Goddesses in Myth and Cultural Memory

Emilie Kutash

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780567697400
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Ancient Religion

How have the goddesses of ancient myth survived, prevalent even now as literary and cultural icons? How do allegory, symbolic interpretation, and political context transform the goddess from her regional and individual identity into a goddess of philosophy and literature? Emilie Kutash explores these questions, beginning from the premise that cultural memory, a collective cultural and social phenomenon, can last thousands of years. Kutash demonstrates a continuing practice of interpreting and allegorizing ancient myths, tracing these goddesses of archaic origin through history. Chapters follow the goddesses from their ancient near eastern prototypes, to their place in the epic poetry, drama and hymns of classical Greece, to their appearance in Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy, Medieval allegory, and their association with Christendom. Finally, Kutash considers how goddesses were made into Jungian archetypes, and how some contemporary feminists made them a counterfoil to male divinity, thereby addressing the continued role of goddesses in perpetuating gender binaries.

1

Introduction: “To Whom Death Never Comes”

In the second century of the common era, in the town of Autun in Gaul, the people of the town still held processions to honor their beloved goddess Berecynthia (also known as Cybele). After a martyred Christian saint was killed because he would not bow down to Cybele, in a dramatic scene, the bishop threw the image of Berecynthia, an idol carried in this procession, to the ground. When she was unable to be re-erected despite all efforts of prayer and sacrifice, the people began to doubt her power. All the onlookers converted on the spot to the Catholic Church. Incidents like these document the long struggle between Christianity and the Roman “Magna Mater” (the Great Mother) as an object of veneration.¹ This second-century incident illustrates how the reception of a goddess, an object of devotion in the world of the ancient Greeks and early Roman Empire, could alter with a changing geopolitical circumstance. The bishops who railed against goddesses and particularly despised Aphrodite for her blatant eroticism would have been quite alarmed to live in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In a rather lengthy article in The Atlantic (January 2001), titled “The Scholars and the Goddess,” Charlotte Allen writes about Wicca and Goddess spirituality, describing it as a fast-growing religion in Neopagan circles. Aside from neopagan goddess worship, in Greece there are now followers of Hellenism who wish to return to their ancient cultural roots by worshipping the ancient gods.² Carol Christ, in 1978, gave a keynote address at a conference called “Great Goddess Re-emerging” at the University of Santa Cruz. It was attended by 500 people and later published as an article “Why Women Need Goddesses.” The first women’s spirituality conference, held in Boston in 1978, was attended by 1,800 women. Now, in the early years of the twenty-first century, these movements are still growing, and it seems that goddesses are still among us. Not only are they the object of scholarly and popular attention, they are characterized in ways that still gain traction from the very old “muse inspired” narratives of ancient epic poets.

Goodison and Morris point out that it is the feminist quest for “reshaping and transforming symbols of divinity which validate women’s experience” that has fueled much of the goddess movement of today.³ Philip G. Davis’s book Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality and Lynn Meskell and Cynthia Eller’s The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, as well as the work of Mary Lefkowitz, provide skeptical accounts of such modern goddess revivals,⁴ mostly on the basis of a flawed view of history. On the other hand, in Brooke Holmes words, “[t]he wild interpretive potential coiled in myth is nowhere clearer than in the polyphony of feminist readings and appropriations.”⁵ These two examples, one that is wary of anachronism and the other respectfully “receptive,” illustrate both the failings and strengths of our collective memory of the past. Despite the new-found allegiance to goddesses, the history of goddesses and how they survived the centuries, retaining a presence far beyond the Christian dismissal, are largely unknown. Some of the appropriation of goddess mythology has enhanced feminist literature in a positive way while some is a result of misreading based on unexamined assumptions. What I have intended to provide, in Goddesses of Myth and Cultural Memory, is an account of the remarkable but actual fact that goddesses have a presence in a wide range of literature, philosophy, and theology in such divergent contexts as Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Medieval allegory, and in feminist and psychoanalytic literature of our own time. The history that emerges through this diachronic presentation will allow readers, ranging from undergraduate students, graduate students, nonacademic readers to research scholars, to find their way through an incredible series of diverse settings within which goddesses have featured. It will enable them to think critically about what may have been a matter of curiosity and/or fascination, but which can now be viewed as a comment upon the times, places, and gender norms that are reflected in texts of the time. Furthermore, it will enhance the readers appreciation of the fact that this history has contributed to the stereotyping that is often the “unknown known” in our thinking about gender.

Jan Assmann, building upon the work of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs on the social frame of collective memory, suggests that “[t]he past only comes into being as far as we refer to it.”⁶ Cultural memory, he suggests, persists over millennia, and can define the memory horizon of a society.⁷ He contends that

Just as an individuals form a personal identity through memory, maintaining this despite the passage of time, a group identity is also dependent on the reproduction of shared memories. The difference is that group memory has no neurological basis. This is replaced by culture: a complex of identity-shaping aspects of knowledge, objectified in the symbolic forms of myth, song, dance sayings, laws sacred texts, pictures.⁸

Furthermore, collective or bonding memory is a social and cultural phenomenon that can last hundreds and possibly thousands of years.⁹ In his book Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Assmann establishes the premise that cultural memory is an all-pervasive explanatory paradigm.¹⁰ Moses and the Golden Calf, and other canonical memories of the Jews leaving Egypt, are still celebrated by the Jewish people though basically only documented in the biblical text. The organizing myths of other religions and cultures also document the power of this form of remembering. Similarly, the “memory” of goddesses is a direct result of the ability of later texts to incorporate “previous signifying systems” and “reconstruct pre-existing sign-functions.”¹¹ Goddesses in Myth and Cultural Memory, then, is arranged diachronically to facilitate the reader in developing a sense of the evolution and reception of goddess mythology as it impacted on a variety of interpretive communities. At the same time, the reader will be able to get a sense of the thematic constancies that seem to endure regardless of changing geopolitical and cultural context. The diachronic approach illustrates group memory within diverging interpretive communities through the centuries, while the thematic approach reveals the commonalities across these communities. One which is striking is the preservation of a certain type of codified binary gender opposition. I also hope to make it clear that almost everything that is known of goddesses is “literary” and hence subject to reader response and historical context. While statues and aretalogies attest to the presence of goddesses as objects of worship to long-gone cultures, goddesses command a still more powerful presence in the Archaic and Classical literature of Greece and in the texts that span all the centuries that follow.

One can go as far back as Sumer and find that gods and goddesses not only represent the power in the universe and control the natural elements of sky, sun, moon, and storms, but also watch over the polis (city-state).¹² Every city-state in ancient cultures had its own divine pantheon and a ruling divinity that served to ensure peace and prosperity and who was in a close relationship with the city ruler. Goddesses, as well as gods, served these functions. Our knowledge of these histories is solely dependent on archeological finds and deciphered manuscripts, themselves subject to reception and interpretation. A certain caution must be observed, then, in making too facile assumptions about the mysterious figures that preceded the epic poems and hymns that date from the archaic period. Goodson and Morris point out that scientific objectivity, in current approaches to archeology, has given way to the notion of a participant observer. The influence of Orphism, Hesiod’s Theogony, Homer, and the Homeric hymns as sources for iconic goddess prototypes, on the other hand, is our source par excellence, for what we know of goddesses and this fact should not be underestimated. In these texts, one finds a chthonic deity, a goddess of the crossroads, of fertility, of the wild, a queen of night, and a guide between the underworld of the dead and the world of the living. There are wives, mothers, and virgins, and a celebrated goddess of love. Separately named, politically unattached, each of these goddesses embodies a diverse set of functions. Athena, born from the head of her father Zeus, is a virgin and is known as the goddess of wisdom and war. Hekate is an honored Titan who guides Persephone from the world of Hades. Hera, the wife of Zeus and a mother goddess, possesses life-giving fertility, as do Kybele and Rhea. Artemis is a goddess of the wild and Gaia the sole origin of most of the progeny that populate the theogonic genealogy that follows her. These figures are forever after known to be the traditional goddesses of the archaic and classical ancient world, and it is these figures that have been taken as objects of devotion in certain contemporary settings. This is powerful evidence that the prototypes found in ancient literature have taken a strong hold on our collective memory. It is these very goddesses that inhabit the texts of current scholarship, arouse the passionate attention of popular culture, and prove their legendary immortality by capturing an everchanging but perennial interest.

Jenny Strauss Clay has pointed out, “The study of the gods in early Greek poetry is not merely of antiquarian or academic interest but is justified as a necessary foundation for an understanding of the roots of Western thought.”¹³ In Goddesses in Myth and Cultural Memory, I have emphasized the fact that most of what is known about goddesses has little to do with the archaic original cultural settings within which goddesses were worshiped and mythologized and much to do with perennial reception and re-interpretation of these myths. I agree with Jean-Pierre Vernant, who has written extensively on Greek mythology in his claim, that “It is no longer possible for us today to reconstruct a prehistory of Greece starting from a tribal community or even a previous matriarchal society.”¹⁴ The book will proceed by tracking a trajectory that was initiated in the archaic period, but which culminates in the contemporary world. Much of extant scholarship has held fast to the conviction that goddesses, whose personae are essentially constructed by the epic poets, originated in the elusive space of archaic history. The goddesses of the people of the archaic past, however, are shadowy figures at best. The goddesses that commandeered ritual and votive practice in archaic civilizations are long gone. Knowledge of what they might have been like can only be accessed when ancient manuscripts and archeological finds are interpreted.

When we turn to the Greek dramatists in the Golden Age of Greece, we find one of the first settings for a “reception” of epic mythology. Here the traditional gods and goddesses retain their archaic resumes but carried out new functions. In this genre, they take part in dramatic narratives, inciting humans to action and intervening in human affairs. Many commentators consider this usage to be a deus ex machina. Certainly, it is difficult to separate the artist’s need for a facilitator in the action of the drama and the presumed theology the god or goddess represented. Mary Lefkowitz, however, does not consider the gods’ presence in these dramas as external to the action. She suggests that they are central to it, and to the idea that justice is done in the end and that the gods ultimately control human destiny. In theogonic mythology, gods and goddesses play a role in super-cosmic events and in the creation of the world. In the Iliad and Odyssey and in Greek drama, they do so in human lives.¹⁵ Greek drama, then, is a transitional literature, extracting the gods and goddess from the context of myth and rendering them “forces” in human events. In this milieu, gods and goddesses have already been utilized in roles that go beyond the horizon within which they were originated.

The Archaic Sources

Ancient votive, ritual, and regional practices related to the worship of a goddess, then, must be differentiated from the archaic and classical texts that mythologize her. Acknowledging this difference allows a full appreciation of how textual innovations both reflect and transform their surrounding culture. Charles Martindale, whose pioneering work on reception theory and classics is widely followed, calls the desire of a classicist to experience Homer as untouched by any taint of modernity “deluded.”¹⁶ While deluded may be too strong a word here, it points to the fact that caution must be applied to any project that would aim at reconstructing the originating historical situation within which goddesses were part of the lives and ritual practice of archaic societies. It may be equally treacherous to assume we can fully decode Homer or Hesiod in terms of original source material. The question of the influence of ancient Near Eastern mythologies remains an open issue, but all references to a goddess that follow the archaic and classical periods began and remain literary. That there was a “myth itself” is very often a product of romantic imagination.

What do we know about the earlier cultures that may have preceded and influenced Hesiod and Homer? “In all likelihood their origins are heterogeneous,” as Strauss Clay tells us, “some may belong to the pre-Greek Aegean substrate, whereas others are unquestionably Indo-European in origin; yet others may be imports from abroad, especially the East.”¹⁷ In recent scholarship, even the East-West binary has been seen to be simplistic and has given way to an emphasis on historical and comparative studies of mythology and religion.¹⁸ With an Indo-European orientation, the statuary and texts found throughout the ancient world have given us artifacts that amaze and inspire, and one thing is indisputable. Goddesses were very important to ancient societies as were gods. Archeological finds, inscriptions, and aretalogies add to our inherited artifacts and are tributes to the extra-textual importance of gods and goddesses to early societies. They provide direct knowledge of ritual and of traditional burial practices, as does evidence of telestic and/or mystery rites.¹⁹ Walter Burkert, Carolina López-Ruiz, M. L. West Jenny Strauss Clay, G. S. Kirk, and others have found precursors to Hesiod, Homer, and the Homeric hymns in Mesopotamian and Near Eastern (e.g., Ugarit-Phoenician) texts.²⁰ M. L. West points out that in 1929 when the excavation of Ugarit began, literature of the bronze age began to be deciphered. Akkadian cuneiform, Sumerian and Hittite texts, as well, subsequently became accessible.²¹ As Semitic-Ugarit texts became available, they allowed a greater appreciation of earlier influences. Burkert cites Franz Dornseiff as the first to give credit to the impact of the Near East on classical Greece, as well as Albin Lesky.²² The deciphering of Hittite mythological texts revealed connections that document a common heritage and texts of Semitic Ugarit, Greek fragments of Philon of Byblos dealing with Phoenician mythology, and other sources have received increasing scholarly attention. Similarities between the Hurrian creation myth and the Greek mythology of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus have also been widely appreciated for at least fifty years.²³ Goddesses too have ancestors, Inanna in Sumer, Ishtar in Akkad, Anath in Canaan, etc., whose characters are similar to the Hesiodic and Homeric figures.²⁴ Love and war, virginity, promiscuity, bloodthirstiness, and theogonic fecundity did not originate with Hesiod. The oldest of them known to Western scholarship was Inanna, the great Sumerian goddess of love and war.

Jan Assmann points out that an ancient text is in need of as much philological labor as it does “because the context within which it was formerly understood has now disappeared.”²⁵ Whatever preexists Hesiod’s or Homer’s literary masterpieces despite Near Eastern influence would be impossible to recover. The “tautegorical” level of myth in its regional and cultural significance has been refigured and received within a changed cultural milieu. Although Hesiod is an early and archaic source for goddess mythology, the style in which he presents these myths is well on its way to metaphor and allegory.²⁶ Kirk discusses his predecessors Francis Cornford, W. K. C. Guthrie, and Martin Nilsson, ...