Demeter and Persephone, Hera, Athena, Medusa, Artemis, and their Roman counterparts are often the first, sometimes only, goddesses modern women experience, and they have profoundly influenced our 21st century attitudes about gender, violence, and more. Yet, as Max Dashu says in her new book, Women in Greek Mythography, Greek history has “served as a template for supremacy, from male domination and Hellenic colonization, to modern Eurocentric ideologies about history” (xi).
While most Greek scholarship generally glosses over these malevolent influences and ignores women’s lives, Dashu focuses on “female spheres of power, priestesses, witches, and of course systemic patriarchy” (xi) in order to “map realities of women’s lives, both their spiritual authority and their subjugation; the spaces they carved out, their ceremonies, and the stories they wove into their tapestries” (xi).
Women in Greek Mythography is not only a fascinating historical story of Greek myth and religion to be read cover-to-cover, but a rich sourcebook. Dashu meticulously documents her sources so that readers can continue their own research while being assured that her assertions are true. She draws from scholarly works of history and mythography, as well as analyzing images on vases, friezes, sculpture and more that are essential in the absence of literary sources from the earliest periods. She has carefully rendered 270 drawings of these images so that readers can judge their meaning for themselves. She delves into language, seeking out the origins of words that may indicate where goddesses and myths originated and their relationships to one another. She demonstrates that goddess mythologies often had many variations, sometimes conflicting, with many “countless regional deities that were subsumed under Olympian names, the local origin myths, ceremonies and customs” (xiv).
Let’s follow some of the book’s major themes. We begin at the very beginning of the universe. Creation myths of the Titan goddesses, or titanides, who werethegoddesses before the more familiar Olympians, offer beauty, mystery, and a celebration of female divinity, strength, and wisdom. As Dashu says, “Mythic genealogies are a way of explaining the nature of reality and understanding the world. These beings are not personalities but powers of Nature, realms of existence” (3). Nyx, or Night, was “the first cause” in some Orphic poetry and “the source of vital essence, eternal in nature” (4). Next comes Gē, or Gaia, named in a Homeric Hymn as “Mother of all, eldest of all beings,” (9) whose altars or temples were known in many Greek cities. Meet Tethys, “a primeval sea-goddess” (12) and Thetis who “emerges from the unformed primordial unity, and she shapes and lays out the order of things” (14). In the myth of Eurynome, “The primordial earth, sky, and sea existed as an undifferentiated mass within a great Egg, the cosmic mold” and Eurynome came forth when “everything burst out and separated into form” (18).
Other titanides are essential to the cosmic order. Among those Dashu cites are Themis, the goddess of divine law and her daughters, and the Horai, who are “the Seasons, Hours, and All the Cycles of Time” (31). One of the Horai is Dikē, “whose wheel represents the coursing of the sun, moon, and stars through the universe…It is she who endows every living being with its own true nature” (31). The Moirai, the Fates, “sing fate as they spin, measure, and cut the strands of lives” (35) and “spin time, the present from the past, and shape the future” (36). In the face of injustice, the Fates became the Furies, known as the Erinyes (also known as Eumenides). Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory or remembrance and her nine daughters are the Muses. Nemesis, a goddess remembered in our own word “nemesis,” “represents the inexorable justice of divine Law toward all who violate the Order of Nature” (44). Finally, we come to Hekate, widely revered in ancient times, who “determines success or failure in human affairs, and her aid is invoked in most areas of life” (52).
Around 2000 BCE, Indo-European conquerers“imposed their language and political rule on the ancient Aegean peoples, while intermixing and eventually absorbing culture from them” (57). Waves of Indo-Europeans mixed with other populations from mainland Greece and the islands showing that Greece was not one, homogenous population or culture but an ever-changing mix of tribes and peoples whose origins and relationships to one another are still being discovered and debated by scholars, archeologists, linguists, and others.
In time, a Hellenic culture developed borrowing from others in the Eastern Mediterranean, including the “Cretans, Egyptians, Libyans, Phoenicians, Cypriots, and Anatolians” (59). Among them, Crete is noteworthy for being peaceful and relatively matricultural, with outstanding art featuring goddesses and women in positions of religious power.
The mainland Greek Mycenaean culture began to rise about 1600 BC and was somewhat similar to Crete in that it featured images of goddesses and women leading ceremonies, dancing, at altars, and other elements that indicated women were powerful in the religious sphere. It was, however, more warlike and participated in conquests and enslaving. While the Mycenaean culture finally collapsed about 1200 BCE, the Greeks who came after them glorified the Mycenaeans and their exploits in the Trojan War, especially, in poems including the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Dashu shows clearly how in these stories violence against mortal women and goddesses became celebrated in Greek culture. Iphigeneia is sacrificed by her father in order to sail off to Troy at the beginning of the Trojan Warand, at the end, Polyxena “is slain at the grave of Akhilles” (76). The women who are captured are inevitably raped and enslaved. Helen is often blamed and shamed in Greek literature for causing the Trojan War, though she was fleeing a despised arranged marriage. Historical records of the Trojan War and other conquests show that this pattern of rape and enslavement of women captives was repeated in daily life..
In the later Classical eras that followed the Archaic era of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the goddesses themselves began to be transformed. About 700 BCE, goddesses began to have their own, more differentiated iconography while older myths become increasingly altered to reflect patriarchy as the Olympian deities take center stage. Dashu profiles many goddesses, including Hera, Hestia, Demeter and Persephone, Leto and Asteria, Artemis, Eileithyia, Otheia/Wortheia/Forthaia/Worthasia, the Gorgons, Athena, Aphrodite, the Nymphai, Kybele, and Tykhe. However, according to Dashu, the transformations of Hera and Athena are “especially dramatic” (127).
Originally sovereign, independent, and unmarried, Hera was one of the first deities to be worshipped in temples with priestesses themselves honored with statues. Even after her myth married her to Zeus, in her 700 BCE Olympian temple she is enthroned while he stands behind her as her spouse. But soon her myth was profoundly changed, perhaps to reinforce the conquest of the Indigenous Greeks. In one version, she marries Zeus because of her shame that he has raped her. As Dashu says “So Hera gets locked into marriage and is turned into the ultimate patriarchal wife” (134), turning her jealous anger towards and punishing “her husband’s victims and paramours” (134). “She sometimes manages to get her way through subterfuge, but her power is mythically contained, mocked, rebuked” (134-135).
Athena is the very ancient goddess of Athens and she is associated with both owls and snakes. Each year the women of Athens purified her temple, removed the robe and rich ornaments covering her earliest statue, veiled her with a cloth, and processed her to the water where she was ritually washed and redressed. The Erekhtheon on the Acropolis was built for her, complete with a crypt for snakes. Athena was thought to have given tools of civilization, including “the plough, the rake, the bridle, numbers, the chariot, and navigation. She also invented the trumpet, the flute, and domestic arts such as weaving” (179).
Yet in her later stories, this virgin warrior was no friend of women. She was born from Zeus’s head, bypassing women’s role in birth altogether. When Athena won a contest to see who would be Athens’ patron deity by offering the city the olive tree, Athenian women lost their essential civic rights. Says Dashu, “Athena became the ‘patron deity of the state’ (and not only of Athens). She protected male heroes, warriors, invaders, and colonizers. (I found no stories of her defending women, although they seek refuge at her statue—which didn’t work out for Kassandra)” who was raped there (180).
Key to transforming the ancient goddess myths to reflect patriarchal attitudes and power was the use of extreme violence against the goddesses and mortal women, a reinforcement to real Greek women of their place in society and powerlessness against male dominance. In her chapter “Mythic Conquests,” Dashu documents instance after instance of kidnapping, capture, rape, sacrifice of daughters, wives, and young women, and enslavement in the myths. Domestic abuse by Olympian husbands against their wives, led by Zeus, is rampant with scenes that would be familiar to today’s female domestic abuse victims and survivors.
The most powerful gods are the worst serial rapists and abusers. Zeus colluded in the abduction and rape of his daughter, Persephone, by her uncle, Hades. Zeus also rapes Persephone as well as Demeter, who is his sister, and his own mother. Besides Zeus and Hades, other gods who abduct, rape, and kill goddesses and mortal women include Poseidon, Apollo, and Hermes. While the rapes are glossed over in both myths and scholarship about them with language implying that these were consensual romantic and sexual relationships, paintings that show the rapes and murders in horrifying detail indicate that ancient Greek men not only approved of these behaviors, but enjoyed seeing depictions of them.
Dashu shows how violence against women takes myriad forms in both myth and real life, such as the murder of female monsters or women in animal form as when Perseus beheads the Gorgon Medusa with Athena’s help. Gods and men also sacrifice young women “often for the sake of war, or in expiation to a deity” (254) and sometimes to end plagues. Other times women are sacrificed or sacrifice themselves upon the deaths of their husbands. Women and goddesses who cross the sexual double-standard, even as rape victims, are in special, sometimes fatal, danger. Dashu also gives a convincing argument of the connection between violence against women and colonization by the Greeks. Not only were these conquests often symbolized in myths of rape, but rape was used in real life as a method of terrorizing the population into submission.
Part of the mythic Greek denigration of women is the taking over of women’s roles, including as birthgiver. Besides birthing Athena from his head, Zeus also births Dionysus from his thigh. In their transformed myths, the Great Mothers like Demeter and Rhea are raped while male gods like Khronos and Phanes take over creation of the universe, with Phanos taking Nyx as both daughter and wife.
Even as the myths of the Greek goddesses echoed the increasing and violent subjugation of women, some women, especially elite women, still maintained their sphere of spiritual power. Dashu documents that for 1500 years, rulers and others from all over Greece and elsewhere consulted the Pythia, the oracle at Delphi who was always a woman, on their most momentous decisions. The Pythia breathed in fumes that created “exalted, profound states of consciousness” (276) and her prophecies were “coherent, articulate, fluent, and knowledgable almost beyond comprehension” (276). Other women were oracles throughout Greece, including Dodona, Didyma, and elsewhere.
For millennia, women were honored as snake and bee priestesses. In both Crete and Mycenaea, paintings and seals show “dancing women as priestesses presiding over ceremony, adoring goddesses at trees, stones, and altars” (280). The word “Pythia” means “Snake Woman,” and “The priestesses who preserved the women’s Mysteries at Eleusis were titled panageis (‘all holy; sancrosanct’) and also Melissae, ‘bees’” (282).
Eventually, however, the oracles long associated with women’s spiritual power were taken over by male gods, most famously when Delphi was dedicated to Apollo, but also Didyma and Dodona. Other changes at Delphi included the barring of women from seeking consultations, the introduction of “Apollonian mandates to colonize, or the recurrent maiden sacrifices” (295).
Dashu also demonstrates the denigration of oracular women in goddess myths, including the Trojan Princess Kassandra, whose warnings went unheeded and who was raped and taken as a prize of war in theTrojan War. A sympathetic Euripides features a seeress, “Wise Melanippe,” in two fragmentary plays in which she is raped and punished for the resulting pregnancies with “terrible ordeals” (317), but confronts her father, challenging his authority as well as that of Zeus. As Dashu says, “There is no place in such a world for the wise prophecy of Melanippe” (323). And elements of that world have continued into our own.
Max Dashu, an independent scholar, founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970 for the purpose of, according to her website, “Restoring Women to Cultural Memory.” Her extensive research focuses on matricultures and the female spheres of power within them, patriarchies and allied systems of domination, and women as medicine women, female shamans, and witches in a global context. Women in Greek Mythography is the second book to be published in her series The Secret History of the Witches which will eventually include sixteen volumes.
Dashu’s books provide the larger context of women’s spiritual sphere of power over millennia as well as current scholarship with an acknowledgement that more is being learned every day. Dashu’s work shines a light on where we, as women across the globe and the millennia, have been and offers hope of a future where women are powerful and celebrated, which is vital to a peaceful, just, sustainable world. Women in Greek Mythography is an essential resource for anyone wishing to understand the complexity and sometimes profound beauty as well as misogynistic horror of the Greek myths, and their meaning for the women of ancient Greece and of the 21st century.