The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece

Sue Blundell, Margaret Williamson, Margaret Williamson**Nfa***, Sue Blundell, Margaret Williamson, Margaret Williamson**Nfa***

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134799855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

In classical Greece women were almost entirely excluded from public life. Yet the feminine was accorded a central place in religious thought and ritual.This volume explores the often paradoxical centrality of the feminine in Greek culture, showing how out of sight was not out of mind. The contributors adopt perspectives from a wide range of disciplines, such as archaeology, art history, psychology and anthropology, in order to investigate various aspects of religion and cult. They include the part played by women in death ritual, the role of heroines, and the fact that goddesses had no childhood, at the same time posing questions about how we know what rituals meant to their participants.
The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece is a lively and colourful exploration of the ways in which religion and ritual reveal women's importance in the Greek polis, showing how ideologies about female roles and behaviour were both endorsed and challenged in the realm of the sacred.

1

INTRODUCTION

‘So it is seemly for a woman to remain at home and not be out of doors; but for a man to stay inside instead of devoting himself to outdoor pursuits is disgraceful’ (Xenophon, Oeconomicus 7.30). These words, uttered by an Athenian citizen during a discussion of household management, neatly illustrate what has long been a commonplace about the women of ancient Athens and, as far as we know, of other cities of the time: that in sharp contrast to their male counterparts, female citizens were excluded from public affairs. Equally commonplace, however, is the observation that there is one major exception to this generalisation. In one crucial area, that of religious practice, the barriers between women and public life were conspicuously breached. Debarred entirely from public debate, from law-making and political processes, women nonetheless participated fully in the city’s religious life. They were involved in religious ritual at all levels, from private and informal celebrations to state-sponsored occasions; the part they played was often of acknowledged importance to the community as a whole, and it could take them into public spaces otherwise reserved for men. In the public symbolism of religion, too, the female was often accorded equal importance with the male, with goddesses displaying power, and commanding respect, equal to that of gods. The role of priestess was the only public office open to women, and there are indications that women were regarded as having a closer intrinsic connection with the divine than men.¹

The connection between the feminine and divine spheres of life and thought was, then, a particularly rich one. The purpose of this book, originating in a series of papers presented at the Institute of Classical Studies in London in 1993, is to examine some of the multifarious links involved. We shall be considering not only the ways in which real-life women related, or were thought to relate, to divine beings, but also the cultural constructions shaping the categories of the feminine and of the divine. Thus, these essays are concerned with goddesses and heroines as well as with human females, and even with rituals involving gender inversion by male participants.

We begin, however, with some brief contextualising information. Greek religion can be divided into two principal components: ritual and myth. Although it would be wrong to assume that Greek religious systems were devoid of beliefs or ideas, they were not constructed around a uniform and authoritative set of doctrines; rather, it was through actions and through mythical representations that the Greeks sought to establish a relationship with the divine. The actions, or rituals, were of many different types but, whether performed in private or in public, their focus was generally on acknowledging and honouring a divinity or set of divinities. The main medium for representing divinity was myth, a body of traditional tales in which the human condition was explored through narratives featuring superhuman beings. These myths could be sung, spoken, written or visually conveyed in sculpture and vase-paintings. Narratives and representations such as these would often be presented in close conjunction with ritual, for example in hymns sung at religious festivals, but this was not always the case: statues of heroes and gods, for example, functioned in several different contexts.

The divine powers worshipped by the Greeks can be divided into two main types, both of which receive detailed attention in this volume: deities, and heroes and heroines. The deities were immortal beings who had been born, but would never die. There were many of them, and their numbers were fluid, with the possibility of introducing new cults in response to changing priorities in the culture. Individual gods and goddesses, too, were honoured under a range of titles which could be used to emphasise and call upon particular facets of their power on different occasions. To a large extent, the behaviour of deities is modelled on that of their human worshippers: they are often conceived of as responding and acting like exceptionally powerful human beings. But they also differ from humans in crucial ways, and many of these essays are concerned with the defining differences between mortals and deities. The differences are especially significant in the case of goddesses, who are seen as wielding great power in a period when real-life women were, in general, socially and politically subordinate to men.

The significance of deities was, however, not purely individual. They also had a corporate identity, in that they belonged both to a divine universe and to various sub-groups within it; and they could be worshipped collectively. The most prominent of the sub-groups was that of the Olympians, an elite which consisted of six goddesses (Hera, Athene, Artemis, Aphrodite, Demeter, Hestia) and six gods (Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Hermes, Ares, Hephaestus). Even here, though, fixity of personnel was not an essential feature; in Athens, for example, Hestia, goddess of the hearth, was sometimes replaced by Dionysus, who as god of drama was of particular importance to the Athenians. The Olympian group was both an extended family and a kind of governing council, headed by Zeus. It was thus capable of functioning as a paradigm for institutions within Greek society on several levels, and provided a framework for exploring issues of cohesion and conflict, order and disorder within and between human communities.

The second major category is that of heroes, who differed from gods in having had an existence as human beings who had lived and died. Some were real historical personalities, but most were imagined as having lived in the distant past. All had performed deeds benefiting their communities, which had earned them the right to be worshipped after their deaths; in most cases hero cults were local, and it was rare for a hero to receive recognition outside the region in which he was thought to have operated. Heroes, and their rarer female counterparts, heroines, could intervene in human affairs independently, conferring rewards and exacting punishments in the manner of deities. Their status is best described, though, as intermediate between that of deity and mortal; thus they can move between human and divine realms, and may for example be mortal women loved by male gods or the children (normally male) of such unions. Their intermediate position makes heroines in particular a rich source for exploring the paradoxes inherent in the conjunction of the idea of divinity with that of the feminine.

There is no privileged source of information for Greek religion, which had nothing equivalent to the Christian Bible; however, so integral was it to Greek life and thought that most of the written and material remains of the culture provide information about it. Literature includes many descriptions of religious practice, and epic, lyric and tragic poetry are based largely on mythical narratives about gods and heroes – narratives which were reworked at each retelling. Our two major sources apart from literature are inscriptions and archaeological material. The inscriptions relate particularly to religious practices in the public sphere, recording such things as religious calendars, dedications to deities, correct ritual procedures, oracular pronouncements and the financial accounts of sanctuaries. Archaeological material from cemeteries, sanctuaries and temples tells us about rituals, about the organisation of religious space and about objects offered to deities; relief sculptures from temples are also, together with vase-paintings, important texts in the transmission of myth.

This book focuses mainly on the archaic and classical periods of Greek history (approximately 750 to 330 BCE). Some aspects of Greek cults and of the divine beings who were honoured in them can be traced back to well before that time; but it was within the context of the polis, usually translated as ‘city-state’, that the religious practices and representations with which these essays are concerned achieved their characteristic form. In physical terms, the polis (plural poleis) was an area of arable land containing a number of small agricultural settlements; it was fringed by hill country which was used for pasture and hunting, and had an urban centre which, as well as housing much of the population, also functioned as a market and meeting-place. Though generally small in size, with a population in the low thousands, each polis was an autonomous state. This form of political organisation developed rapidly during the early part of the archaic period, so that by about 600 BCE the Greek world was divided into literally hundreds of poleis. Religion had played an important part in their formation, since the establishment of sanctuaries and cults in rural areas was crucial to the definition and defence of each polis’s territorial frontiers.² The continuing link between religious practices and the life of the polis, in which each both determines and is determined by the other, is a theme that recurs in many of the discussions that follow.

We begin with a pair of case-studies that link the two defining elements of Greek religion: myth and ritual. In the opening section (Part I, ‘Deities and their worshippers’) Isabelle Clark in Chapter 1 and Susan Guettel Cole in Chapter 2 study some of the representations and practices associated with the worship of two goddesses whose spheres of influence were central to women’s lives. Artemis, the goddess of wild nature and of hunting, was also associated with girls’ rites of maturation and later with childbirth; Hera was traditionally regarded as a marriage deity. Both are panhellenic goddesses, members of the group of twelve Olympians; yet in both cases we see how much local diversity there could be in the practices associated with their worship. It is also clear that their spheres of influence are not neatly divided: each of these two is linked at some point both with maturation rites and with marriage.

Striking too is the range of different ways in which the worship of these two goddesses was important to the community as a whole. It is not just that, as both essays show, each was both a guarantor and to some extent also a paradigm for the behaviour of human females. Women’s lives, properly ordered, were of central importance to the entire social group, not only because they were childbearers but also in more symbolically mediated ways. Thus, Artemis’s far-flung sanctuaries and the women who worshipped in them were significant precisely because of their proximity to the boundaries of a city’s territory. For as long as it was not attacked (and of course it sometimes was), vulnerable territory close to a border demonstrated the security of the whole community; and Cole also suggests that there is a symbolic link between the integrity of the bodies of female celebrants and that of the polis. The worship of Hera served another function again: her festival at Plataea, in which both sexes participated, helped to promote cohesion among the communities that took part.

Each of these goddesses is portrayed as having characteristics broadly similar to those of human females: Artemis is herself represented as a parthenos, an unmarried girl, and Hera as a bride or wife. Like mortal women, therefore, they are defined at least partly in terms of their sexual status. But we have already noted that deities also differ from their human counterparts, most obviously in the case of goddesses because of their power. These two goddesses exhibit other differences as well. Unlike her mortal counterparts, Artemis is able to remain a parthenos; Hera is not only party to an incestuous marriage (since Zeus is her brother), but she also displays a degree of independence, and vindictiveness towards her husband’s paramours, that would not be tolerated in a mortal woman.

The theme of divine females’ difference, principally from humans but also from male deities, is explored further in the next section (Part II, Objects of worship’). Sue Blundell in Chapter 4 discusses the ways in which Athens, an unusually large and powerful polis, chose to represent its patron deity on the Parthenon, the largest and most splendid temple of its time and situated in the most prominent of the city’s public spaces, the Acropolis. Like Artemis, Athena was a parthenos, and this presented the city with a double paradox. A virginal female presided over a city whose public institutions were all male, and which identified marriage as central to its claim to civilised values. This, Blundell argues, helped to determine the complex message of the Parthenon sculptures, structured as a discourse by the spectator’s movement alongside and eventually into the building. Athena’s difference from human females was central to this discourse, which not only counterposed Athena to Pandora, the first woman, but probably also contrived to suggest a structural link between the victory over Poseidon by which Athena was established as the city’s patron and the disenfranchising of real Athenian women.

Visual representations of deities and the assumptions underpinning them are also the subject of Lesley Beaumont’s discussion in Chapter 5, which focuses on the early stages of life. A contrast between male and female is immediately apparent as regards divine birth and infancy: scenes showing the birth of a goddess are far less frequent, and such as there are represent their subjects as fully grown – unlike, say, the infants Hermes or Apollo. Thus Athena springs fully armed from the head of her father, while Aphrodite emerges as an adult female from the sea or from a shell; and both, significantly, have only one, male, parent. The explanation for this, it is suggested, has to do with the polarities of power and powerlessness which are already uneasily combined in the notion of a female divinity. Adding the element of childhood, another fundamentally weak or incomplete condition, would destabilise the paradox to the point of untenability.

Intermediate between the categories of human and divine is, as we have seen, that of the heroic, and the female version of heroic identity is explored in Emily Kearns’ essay (Chapter 6) on heroines. The range of roles performed by heroines is considerable, ranging from heroes’ consorts to gods’ paramours (and thus the mothers of heroes), priestesses and eponymous heroines. Heroes and heroines normally have a two-phase existence: before death, when they lead quasi-human lives, and after it, when they become the objects of cult. It might perhaps be expected that the dichotomy between human and divine would be neatly distributed between these two stages. The reality, however, turns out to be more complicated: not only do myth and ritual often (as the opening chapters also showed) pull in different directions, but they can do so in unpredictable ways. Like goddesses, heroines are both like and unlike mortals; but the degree of that difference varies considerably, and it is as likely to be found in the myths about a heroine’s life as in the practices and myths linked with her worship. Thus, for example, heroines who are worshipped as heroes’ consorts seem to know their place in much the same way as mortal women. Heroines worshipped by parthenoi, on the other hand, often show in their own life-stories a troubled relationship to the transition to adult status which their human devotees must accomplish. This case illustrates particularly well the heroine’s intermediate status: goddesses can avoid the transition altogether and humans not at all, while heroines’ attempts to achieve it either fail or are accompanied by disaster.

In the next section (Part III, ‘Ritual and gender’), the focus moves from divinities to their human worshippers. Karen Stears in Chapter 7 explores the nature and significance of gender division in Athenian funerary practices. The procedures for laying out, lamenting and burying the dead were well established and involved a fairly clear division of labour between the sexes. As one might expect, women played an important role in the stages that took place in domestic space: the preparation of the body and the laments over it. They were also, however, involved in the next phase: female as well as male mourners would accompany the corpse on its way to burial. The importance of women at both stages is indicated by legislation from the archaic period limiting the permitted categories of female mourners and prohibiting excessive displays of grief. Since iconographical evidence shows women mourning in a less restrained way than men, it is possible to see in this legislation a reinforcement of the ideology that constructed women as in need of male control.

Yet this is not the whole story. Previous discussions of the division of labour in death ritual have focused on women’s association with the private sphere, and their relative powerlessness and lack of status outside it. An important implication of Stears’ discussion, however, is that this perspective is too limited. It is not simply that, as has already been observed, ritual is the one area of life in which women habitually crossed the divide between public and private with impunity. Even the most apparently private features of these family-based rituals could themselves have consequences in the public world, affecting not only the public standing of a household or kinship group in the wider world but ultimately also relationships between these groups in the polis as a whole: funerary legislation can, indeed, be made sense of only on the assumption that women’s behaviour has consequences for the whole community. We may, therefore, need to revise our understanding of the notions of power and status in relation to women. Women’s greater expressiveness in mourning is a case in point. No doubt it is true that the ideology of gender to which it both conforms and contributes reinforces women’s subordination; yet women’s mourning could simultaneously, and paradoxically, also enhance their own status and that of their kin group, and possibly even form the basis of legal claims on the deceased’s estate. Once again we find that women’s lives and religious practice, however closely they may be confined within the private sphere, are seen as essential to society as a whole.

Death ritual is only one of a number of rites of passage involving a temporarily marginal or liminal status for some or all of the participants. Others especially relevant to women which have already been discussed are those surrounding marriage and childbirth, linked particularly with Hera and Artemis. Another ritual in which women played a central role, and which explicitly involved such marginality, was maenadism, a type of cult honouring Dionysus. This typically involved groups of women performing cult for the god in the wild spaces outside the city, on the mountain. For female worshippers, Richard Seaford has argued that this period in the wild renewed the links thought to exist between unmarried women and wildness: in a maenadic group, married women were re-entering the wild state which Greek culture associated with human females before they were ‘tamed’ by marriage. Euripides’ play The Bacchae, named after its maenadic chorus, suggests that this temporary reversion to an earlier state was accompanied by other departures from their normal identity: in the play the women’s actions are compared to those of animals or of males.

The need for divine protection an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 1 Deities and their Worshippers
• 2 Objects of Worship
• 3 Ritual and Gender
• 4 Sources and Interpreters
• Bibliography
• Index