Abstract
Although Greco-Roman material has been of considerable interest to the creators of modern goddess cults, there has been little response to their claims from classicists, who apparently view their efforts as marginal and eccentric.2 Indeed, unlike the study of the evidence for the worship of goddesses in pre-history and in ancient civilizations, goddess cults and their theorists have found a marginal place in the academic world, but operate largely beyond its boundaries. Hence the study of these cults offers an opportunity to consider the relation of an important popular feminist movement in the U.S. to the concerns of feminists in the academy. In this essay I propose to take a look at some contemporary goddess cults and the claims of spiritual feminism from a classicist’s perspective. In an attempt to be selective rather than comprehensive, I have chosen to concentrate above all on the writings of Starhawk and Carol Christ as representatives of a diverse movement.3 I shall not address one major area of contemporary interest in ancient goddesses, the neo-jungian psychotherapeutic movement based on the use of goddess images as archtypes.4 The first half of the essay takes a critical look at the theoretical claims made in favor of this movement (rather than considering actual practice) ; the second half turns to classical material. An examination of archaic and classical Greek literary representations of the relation between myths and cults involving goddesses and women reveals, I shall argue, not only significant misappropriation of ancient sources, but missed opportunities for a fuller understanding of the religious project in which spiritual feminism has engaged.
I would like to thank my former colleagues Vivian Nyitray and Brian Smith for advice and suggestions, and Duncan Foley Marianne Hirsch, Laura Slatkin, Richard Seaford, Christian Wolff, and the audience at a feminist conference on origins organized by Teresa Brennan in Cambridge, England, 1990 for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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Notes
To my knowledge, no comprehensive study of the demographics of this movement has been made. For the purposes of this study, I shall respond, and only selectively, to the considerable and still growing body of published work on the issue. In this essay I neither deal with the spiritual feminist movement as a whole nor offer comprehensive documentation of the issues under discussion. Christ and Starhawk were selected because they played a formative and influential role in the movement. For further annotated bibliography, see Anne Carson, Feminist Spirituality and the Feminine Divine (Trumansberg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1986)
and Patrice Wynne, The Womanspirit Sourcebook (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988).
For a representative anthology of seminal views from the 1970s, see Charlene Spretnak, The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power Within the Feminist Movement (Garden City: Anchor, 1982).
See, for example, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Every Woman: A New Psychology of Women (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984);
Jennifer Barker Woolger and Roger J. Woolger, The Goddess Within: A Guide to the Eternal Myths that Shape Women’s Lives (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987);
and Patricia Reis, Through the Goddess: A Woman’s Way of Healing (New York: Continuum, 1991). Jungian analysis of goddess archetypes is another topic not directly addressed in this essay.
See the representative work of Marija Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 6500–3500 B.C., second edition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982) and The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989),
and Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).
For a summary, see Carol P. Christ, The Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 161–80.
Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979, rev. 1989), 200.
See Carol P. Christ, “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections,” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), 277–79.
Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic Sex and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), 4.
The question remains open. The recent Jungian study of myths and images of Western goddess figures by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (New York: Viking Arkana, 1992), for example, closes with a meditation on the possibilities of reclaiming a goddess myth without a goddess.
For a brief judicious critique of interpretations of prehistory in question here that specifically addresses Mycenaean and Minoan evidence, see Margaret Ehrenberg, Women in Prehistory (Frome, Somerset: British Museum Publications, 1989), esp. 66–76 and 108–118. The larger issues raised by feminist archaeology and anthropology are beyond the scope of this essay, and I do not mean to suggest a quarrel with the overall enterprise of re-evaluating prehistoric evidence.
See further for prehistoric archaeology, Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey eds., Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1991)
and for anthropology, Micaela di Leonardo, ed., Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), above all the essay by Margaret W. Conkey with Sarah Williams, “Original Narratives: The Political Economy of Gender in Archaeology,” 102–19.
For discussion of the evidence from the Linear B Tablets, see Jon Christian Billigmeier and Judy Ann Turner, “The Socioeconomic Roles of Women in Mycenaean Greece: A Brief Survey from the Evidence of the Linear B Tablets,” in Reflections of Women in Antiquity, Helene P. Foley, ed. (New York and London: Gordon and Breach, 1981), 1–18 with further bibliography.
See J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion and Mother Right, Selected Writings, trans. R. Mannheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967) (English translation of selections from the German original)
and Joan Bamberger, “The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society,” in , Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 263–280. For discussion of Bamberger, see further below.
For an attempt to view the movement in a larger post-modern context, see Charlene Spretnak, States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age (San Francisco: Harper, 1991).
See, for example, Alice Echols, “The New Feminism of Yin and Yang,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thomson, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 439–59.
For a critical response to the essentialism debate with further bibliography, see Teresa de Lauretis, “Upping the Anti [sic] in Feminist Theory,” in Conflicts in Feminism, Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds. (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 255–70.
Women are, for example, ideologically subordinated by being linked with nature, whereas men are linked with culture. See Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?”, in Woman, Culture and Society, Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 67–88 with the critique in Nature, Culture and Gender, Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Yet see, for example, Nelle Morton, “The Goddess as Metaphoric Image,” in Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ, eds. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), 111–18.
For a recent attempt to uncover such enabling pagan rites behind Christian practice, see Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993). “Z” (Zsuzsanna Budapest), The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries (Oakland: Wing-bow Press, 1989), postulates the existence of Dianic Colleges in which young women served Artemis or Diana before the Judeo-Christian genesis (Artemis/Diana appears in Greco-Roman mythology surrounded by bands of female companions and hunters).
Women may or may not have been present at the dramatic festivals in Athens, although they are sometimes said to have opinions about tragedy. For a recent discussion of the sources and further bibliography, see Jeffrey Henderson, “Women and the Athenian Dramatic Festivals,” in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 121 (1991): 133–48. Although we cannot know whether women would have subscribed to these tragic interpretations, nor in most cases to what degree tragedies offered a new or traditional version of these myths and rites, male views on the role of these cults are critical to understanding their function in the society as a whole.
For a fuller discussion of these aspects of Eumenides, see Helen Bacon, “Aeschylus,” in Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome I, ed. T. James Luce (New York: Scribners, 1982), 147–52 and
Froma Zeitlin, “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia,” Arethusa 11 (1978): 149–84, reprinted in Women in Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers, John Peradotto and J. P. Sullivan, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 15–94.
See A. F. Garvie, Aeschylus’ Supplices: Play and Trilogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 226–27, esp. n. 6;
George Thomson, The Oresteia of Aeschylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 343, and Aeschylus and Athens, third edition (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1966), 294ff.;
D. S. Robertson, “The End of the Supplices Trilogy of Aeschylus,” Classical Review 38 (1924): 51–53; and Froma Zeitlin, “Patterns of Gender in Aeschylean Drama: Seven Against Thebes and the Danaid Trilogy,” in Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, Mark Griffith and Donald G. Mastronarde, eds. (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press), 111–12 and “The Politics of Eros in the Danaid Trilogy,” in Innovations of Antiquity, Ralph Hexter and Daniel Seiden, eds. (New York and London: Routledge), 234–38.
Richard Seaford, “The Tragic Wedding,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 107 (1987): 112–17 suggests instead that the play concluded with an aetiology of the hymenaios or wedding song.
For further discussion of the play’s concluding aetiology, see Christian Wolff, “Euripides‘Iphigeneia Among the Taurians: Aetiology, Ritual and Myth,” Classical Antiquity 11.2 (1992): 308–34, esp. 319–24.
For a fuller version of the argument presented here, see Helene P. Foley, “Anodos Dramas: Euripides’ Alcestis and Helen,” in Innovations of Antiquity, Ralph Hexter and Daniel Seiden, eds. (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 133–60.
For a brief summary of women’s roles in Greek cult, see Louise Bruit Zaid-man, “Pandora’s Daughters and Rituals in Greek Cities,” in A History of Women I: From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints, Pauline Schmitt-Pantel, ed. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992), 338–76
and Elaine Fantham, Helene P. Foley, Natalie B. Kampen, Sarah B. Pomeroy and H. Alan Shapiro, Women in the Classical World: Image and Text (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994);
for their role as priestesses, see Helen McClees, A Study of Women in Attic Inscriptions (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1920);
Judy A. Turner, Hiereiai: Acquisition of Feminine Priesthoods in Ancient Greece (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 1983); and “Greek Priesthoods” in Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean II, Michael Grant and Rachel Kitzinger, eds. (New York: Scribners, 1988), 925–32.
For an attempt to imagine what went on in all female cults in Athens, see John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 188–209.
Christ, “Laughter,” 201, and Charlene Spretnak, “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone,” in Plaskow and Christ, Weaving the Visions, 72–76. See also the discussion of the significance of the Demeter myth to modern women by Christine Downing, The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine (New York: Crossroad, 1988).
For a spiritual feminist reading of the myth not discussed here, see Carol Orlock, The Goddess Letters: The Myth of Demeter and Persephone Retold (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987).
For a discussion of other feminist reactions to the Demeter/Persephone myth, see Helene P. Foley, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary and Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Gunther Zuntz, Persephone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) is here attempting to reconcile through the story of the rape two possibly separate myths, a putatively Indo-European myth about mother and daughter corn goddesses and a putatively pre-Greek myth about Persephone goddess of the underworld. This intriguing reconstruction is entirely speculative, but in any case there is no evidence that pre-Greek culture in southern Greece was pre-patriarchal or matrifocal.
See George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens (New York: Haskell House, 1972), 119–23,
T. W. Allen and E. E. Sikes, The Homeric Hymns (London: MacMillan and Co., 1904), 292,
and Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), 120–62. This supposition derives from the role of women in other Demeter cults, not from any certain evidence. If the Thesmophoria pre-dated the Mysteries, women probably did play a role in creating the Eleusinian myth and the cult at its earliest phases. The earliest physical remains at Eleusis are Mycenaean, although they may not be indicative of a cult at this early date. Only if the cult began at an earlier stage that was in some sense pre-patriarchal (a strictly hypothetical speculation), can the myth as we now have it represent a patriarchal re-shaping of pre-patriarchal material.
For a fuller discussion of these mythical variants, see Foley, Hymn to Demeter, esp. 97–103 and Jenny Clay, The Politics of Olympus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 224–65 passim.
See Jean Rudhardt, “A propos de l’hymne homérique à Déméter,” Museum Helveticum 35 (1978): 1–17, translated in an abridged form in Foley, Hymn to Demeter, 198–211.
For further discussion of the dynamics of the mother/daughter relation in the poem and the female confrontation with patriarchy, see Marylin Arthur, “Politics and Pomegranates: An Interpretation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter,” Arethusa 10 (1977): 7–47 reprinted in Foley, Hymn to Demeter, 21–42 and Foley, Hymn to Demeter, esp. 112–37 with further bibliography.
See especially Orphic frag. 49 Kern, Orphicorum Fragmenta (Berlin: Weidmann, 1922) and Apollodorus, The Library 1.5.1–3.
In contrast to Bamberger, Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 179–81, 197 interprets these myths as, in some cases, a response to the disorder following Europeanization; in other cases the myths are produced by cultures in which women have considerable informal power. Bamberger’s interpretation seems to fit the Greek context better (see the use of Bamberger by Zeitlin in “Dynamics of Misogyny”).
Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot; Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 5–6; see also 102–03. The plot pattern of wrath, withdrawal, return was in fact common to both male and female stories in epic (e.g., Achilles in the Iliad), but the resolution of the Demeter/Persephone story marks its difference from the mortal and masculine version.
Nancy Chodorow, “Family Structure and Feminine Personality,” in Woman, Culture and Society, Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 60–62.
Most contemporary feminist psychoanalysts (e.g., Luce Irigaray “And one doesn’t stir without the other,” Signs 7.1 [1981]: 60–67 and Speculum of the Other Woman [Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985]) would argue that the mother/daughter relationship is fundamentally and inescapably conditioned by patriarchy and its effects on the status of the mother.
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© 2001 Elizabeth A. Castelli
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Foley, H.P. (2001). A Question of Origins: Goddess Cults Greek and Modern. In: Castelli, E.A. (eds) Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04830-1_13
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