Bride of Hades to Bride of Christ

The Virgin and the Otherworldly Bridegroom in Ancient Greece and Early Christian Rome

Abbe Lind Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351060172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

This volume argues that ancient Greek girls and early Christian virgins and their families made use of rhetorically similar traditions of marriage to an otherworldly bridegroom in order to handle the problem of a girl's denied or disrupted transition into adulthood.

In both ancient Greece and early Christian Rome, the standard female transition into adulthood was marked by marriage, sex, and childbirth. When problems arose just before or during this transition, the transitional girl's status within society became insecure. Walker presents a case for how and why the dead Greek virgin girl, depicted in Archaic through Hellenistic sources, in both texts and inscriptions, as a bride of Hades, and the life-long female Christian virgin or celibate ascetic, dubbed the bride of Christ around the third century CE, provide a fruitful point of comparison as particular examples of strategies used to neutralize the tension of disrupted female transition into adulthood.

Bride of Hades to Bride of Christ offers a fascinating comparative study that will be of interest to anyone working on virginity and womanhood in the ancient world.

Part I

Virgin suicides

1Loving death

Peri Partheniōn, “Concerning the Matters of Girls,” appears as part of a set of gynecological treatises within the Hippocratic Corpus written by an anonymous Hippocratic author at the end of the fifth or early fourth century BCE.¹ The short text comprises an investigation into the mental and physical problems besetting parthenoi, unmarried girls, at the time of puberty.² The author introduces the medical problem thus:

First concerning the so-called sacred disease, and about those stricken, and about terrors of the sort that people fear so strongly that they go mad and think they see certain spirits (δαίμονάς τινας) hostile to them, at night or during the day or at both times. Then as a result of this kind of vision, many have already hanged themselves, more women than men, for the female nature is more faint-hearted and more troublesome. And girls (παρθένοι), those for whom it is the right time for marriage and yet remain unmarried, suffer this especially at the descent of their menses.³

Later in the text, our author elaborates on the symptoms particular to parthenoi: The girl suffers shivering and fevers; she is out of her mind and murderous; she is terrified of the gloom; she is likely to hang herself and is drawn to evil; she addresses by name fearful things, which order her to leap about and to throw herself in wells and to hang herself. In the absence of these apparitions (φασμάτα), a certain pleasure compels her to have an erotic desire for death as something, or someone, good (τινος ἀγαθοῦ).⁴

The Hippocratic physician cites a physiological cause for these peculiar symptoms. For him, the source of the illness that can prevent the successful transition from parthenos to gynē, from girl to woman, is the distinct makeup of the virgin female body, which can delay menarche, the biological signal that a girl is “ripe for marriage” (ὥρη γάμου, 11). When all other signs point to ripeness yet menarche has not occurred, the diagnosis is that the menstrual blood is trapped in the body, leaving the girl vulnerable to mental aberrations from the flooding of her heart and diaphragm. His recommended cure is to make the body no longer a virgin one, that is, to ensure a girl’s physical transition through the cultural markers of transition, marriage, sex, and childbirth.

In this chapter, I offer an alternative interpretation of the illness described in the text that focuses on the role of the girls themselves in making use of the cultural trope of the bride of Hades to deal with the cultural problem of the liminality of partheneia, the transitional—and ideologically short—period between sexual maturation and marriage and motherhood. By investigating the symptoms of daimonic attack from the perspective of the girls, who have been conditioned by myth and society to imagine this transitional period as a time of extreme vulnerability, we can see this affliction as a culturally structured condition based on the socially constructed “nature” of girls. In framing their hindered transition as a daimonic attack that incites suicidal behavior or, alternatively, displaying an erotic desire for death, girls actively use cultural tropes as strategies to handle the difficulties of the physical and cultural transition from parthenos to gynē.

Previous scholars have also sought to reassess the Hippocratic author’s approach to this “disease.” Notably, Demand has argued that since this problem also affects men, it cannot be explained “exclusively in terms of references to female anatomy.”⁵ In response, King insists that because the author makes it clear girls suffer this more, we must ask, “What is there about their anatomy which makes them particularly susceptible?”⁶ This question, however, again focuses the attention on the male physician’s perspective about the female body, which does not offer an explanation for the distinctive way in which girls express their presumed mental aberrations. To understand the girls’ role in shaping these symptoms, I question culture not nature: what “fears” did society create in girls that could lead to this kind of reaction?

In what follows, I first review earlier scholars’ attempts to retrospectively diagnose this illness as hysteria. Like the Hippocratic physician, such attempts look to a biological cause based on female nature. I argue, however, that by emphasizing cultural and historical factors, the concept of hysteria—or, to use a less loaded term, conversion disorder—can be stripped of its pejorative sense and used to understand illness behaviors with no apparent pathological cause, or in this case, where a pathological cause cannot be accurately diagnosed over two millennia. By applying anthropological models that explain the symptoms of conversion disorder as culture and history-bound to our Hippocratic text, I explain both why such symptoms occur predominantly in pubertal girls and why these girls might interpret an illness or frame their illness symptoms as an attack from hostile spirits (daimones) and fearful ghosts (phasmata). Through a comparison with strikingly similar symptoms in other recorded cases of conversion disorder among adolescent girls, I suggest that the symptoms described in this text, as well as similar sets of symptoms found in Greek myth, grow out of culturally distinctive sets of social pressures placed on girls. In the case of Greek parthenoi, the pressure to marry early and become a mother, that is, to successfully fulfill the female role in life, creates in girls a fear of failure to fully transition into an adult. Their expression of this fear and anxiety about their future, manifested here as attacks from ghosts, is then shaped by their cultural context, which exhibits a belief in the existence of vengeful spirits of prematurely dead girls who attack their still living counterparts.

While the identification of the problem as daimonic attack allows the girls and their families to utilize religious strategies of propitiation to aid in the transition, the text also hints at an alternative strategy utilized by girls, namely, identification as a bride of Hades, expressed through a sexual desire for a personified Death. Instead of projecting their fears onto an external antagonist who could be dealt with ritually, girls could internalize the problem through identification with the paradigmatic lover of Hades, Persephone. While such identification with Persephone in effect manifests as the same impulse to die as the external projection onto daimones and phasmata, it offers girls an independent role in a direct strategy to neutralize the tension and fear of transition and to avoid the potential eternal liminality of dying “incomplete.” Looking particularly at the language of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, I show how the bride of Hades metaphor takes girls from the mortal world, with its approaching realities of sex and childbirth, toward a mythical world in which they can achieve the status of adult woman without those hallmark experiences of the “complete” gynē.

The text then reveals two ways in which girls have internalized cultural distinctions and have utilized cultural tropes about female nature to deal with the difficulties of the girl to woman transition. While the propitiation of daimones seeks supernatural aid in surviving the transition into adulthood, identification with Persephone provides girls with a direct means to safeguard their eternal status should their mortal transition fail. Instead of potentially joining the ranks of the vengeful ghosts of the prematurely dead, forever restless in their liminal state, girls could actively assert the eternal status of a bride of Hades by making use of a pervasive mythical theme.

Retrospective diagnosis: hysteria?

When interpreting the symptoms of Peri Partheniōn, many scholars have resorted to “retrospective diagnosis,” relying on our modern terminology to label a set of symptoms suffered over 2,000 years ago.⁷ In particular, some have attempted to retrospectively diagnose this disease of girls as hysteria, following a long and, as King has shown, misleading tradition of locating the first diagnosed cases of hysteria within the gynecological treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus.⁸ In his assessment of the treatise, Laín Entralgo, a Spanish medical historian, refers to the girls of Peri Partheniōn as “certain ill—perhaps hysterical, to judge by what is said of them—women.”⁹ The French psychiatrist Catonné also identifies the various symptoms these girls exhibit as signs of a psychic disorder and goes so far to say that the text is “the very first description in medical history of what nineteenth-century authors called hysterical insanity.”¹⁰ King has argued that such attempts to diagnose this “disease” across two and a half millennia are “deeply unconvincing”; girls could have been suffering from any number of mental or physical problems, with or without an identifiable organic cause, which could have caused such symptoms.¹¹ King also argues that the label hysteria is not applicable to Hippocratic medicine and in fact is detrimental to our understanding of Hippocratic gynecology.¹²

I agree with King that the label hysteria offers nothing to elucidate the Hippocratic conception of the young female body and completely misinterprets the author’s point that this is a physical illness with an identifiable biological cause. However, we can move beyond the physician’s explanation of biological causes by using modern anthropological approaches to hysteria, more neutrally referred to as conversion disorder, to understand why girls at the highly marked age of transition might interpret an illness, whatever it may be, as an attack from daimones and fearsome phasmata. Such an approach, as opposed to a modern scientific or medical approach, allows us to explore the girl’s perspective on her illness and understand the expression of her symptoms in culturally specific terms. It emphasizes female “nature” not as a biological fact but as a social construct. The contradiction implicit in the idea of a socially constructed “nature” points to the essential problem. “Hysteria” is not a historical constant but a historical variable.¹³

Hysteria has been invoked repeatedly throughout history to diagnose or retrospectively diagnose inexplicable illness behaviors from the dancing manias that swept across medieval Europe to “possessed” nuns and the girls of Salem, Massachusetts, fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Virgin suicides
• Part II Parents of the bride
• Bibliography
• Index