily, I seek to bring some of that ancient mythical world into the realm of possibility for contemporary readers, well-read or otherwise. And finally, obviously all of the myths that we have recorded come to us from aristocratic ancient Greek writers, but the deities, Aphrodite in particular, were by no means worshiped only by aristocrats. Remember that she is also the patron Goddess of prostitutes and not just upper class courtesans or priestess prostitutes, either. Remembering her as ONLY elegant is, I think, to lessen the profound impact that she had on her celebrants. Beyond that, if you read the myths in the original sources (check out the References page for more about where), I think it is clear that all was not cucumber sandwiches and croquet in many of the myths of Aphrodite (or, indeed, ANY of the Olympian gods).

I hope that you understand why I will not be changing my descriptions and accept my sincerest apologies if they have offended.

Yours,
Ailia

I’m actually not in Ecuador anymore and have successfully moved across the United States to my new home by the University where I’m going for my MA and then PhD. That’s why 1) I haven’t posted recently and 2) I may end up punking out on this blog. But here’s hoping I can keep up with it all and keep this baby running.

So anyway, back to the Ancient Greek Ladies. Sort of.

While I was visiting Quito, I encountered the very beautiful Virgin of Quito. I fell in love. This is a virgin who is also called “The Dancing Woman” and “The Woman of the Apocalypse.” It was the latter name that helped me put the pieces together: crown of 12 stars, check; moon under her feet, check; dragon, check; shiny clothes, check; eagle wings, check; this chick is straight out of Revelation! So I dug out my trusty old New Oxford Annotated Bible and read what it had to say.

One well-known version of the story tells of the goddess Leto, pregnant with Apollo [and Artemis, thank you very much], who is menaced by the dragon Python who pursues her because he knows that Apollo [geez, stop forgetting Artemis!] is destined to kill him. Here this material is reinterpreted in terms of Jewish traditions and expectations as the story of the birth of the Messiah.

So there you have it. I’m excited. I love stuff like this. Sychretism=my favorite.

P.S. Do that poll thingie. I don’t feel like this blog fits too easily into any one of those categories, but hopefully you’ll disagree and help me with registering this durn thing in other people’s lists.

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.

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.

_{1. “chthonic.” Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 24 Jun. 2008. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/chthonic>.}

_{2. As presented in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter}

Reposting a bit from On the Road in Virginia: Looking for Gleb Botkin over at A Letter from Hardscrabble Creek.

Gleb Botkin’s Church of Aphrodite lasted from the 1930s to 1969. (He formally incorporated it in 1939, but I don’t know just when it started.)

The church was more Goddess-monotheistic than polytheistic:

Aphrodite, the flower-faced, the sweetly smiling, the laughter-loving Goddess of Love and Beauty, is the self-existent, eternal and Only Supreme Deity, Creator and Mother of the cosmos, the Universal Cause, the Universal Mind, the Source of all life and all positive and creative forces of nature, the Fountainhead of all happiness and joy.

Did I mention this was in Virginia of all friggin’ places? Awesome possum. Go read the whole thing and look at pix and whatnot. Go Aphrodite!

So the other day, I was sitting at the kitchen table attempting to take notes on Eliade’s book when suddenly I was surrounded by children. I had a moment of sympathy for Harriet Beecher Stowe and then gave up my academic intentions and started showing them pictures from my Gallery. My mythically inclined nephew T-, who asks me to tell him myths whenever we drive anywhere, wanted to see pictures of monsters. So I began with the Hydra, Echidna, and Cerberus. At that point, L- sat down with us. L- is the totally awesome ancient wrinkled lady who is deaf and mute and so full of joy and was adopted by my husband’s family three generations ago here in Ecuador. She doesn’t have any formal sign language, but still makes herself more or less understood. So do we. So with the help of the pictures, I started to explain who these monsters were to L- as well as T- and I-, the oldest niece. We moved onto Medusa, the Sphinx, then the Sirens.

At that point, I started to forget what other monsters I- could show (no internet to remind me of the lists I’ve made!) and I- started to get bored. Instead I- asked to see some pictures of the goddesses and I was happy to oblige. When I got to Aphrodite I remembered to explain to L- who she was, so I made as if to pray, then vamped a sexy sort of beauty as best I could. We continued and eventually the kids got bored, but when I turned to L- she asked to see the images of Aphrodite again and again until my laptop ran out of batteries.

Ecuador is about 90% Catholic and there are images of the Virgin Mary everywhere. It occurred to me after that since L- can’t read, and DOES know Mary, it is highly likely that the two have been conflated in her head. Maybe this makes me a bad person, but secretly I think that is AWESOME.

I’ve been taking advantage of my two-month break in the isolation to read books that I’ve previously attempted and utterly failed to complete. Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane certainly falls in that category. The second chapter, “Sacred Time and Myths,” reminded me of a common question I get in emails asking for “when” the gods were born. That question – in many cases – can be answered in the context of other god’s births or a larger myth, but in terms of years? Forget about it.

Adfamiliares (who taught me everything I know about Roman Religion, and is a pretty cool cat) made a comment about how different that is from the Christian tradition. Eliade explains it by saying “Christianity radically changed the experience and the concept of liturgical time, and this is due to the fact that Christianity affirms the historicity of the person of Christ.” (72) But the “sacred” time in which the myths of the ancient Greeks took place “is an ontological mythical, Parmenidean time; it always remains equal to itself, it neither changes nor is exhausted.” (69)

Most of the myths I’ve collected on my site involve mortal men and women set in a past that has the potential for being “infinitely repeatable” in a ritual sense. It does not seem like a big leap, to me, to include in that category such stories as those that make up the narratives of the Eleusian Mysteries, or even the stories like that of Adonis, whose death was also ritually noted each year.

But Eliade suggests that “we moderns” cannot possibly appreciate the transportation via ritual and myth into the eternal sacred time of our foremothers and fathers. I think, however, when I tell the myths to my nephews and nieces, they are as transported as a child 2000 years ago. What do you think?

I am in Ecuador for the next two months with the four small children of my sister-in-law. I wish I knew more Incan myths to tell them – I’m gonna spend some time on Encyclopedia Mythica soon – but since I don’t, I’ll work with what I know. My niece (the oldest, at 9 years old) got a copy of D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths for Christmas last year, so we can talk about some of the gods and goddesses now and she already knows their background stories. But when she asked me to tell her about Greek Religion this afternoon, I found myself at a bit of a loss.

My niece is Catholic, although I’m not, and I am trying to be respectful of the religious education she is currently receiving. Her parents are smart, and very open to her learning about different traditions, but obviously they want her to understand why they have put their faith in their God and no others.

So she asked me, and when I hesitated she answered her own question, throwing her hands wide and saying almost scornfully, there’s Gods and Gods and Gods. Her grandfather, a very well read man himself, agreed with her saying, “they seemed to make up a god for everything.”

Well. I am not a neo-Hellenist, but I was indignant. “Perhaps,” I said, attempting to keep the frustration out of my voice, “they saw God in the world around them.” It was a gross oversimplification that almost made me cringe, but it had an effect. Suddenly it didn’t seem to her like these were simple uneducated people without the benefit of her theological background, but people just like her with a different perspective. In short, people she could learn from. And the myths – though still not the same (nor should they be taken as such) as the biblical cannon she is learning – began to earn her respect as meaningful to those people who told them.

I planted strawberries today and had a religious experience.

You should understand that in my life planting strawberries is an extreme rarity, whereas religious experiences occur almost hourly. Posts like this one will be even more uncommon, I’ll leave them to blogs like When Isis Rises or Panthea.

Anyway back to my life. I love nature in theory. I don’t mind being dirty, I used to really enjoy hiking as a kid and I imagine that I would enjoy gardening if a) I lived in one place long enough to plant something and see it bloom and b) that place had land attached to it. So today when blueberry and strawberry plants arrived at my dad’s place and I set about planting them for him (he and my stepmom are driving across the country), I didn’t think it would be so bad.

I was wrong. It was terrible. I had no idea where the plants should go, no idea how deep to plant them*, if water was needed in what amounts and at what point in the process. I was pissed that this hadn’t been explained to me in detail, annoyed that I was surely going to be blamed when they failed to produce fruit - if they were even alive by the time Dad returned!

And then a change came over me. And even though it’s spring, not fall, here in D.C., I had Demeter in my mind. Suddenly the exact level of the dirt compared to the point where root met stem seemed less important. Instead I was, if not amazed, at least proud to have my fingers in the dirt contributing to the life cycle of another of the Earth’s products. If the plants die - and they might yet - there are plenty of critters to appreciate their decline. On the other hand, the power of life in those things, while fragile in some ways, is also pretty friggin’ tenacious!

So, I will never understand the impact of the Eleusian Mysteries on the ancient Greek populace, but today I was glad that at least I grew up on the stories of the Goddess of Agriculture and of Her relationship with the soil-tilling men and women who worshiped her. I am pleased that we still find a way to remember and teach each other that not all gods live in Heaven, far away from the planting of strawberries.

*Yes, I realize this information can probably definitely be found online, but my hands were already dirty and I was lost in my own frustration.

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.

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.

The Theogamia was this ancient Greek festival celebrating, literally, the gods’ marriage. All the rituals took place in the temple of Hera, and the whole thing appeared to be in honor of the goddess in her role as Protectress of Marriage. Now, when we talk about Hera these days, we tend to discuss her primarily as the shrewish cucquean who caused so much trouble for Zeus’s flings and for Heracles. But despite the common depiction of her as vindictive and vain and her marriage as a battleground, there are still myths in which she and Zeus are assumed to have a solid relationship.

Furthermore, she’s a goddess that women can identify with, she works hard, not just to get rid of the competition, but to make herself the best wife she can possibly be. She bathed once a year in a sacred spring to restore her virginity - that oh-so-important status for Greek women - and even borrowed Aphrodite’s divine girdle to make herself extra sexy for her man.

The Theogamia, says Mikalson in The Sacred and Civil Calendar of the Athenian Year, may have been celebrated exclusively by women. It seems possible that if ever having only myths written down by male authors would make a difference in the illustrating a particular goddess, it would make a difference in the imagining of Hera. What I wouldn’t give to be able to travel back and meet a woman celebrating this festival and ask her what myths the millenia have allowed to fade. The Theogamia was celebrated on the 27th of the month of Gamelia - the lunar month generally associated with January - and I think that would make the correct time to celebrate it right about now!