Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess

You may have picked up from previous entries that I really dig Penelope, but now you’ll start to understand why in this series!

–

There has been a great deal of work done in recent years to “reclaim” the Goddess. Women look to Her for spiritual guidance, for wisdom, for empowerment. They call out to Her by her various names. I myself participate in this new Goddess movement to some degree and it makes sense to me to see goddesses as archetypes guiding or reflecting human behavior. Furthermore, this seems to apply flawlessly to reading the Odyssey, especially as relates to the much-debated action of Penelope.

There are many goddesses in the Odyssey, Kalypso and Kirke come to mind, but it is the Olympian goddesses - specifically, Hera, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Athena - who so nicely guide our perceptions of Penelope and the outcome of the story. These four only show up once all together, in the context of Penelope’s confusing metaphor describing the daughters of Pandareos:

Hera gave them form and prudence surpassing all other women; pure Artemis gave them an lofty stature, and Athena taught them to do renowned works. When bright Aphrodite had ascended to holy Olympus seeking the accomplishment of a blooming wedding for the girls from thunder-loving Zeus (for well does he know everything, both what shall happen and what not happen to mortal humans) the Snatching winds came and snatched them away and gave them to the hated Furies to care for.

Each of these goddesses has a different gift to give the unfortunate Pandareides and they each have a similar role in the greater telling of the Odyssey. Nancy Felson-Rubin has already done a good job of identifying plot-types, however, by seeing the role of each goddess tied into the story more clearly, the function of those plot-types takes on a different meaning. Felson-Rubin states, “Until 23.205 [the end of the Odyssey] even the knowing reader feels suspense as to whether Penelope or Odysseus will happily reunite,” but I hope to show that what the audience, and the reader, feels is not suspense but empathy, suspense being impossible in a story where the end is known. And with a story this famous, who could fail to know the end?

Felson-Rubin, Nancy. “Penelope’s Perspective: Character from Plot.” Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays. Seth L. Schein, ed. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1996

–

Coming soon: Part 2 - the roles of the Goddesses

This book is the bomb. Really. If you are truly interested in ancient Greek myth, you should own this book. It’s typically used as an college textbook in Mythology classes and has 1105 pages, but if you need just one reference, this should be it.

It has everything. It quotes big chunks of original text (including the complete Medea and the Bacchae), it relates Greek stuff to other cultures (Egyptian, Babylonian, etc.), it puts a significant amount of information about the goddesses into the patriarchal framework of the culture, it talks about the feminist alternatives, it has new archaeological and anthropological studies on the Great Goddess, it has a section on modern European and American art, it even has a website where you can go for chapter outlines, quizzes, and learning objectives making it a fantastic resource for teachers.

And yet, for some reason, I virtually ignored this book for the past 7 or so years. I don’t know why. I was young and foolish and thought I knew all there was to know (hey, I was literally a sophomore). I didn’t even include it on this site’s References page.

It has theory, it has original sources, it has information about worship, it has pretty color pictures. My goddess, what is NOT to adore?

So please, if you read this blog because you are genuinely interested in Classical Mythology, do yourself a favor and go buy this book. It cost me $100, but you can get it used for $30 over at fetchbook.info. I swear that I’m not taking bribes to write this, I just care about your access to quality stuff.

Today is my birthday and I’m too exhausted to dress myself properly let alone do my classwork or write a coherent post. But life is good!

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.

In 2005, the famous Margaret Atwood published The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus. Whether or not you have actually read the Odyssey (or generally know the story), it is interesting. It is the story from Penelope’s point of view. But don’t expect to find the mysterious, heroic, wily Penelope of the Odyssey. Nope, here she is presented in her own words and she spends much less energy on her responsibilities as the Queen of Ithaca and the mother of the future king and her husband than she does on her day-to-day life while the Suitors were there and her rivalry with Helen. There’s also a lot more attention given to the maids.

Now the maids, you may recall from the Odyssey, are hanged at the end of the story because they were disloyal to the ruling family by 1) sleeping with the Suitors and 2) telling them stuff. The sex part is - I suspect - woefully misunderstood by the majority of people who read it. The Penelopiad definitely fills in one angle of that story that you won’t get elsewhere. It illustrates world of women, the world of powerless people. Check out Slave-Girl’s Goddesses for some background from my perspective.

The thing is, it’s not the best book. Despite Atwood’s insinuations that what we are hearing from Penelope’s own mouth should not be trusted, to me, the book is pedantic and reads more like a really good writing exercise than anything else (she includes random interludes by a Chorus of maids). It is not Atwood’s best. And frankly, if you are really interested in Penelope, you can get a much deeper, much more interesting, and much more emotionally relevant portrayal by going back and re-reading chunks of the Odyssey (plus some of the scholarship about her if you’re really committed). If, however, the Odyssey seems like too big a task and you want to color in the parts of your mental image of ancient Greece involving women and slaves, it’s worth a look. It’s a quick read, anyway.

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.

—

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!

Mahud, famous for his mythblog community organizing through the synchroblogs and also his awesome mythy pagan posts, has honored me by nominating this blog for the I Love Your Blog award. Now I get to pass the love on by nominating seven other blogs!

Between Old and New Moons - I love what you do with mythology and faith. There are plenty of blogs doing one or the other, but few that wed the two as effectively and appealingly as you do. Also, beyond my appreciation for the content of your posts, I think of you as a blog community leader, and that makes me just about adore you.

Letter from Hardscrabble Creek - I thoroughly enjoy your blog. You don’t do a whole lot of educational myth stuff, but your incorporation of ancient Greek religion not just into your personal perspective but a social one (what the pagan community is doing with it) makes your blog really stand out. Also, it’s beautiful. Fantastic pictures, and your narrative is great.

Tales of a Wayward Classicist - My old friend. It’s not just for that I’ve included you in this list, although I might not know of your blog were it not for that. You are hilarious. Your translations are good. Your discussion of the subject matter and the people (like Catullus and Lesbia) are totally on point and so fresh that it’s hard to believe we’re talking about things that were written thousands of years ago. You’re going to be a fantastic Classics professor.

Under Odysseus - is on hiatus. That’s a crying shame because it’s the coolest thing in the blogosphere as far as I’m concerned. But maybe if you go buy a “I sacked Troy and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” shirt, he’ll have enough money to come back! It’s a blog written by Euryochus, one of the sailors with Odysseus. It’s awesome. It makes me happy.

Bubo’s Blog - You do something that is particularly interesting to me. You relate Classical myth to kids in the classroom. It’s a topic that I think should be discussed more, but you not only discuss it you make it fun for people who aren’t in the classroom any more. Easy to read and all that, too, of course and fun!

Susie Bright’s Blog - What did you think I was just gonna talk about Greek stuff? No way! This is, without doubt, one of the blogs I love. She talks about herself, and politics, and other good stuff, but I like it best when she talks about gender and sex. Which she does often, and with delicious genius.

Xark - The tagline is that there are no unrelated topics, and that is pretty true. It’s a group blog and includes a bunch of “real” journalists (working for real newspapers!) which helps explain why it’s so well written and researched. It’s my favorite catch-all blog, no news-aggregators for me!

In closing, you all rock.

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.

—

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)