Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess

Hey! Check out this translation of the Aeneid! It’s by a chick!!! (Rare for a bloody epic, and it apparently made a difference.)

Now normally I don’t really get as excited about Roman stuff, but the article over at LanguageHat.com is what really sold me. Looking at the translations (originally reported by Jennifer Howard at the Chronicle Review) next to each other, hers is really far and away the most moving to me.

To reproduce a couple:

Little Iulus, clutching
my right hand, keeps pace with tripping steps.
My wife trails on behind. And so we make our way
along the pitch-dark paths, and I who had never flinched
at the hurtling spears or swarming Greek assaults —
now every stir of wind, every whisper of sound
alarms me, anxious both for the child beside me
and burden on my back. — translated by Robert Fagles (2006)

My little Iulus’ fingers
Were twined in mine; he trotted by my long steps.
Behind me came my wife. We went our dark way.
Before I hadn’t minded the Greeks’ spears
Hurled at me, or the Greeks in crowds, attacking.
Now every gust and rustle panicked me
Because of whom I led and whom I carried. — translated by Sarah Ruden (2008)

Howard lists a few other versions, but I would otherwise pick up Fagles’ edition, myself. So check out poet and classicist Sarah Ruden’s blank verse The Aeneid: A New Verse Translation.

I just got an email that qualifies as one of my favorite ever.

I really am loving your website www.paleothea.com but

you are far too intelligent to use "cuz" for because.

Best wishes,
Sharon

In a way, she’s right. I would never hand a paper into a teacher with “cuz” in it - and I like to giggle to myself about students copying and pasting directly from the site without stopping to correct such silliness - and that’s because I’m generally writing focused formal arguments. This website though? Not so much with the formal.

I imagine that at least part of my audience is made up of adolescents like the ones I try to tell stories to on long bus rides for field trips, etc. You might accuse me of talking down to people - and at one level you’d be right - but what I had in mind more was writing like I actually talk. Recording the stories like I tell them out loud - except that you can’t see my hands flailing or me winking at you. There’s precedence for this - most translations of plays do something similar, and of course not a few of the myths included in Women In Greek Myths are elaborated on thus.

My site ain’t the best researched, the best annotated, the funniest, the most beautiful or, unfortunately, the most accessible. It includes random typos, and slang and the occasional curse. Because it’s been around for so long, my site still gets a fair amount of traffic. But now there are options like theoi.com that give you the original sources (in translation) and brief explanations that are totally accessible. To be perfectly honest, his site’s so good, I’m tempted to stop paying rent and let mine disappear into internet oblivion. Nonetheless, I’m still here for now.

Hope you don’t mind, too much.

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.

I love it that we imagined descendants of Classical Civilizations continue to retell Greek myths. Xena was like my favorite show EVARRR and going with my fellow Classics majors in college to see Troy and laughing at all the wrong times together was way fun. My favorite mythically inspired movie is, without question, O Brother Where Art Thou and who doesn’t like Mary Renault’s The King Must Die?

Obviously, these are not generally intended to give an accurate portrayal of what ancient Greek myths looked like or meant to ancient Greeks. And why should they? There aren’t any ancient Greeks around to appreciate such efforts anyway! There are, on the other hand, plenty of people like you and me who are finding ways to make those stories relevant to our lives in entirely different and equally “valid” ways. It’s a great opportunity for social introspection.

On the other hand, sometimes it drives me nuts. Instead of looking at how Disney’s Hercules made Hera our hero’s birthmom (to take one tiny example) and saying, “How fascinating that they refuse to even allow the hint of Zeus’ infidelity, this really says something about our culture’s approach to raising children,” people smile and nod as their kids reel off the version as definitive. The problem here is that these stories become privileged. They start getting cited as proof of correct behavior because “it’s always been this way.”

It ain’t Disney’s fault any more than its Mary Renault’s fault or my fault as creator of paleothea.com or even your fault, dear reader. It’s how stories work. It’s why they are so powerful, so important.

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

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

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

Happy Spring Cleaning everyone!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear student,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours truly,

Ailia Athena

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

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

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

Read the whole post here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Others participating in this month’s synchroblog include:

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