Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess

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

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

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

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

Women in Celtic Myth

and the beginnings of a Gallery of Celtic Women.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Gut reaction, without thinking about it too much: Which are better, multi-generational households or nuclear familes? Why?

A big controversy in scholarship on the Roman family (and history of the family in general) is whether multi-generational households or nuclear families were the norm. At stake, as so often, is not simply accurate reconstruction of historical reality, but coded policy prescriptions for the present. Scholars from the left and the right have been curiously united in arguing that a) in the pre-modern/pre-industrial period, multi-generational households were standard, and b) that was way better than the situation we have now. Those on the left see multi-gen. units as a healthier, more supportive way to live; Marxists in particular regard the nuclear family as an artifact of the rise of industrialism, which separated the locus of production (the workplace) from the locus of reproduction (the home), with all sorts of negative consequences. Meanwhile, right-wing historians envisage a golden age of multi-generational families headed by a strong patriarch, in which a strong division of gender roles was maintained, children respected and obeyed their elders, and everyone was generally less individualistic, materialistic, and selfish than they are now. Also, they had less (of the bad kind of) sex. (Apparently this image of the Roman family provided crucial support for the family policies of Mussolini’s Italy.)

If you spend a while reading this stuff, you can start to wonder what anyone ever saw in the nuclear family. I put the same question to my students, and got an interesting range of responses, from the woman who had grown up in a multi-generational household and loved it (more support for everybody), to the one who came from a large nuclear family and so didn’t feel the need for any more people in the house (this is a Catholic school, after all), to those who thought that adding grandparents to their homes would create intolerable authority conflicts. We all thought it could be nice to have the extended family close enough to rally around in times of crisis, but we had different estimates of how close was too close — much like y’all.

P.S. Current consensus, again in case you were wondering, is that nuclear families have been the norm in most times and places, in large part due to simple demographic reality. In ancient Rome, roughly 2/3 of adults would have lost their fathers by age 25; it was difficult enough to keep two generations alive at once, much less three. Of course, there’s more to it than that — isn’t there always? — but this post is probably long and boring enough already.

*To give proper credit where it’s due, I should note that most of this is drawn from Suzanne Dixon’s The Roman Family. Full treatment of the demographic data is in Richard Saller’s Patriarchy, Property, and Death in the Roman Family.

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This is a guest post by my undergrad Roman Religions professor, Adfamiliares, and she is - as you have obviously noticed by now - the bomb diggity. She has her own blog type thing at adfamiliares.livejournal.com, too!

I’m writing here about what I cared about when I was younger: the Otherworlds of Olympus and Underworld. Most are aware of their existence, but few have any detail, and fewer still can really imagine Olympus, thus my focus today. Part of me would really like to post instead about the world of the Othered silent ancient Greek women, children, and low-status people who never seemed to make more than a cameo in any serious story, but as that is more mundane than the intent I read in Mahud’s invitation, I will save the inspiration for another post.

When Aphrodite was ushered to Olympus by the Horai, what did she see? I always imagined a house on a mountain, like the rich folks in California or Cuzco’s summer palace in The Emperor’s New Groove, but apparently the ancient Greeks didn’t catch that movie. For them the world was a disc with the vault of heaven (including the paths of the sun and moon) above it and Olympus, truly in the Heavens, above that. So, Mt. Olympus both signified the mountain and the sky, and both were the home of the Gods at once. To quote Harris and Platzner, “For many Greeks, the gods’ ultimate home was Mount Olympus; like the ziggurat, Olympus served as an earthly pedestal to which divine beings could descend.”

Yes, yes, but what did it look like?  Well, for one thing, it was sunny. Homer (Il. 749) tells us there was never wind or rain (I TOLD you it sounded like Southern California), but instead of one big palace, each god got dibs on a peak or ravine, with Zeus, of course, in the penthouse at the highest point, and that’s where all the gods met up. They all had thrones and presumably something to house them. Remember, too, that the Horai had to open the clouds to allow people to enter, that’s because the clouds functioned as a form of Gate. Everything else about the place seems to be lost to the ages or left to the individual imagination.

I wanted to write up something about the Underworld, too, since it seems to titillate people’s imagination more, but this is the second week of classes and I’m overwhelmed right now. If you ARE really interested in getting a similar post on the Underworld, let me know. It would probably be much longer, though, since there are many more extant sources.

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Other participants in this synchroblog include:

1. Faith and the Hero’s Journey (Hawk’s Cry: The voice of a witch)
2. Journeying to Otherworlds: Access Denied (Between Old and New Moons)
3. Lions at the Door (Quaker Pagan Reflections)
4. More Than These Words (Aquila ka Hecate)
5. Journeying to Otherworlds (The Dance of the Elements)
6. Mythology Synchroblog 4: Children’s Story for Mabo (Pagan Dad)
7. Underground Ruminations (Gorgon Resurfaces)
8. Synchroblog: Journeys to the Otherworld (Bubo’s Blog)
9. Symbolic Saiho-ji and Otherworld Journeying (Symbolic Meanings)
10. Becoming pagan in America - an otherworld journey (Executive Pagan)

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.

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.

_{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}

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.

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.

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.

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

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!