Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess

df at Breakfast With Pandora just wrote a fantastic post. I am jealous. I wish I’d written it. Starting off discussing Nausicaa, he soon moves into the power of stories (remembered myths) in shaping our lives and particularly the question of our cultures’ approaches to children’s independance. One line I particularly wish I’d written:

I believe in the power of retelling this type of experience. I believe that we build ourselves up by building up our own history, our worthwhile narratives, the myths, the traditional “good stories” of our lives. I believe that when we suppress the events of our lives and do not recount them, parts of us are destroyed, never to return.

You can always tell a healthy family, for example, by the amount of stories it tells on itself.

I could not agree more.

This post is what I like best about when people write about myth. I’d do more of it myself if it weren’t so hard to do it well. It is a big part of why I studied Classics in the first place. A good academic example of such writing is, for example Somewhere I Have Never Traveled: A Hero’s Journey, by Classics prof. Thomas Van Nortwick.  It’s not so much about current events or culture as how “The ancient hero’s quest for glory offers metaphors for our own struggles to reach personal integrity and wholeness.”

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.

You are Queen Metaneira. She was suprisingly normal for a character of Greek mythology. She was a good queen and loving mother. She was kind, and had a pretty normal life, until an act of god brought tragedy. Actually it was an act of goddess. She tried to stand down the goddess, but couldn’t save her child, but she did live to tell about it.
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Paleothea.com - the Ancient Goddess

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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.

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 »

I’ve been playing around with favicons recently - you know, those little things that pop up in the left corner of your browser’s address line - and I’m a little excited to finally have found something I kinda dig. It’s sort of a “P” (as in paleo) with sort of a “t” (as in thea) in the same line, but sort of suggesting the symbol for women as well without beating you over the head with it. I hope. It’s mostly for me, but feel free to tell me how neato it is, too.

The icon is made thanks to Steve Cooley Presents, by the way, in case you also have a Mac and want to (oh-so-easily) make your own such thing.

I was gonna write a better entry than this, but again with the family and the craziness. I’ll be back with the normal in about a week.

Carla over at The English Teacher’s Blog posted an entry about some dude’s presentation that I thought might be pretty interesting to the people who are interested in how Greek myths stay relevant to public education. The three main points of his presentation, she reports, are:

1. The future is unpredictable.
2. Students are networked.
3. The new information landscape is flat, less authority (teacher)-driven.

She goes on to discuss how some students are more networked than others, but in the sub/urban schools I’ve worked in, they managed to stay networked even without a computer at home.

I’m perverse, so let’s cover these points backwards, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »