Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess

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!

It was defining “virgin” and “rape” that got me thinking about this. If I recall, and I can’t check because I’m still in the boonies of Latin America, even D’Aulaire’s couldn’t avoid using that language, because there’s no pussyfooting around the fact that sex - mostly varying degrees of non-consensual sex - is at the root of a LOT of those stories. No Classical education is complete without the story of Persephone, for example, and there’s a ton more.

When I - briefly - taught comparative (strong on the Greek angle) mythology to middle schoolers, I wasn’t allowed to bring in paintings by Peter Paul Rubens to show my class, but I didn’t even think about bringing up the subject of rape and virginity, of castration or infidelity. These things ARE Greek myths. And I assumed - though perhaps I shouldn’t have - that all of my students had a basic working understanding of these concepts.

My 9-year-old niece got D’Aulaire’s for Christmas last year, and so it surprised me that when I started retelling her some of the stories here she had to stop me to ask me “what’s a virgin?” and then later, “what’s rape?” I’m so friggin’ sex-ed-positive that it didn’t occur to me that the underlying question - “what’s sex?” - had not been answered yet.

I am secretly horrified that her introduction to these concepts came through such violent and patriarchal storytelling and I am (again) struck by the ever-presence of sex and violence in the world kids live in. It seems like an incredibly persuasive reason to start educating your kids about sex - and whatever positive values you can offer - from an early age. But given that I think Greek myths should ALSO be introduced at an early age, how can I address the sexual values contained therein? With my own children, I imagine that conversations about cultural conceptions of sex will be taking place as soon as they can understand them (I got that from my own feminist mother in an “age-appropriate” way from an early age, and that’s a good part of the reason that I started Women in Greek Myths), but what the heck do I do with kids that aren’t mine?

Any thoughts are very welcome.

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?

Sorry people, it’s just too hard to get together a post when surrounded by extended family in a far away country without regular internet.

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.