Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess

Okay, I give up. What do YOU want to read about in this blog? The only responses have been to the entries requesting your perspective on the donation thing (very helpful responses, by the way!), so now I am asking for advice again.

This is not a personal journal. Nor is it a particularly scholarly blog, since I believe that the majority of visitors to paleothea.com are beginners in the ways of Greek myths. (Feel free to correct me!) So I’ve tried to write a couple of posts that would help people interested learn a little more about the culture whence these myths came. But maybe that’s a bad idea. Maybe beginners really aren’t that interested in a blog full of introductions …

So if you read this semi-regularly - heck, I’ll take more than once - drop me a line and tell me what you were hoping for.

We are talking about Athena, Artemis, and Hestia here, folks: the Three Virgin Goddesses. At the risk of presenting a depressingly simplistic argument, I’m gonna do my best to give you a starting point for thinking about these things. Remember, now, that ancient Greece was a pretty patriarchal collection of cultures.

So the thing these ladies had in common was that they weren’t interested in having sex with men - but beyond that they were quite different. Athena was kinda butchy with her interest in war and adventure. The perfect daughter (at least for a patriarch) she owed all of her allegiance to Daddy and that would never change because no husband - or even a mama, in her case - would compete for her attention. As a virgin, she represented an ideal of daughter-hood.

Artemis, on the other hand, was super hot. Tomboy? Sure, but in a sexy sort of way. She ran around in her short little skirt hunting deer, she bathed naked in woodland streams and ponds, she was the sort of untouchable beauty you might “flay the flayed dog” to late at night. But just as virginal daughters were supposed to be attractive but off limits until the deal was sealed with a wedding, so too was Artemis off limits. This stage - tight-bodied virginal beauty - is perfectly represented by the goddess.

And finally, Hestia. Dear Hestia. She was a virgin, but only because the alternative seemed so darn complicated. She represents the perfect homemaker. The problem with women is that once they’re sexually active, you can’t tell WHO they’ve slept with. Also, who knows whether a mother’s allegiance will be to her children or her husband (dangerous for a patriarch - see Rhea). And what about her familial obligations to her father? Hestia circumvents all of these issues. She is literally the hearth, the center of the home, and her virginity is an example of the problematic role that women played in such a patriarchal culture.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I have written this site with a very intentional (and occasionally annoying) voice. It’s on purpose. It was written that way 1) so that you won’t get bored reading it, 2) so I won’t get bored writing it, and 3) so that it will be perfectly clear that the “real story” - the one that is “without bias” - ain’t written here.

I already talked a little about that in the first entry, so I won’t spend a bunch of time talking about how I think that retelling someone else’s story without bias is pretty much impossible. Instead, I’d like to tell you a little about my own approach to these stories, and how that affects what you end up reading on the site.

First of all, I started this site as a young feminist. I believed - still believe - that women’s stories are under-represented (not just in Greek myths, of course), and that sharing privileging the myths involving women is a necessary step towards empowerment, etc. It’s all about having a voice, man. Of course, when it comes to ancient Greek myths, even the information about goddesses and heroines is written by men. There are a couple of rare exceptions (check out Women’s Life in Greece and Rome if you’re interested), but mostly we just have to take advantage of the fact that women at least had some place in their myths, even if we don’t get to read too many female mythographers. This was the premise upon which I began building paleothea.com - tell the stories, and let women people (re)tell and (re)interpret them as they may.

I am not the first person to do this, of course. There was a movement, back in the day, towards imagining a matriarchal prehistory (thanks to people like archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, writer Robert Graves, and a number of different spiritual feminist writers - more on that in a great book by Cynthia Eller) to give women powerful roots and proof that a peaceful feminist future is possible. I was ready to believe it myself, as a teen, and it influenced a great deal of what I put on the website. You can still see remnants of that approach in a number of my descriptions.

By the time I was in college, however, I began to feel that trying to imply tens of thousands of years of prehistory (called that because of the gross lack of evidence for uncovering cultural beliefs, ideas, and events) was pretty silly when there was so much out there from a mere two to four thousand years ago that we still haven’t got sorted out! The more I read in Greek and English from original sources, and by smart (and sometimes very progressive) academics, the more I came to appreciate how profound the patriarchy of ancient Greece was. That means, more or less, that I also came to believe that even the stories of strong and powerful women (like Athena, Artemis, Clytemnestra, the Amazons) are also reproducing and representing a patriarchal system.

Don’t fret! Agency is totally still an option within a patriarchal system, and in my opinion, is far more inspiring (and more relevant). And even though the myths weren’t originally meant to empower women, that doesn’t keep them from being crazy cool stories (or from being potentially empowering).