“We’re going to get this,” my mother says, her voice rising as she pleads with the buttons of the cramped antique elevator of our hotel. It resists our demands. “We’re going to figure this out.” She squints again at the sign, half English, half Greek, warning us not to take the elevator during an earthquake.
“Mom.” I place a gentle hand on her shoulder. “You say that as if you have some doubt it might be true. The elevator is old and temperamental; it’s not our fault it’s not working.” My mother always seems to think that everything that goes wrong can be attributed to a failure on our part.
At the temple of Asclepius, a statue of Athena lunges forward, her arm raised; she wears a cape fringed in hissing snakes. Snakes are symbols of the goddess of the earth. Snakes travel underground, shed their skins, and are reborn; they are symbols of immortality. Even when statues are found decapitated, or with arms missing, leaving only the bust, scholars can always tell it’s Athena because of the snakes. Reading me Greek myths as a child, my mother always reminded me, “Athena was born fully grown from her father’s head, because in fact, as a goddess, she preceded him.” When she first appeared in northern Africa, Athena was called Neith, “the terrifying one,” mother of the universe. As creator of the universe, Neith gave birth to herself. On her temple were carved the words:
I am the things that are, that will be, and that have been. No one has ever laid open the garment by which I am concealed. The fruit which I brought forth was the sun.
But the learned men of ancient Greece revised the story of Athena’s birth as follows: Zeus, the king of the gods, rapes Athena’s mother, Metis, goddess of wisdom, a bunch of times, then eats her alive while she’s pregnant. Eating Metis, Zeus thus becomes “wise” himself and eventually “gives birth” to Athena from a crack in his skull in a migraine-oriented form of rapey parthenogenesis. It’s in that version of the story that Athena becomes the patriarchy’s darling. Now she’s the goddess of wisdom and the goddess of war. But wherever Athena appears, so too does the serpent, coiling up her feet, circling her arms, writhing on the head of Medusa, who always appears on the goddess’s breastplate. Medusa is Athena’s shadow self, her underworld reflection, her anger, her history, which she always carries with her. It is by the snakes of Medusa that Athena shall be known.
In the fifth century BC, the Persian army of King Xerxes invaded Greece because the Greeks refused to pay their taxes. After the Persian invasion, the Greek women and children reappeared from hiding to find Athena’s temple smoldering in ashes. Her columns fallen. The goddess’s yellow dress, embroidered by the tiny hands of young girls, ripped from her body. Her temple looted. Its reliefs stolen. The smell of burnt olives still lingering in the air. The Athenians never fully recovered after the Persians destroyed the Parthenon.
They rebuilt the temple as best they could. But then the Turks invaded and stored their gunpowder in it; when the Venetians attacked with their flaming arrows, the rebuilt Parthenon exploded. What remained was later vandalized by Christians, turned into a church, then a mosque, then raided by an English lord. Marbles and reliefs that once graced Athena’s temple are now the pride of the British Museum. Yet, Athena still guards the city. The Parthenon has been reconstructed once again. Now it’s a tourist attraction with a fancy museum and gift shop. My mother and I admire it from the balcony of our hotel where we enjoy a dry red and eat spanakopita with flaky filo crust.
Seeing us marveling, the waiter asks us, “First time here?”
We nod. “It’s so beautiful,” my mother says.
The waiter bows. “When you live here, you feel proud but defeated. You know your best days ended two thousand years ago.”
The Greeks were not innocent when the Persians invaded; they were not rubes. Their conversion to patriarchy had happened long before. Slaves did most of the labor and women were hardly allowed to participate in public life. Still, from the balcony I imagined that feeling of seeing your most sacred site, which evolved over thousands of years of building and refinement, celebration and ceremony, destroyed over and over again; it could create a bloodlust that would turn your people into hungry vampires for generations. Considering how most civilizations on earth have seen that kind of destruction, it’s no wonder there’s so much bloodlust, so many vampires.
My mother and I are both excited to go to Delphi, home of the ancient Oracle. It takes us three hours to get there from Athens by bus, winding up double-lane roads, stopping at a café that sells iced Café Alfredo, olive oil soap, Parthenon magnets, and Zeus snow globes. When we finally arrive at Delphi, our matronly tour guide tells us we will only get forty-five minutes to linger at the site. My mother squeezes my arm and gives me a sorry look. I want to be there, still and quiet, but tour groups jostle around, crowds spuming like ants across golden stones crumbled like croutons. Couples smile with selfie sticks; a tourist in yoga pants performs Dancing Warrior Pose on a scenic overlook. Offended, the sky gods thunder. Rain advances down the mountain. Grasshoppers shiver red-legged in the wild oats as I stand looking toward the sea. I imagine pilgrims as they made their way from their ships, leaving offerings at each temple while they trekked up through the valley, until they finally reached the temple of the Oracle; Delphi was once considered “the navel of the world.” From all the most distant lands, for thousands of years, pilgrims, leaders, mothers, warriors, and politicians would travel to seek the Oracle’s wisdom.
I hear rhythmic incantations and a drum; I look around to see if anyone else hears it. They don’t. I can feel the Pythian crones flocking, landing on the columns, winking at me with sharp, black eyes. I don’t feel like I was the Oracle in a past life, but I could’ve been at her service, a dancer maybe, or a mentee. Standing in her ruins, I ask the Oracle to show me how to bring her wisdom back into the world, to call the snakes back into the garden, to resurrect the Goddess of the earth. To receive my words, I heard her say, open up your womb. You hear the voice of the goddess in your body, not your mind. Let your womb expand and be receptive. Spirit enters through the womb, as it did even for the Virgin Mary, as it does for all humans. Focus on listening. Spirit speaks through conception. Conceive in your body, then bring forth into the world.
I didn’t understand her to mean I needed to have a child, or even that I needed an actual womb. Women without wombs, transgender and nonbinary folks, and even men can still hear the Oracle speaking. She meant that through tuning in to our bodies, to our organs of regeneration, we connect to the life force, and that by tapping into that energy, we can know the nature of reality, far beyond what we can experience through our limited ego-mind.
Delphi pushes out from between the legs of two mountains, crowning like a newborn, named after the dolphins that used to frolic in the bay below. Before the Olympian gods took over, the people of Attica worshipped the earth, the animals, the plants. The Oracle stood outside on a big black rock shaped like an anvil, called the Rock of the Sibyl. Her voice hammered across the valley, over olive groves, laurel, cypress, and pine, sailing out across the sea. Hers was a voice that echoed around the world. When the Byzantine Christians came, they chopped down the laurel and the pine groves; they had no use for them. But they kept the olive trees for their merchants; olives were useful. They could sell the oil.
My mother and I stood together surveying this once lavish and sacred place. “Can you imagine all of this set up for oracles now?” my mother asks me. I think of my appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight; it’s hard for me to imagine him kneeling and presenting me with a goat and a bushel of grain.
The ancient Oracle was skilled in poetics and had a flair for drama. “Know Thyself” was the epitaph inscribed above the entrance to her chambers. Chosen from the eldest and wisest women of the village, she would emerge from a crevice in the rock into a central temple, standing before a bronze cauldron decorated with sirens, griffins, and eagles’ heads. She’d step into bellowing vapors of burning laurel leaves and say things like, “O holy Salamis, you will be the death of
many a woman’s son between the seedtime and the harvest of the grain.” I appreciate how she says Salamis will cause the deaths not of soldiers but of women’s sons. In Greece there is a saying that when a general looks at an army, he sees soldiers, whereas a woman sees only sons. Obviously, seeing sons instead of soldiers gives one a different perspective in relation to whether or not war is a good idea.
I can feel that the Pythia is old even before I go into the museum and learn from the guide that most of the Pythia were elderly. The image of an old woman, wizened, gaunt, eyes lined in kohl, stands in sharp contrast to the paintings of the oracle from the neo-Classical and Romantic periods, or even in recent films like the animated movie 300. The patriarchy always depicts the Oracle at Delphi as a roofied nymphet draped in a transparent negligee, nipples pink, vibrating with desire to whisper her swoony maxims: With silver spears you may conquer the world. The perfect title for a classically Greek-themed porno.
Originally, the Oracles at Delphi were priestesses of the Snake Goddess, the divine essence of nature; Her serpents guarded groves of sacred trees throughout the Mediterranean, where she went by many names: Astarte, Ashtoreth, Ariadne, Neith, Wadjet, Isis, Ishtar, Inanna, Tiamat…But then the Olympian god Apollo arrived in the Oracle’s temple.
As his historians tell it, Apollo, god of music and order, arrived in Delphi only to find the locals complaining about a hideous snake monster named Python. This she-monster lived in a sulfurous cave that just happened to be where the priestesses of the snake goddess gave their prophecies. Apollo plunged his golden arrow into the heart of the Python and smiled as she twisted and bled upon the black rocks. When Apollo got back to the local tavern, bragging about his heroism, the locals cheered. Kind of like when the United States Army invaded Iraq and the Iraqi people were “dancing in the streets.”
Apollo commanded the people to build his temple on top of the old one. There he would have his own prophetic priestesses. Worshipping in nature wouldn’t do for Apollo; even glamping was too rustic for that blond beauty. Apollo liked nice things. Throughout his tenure at Delphi, it grew into a palace of world renown: columned courtyards rich with statues, a sphinx on a plinth donated by the wealthy Nazians, a five-thousand-seat amphitheater made of marble, treasuries filled with luxuries from around the world. Being a generous god, in honor of the slain Python, Apollo decreed that his priestesses would be named Pythia. That was the official title of the oracles at Delphi: Pythia, after the Python Apollo killed. The maw of the monstrous snake goddess would still hiss her wisdom, but now she would speak with the voice of Apollo.
Snakes in the ancient world kept the pests out of the grain storage; most of them weren’t poisonous. But in mythology, the killing of snakes is almost always a dog whistle for the destruction of the goddess religions. As a child, on Saint Patrick’s Day, my mother would make me green four-leaf-clover pancakes with mint chocolate chips and as I ate them she’d tell me about how Saint Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. What the myth really meant was that he drove the goddess-worshipping pagans out of Ireland. When the bards of patriarchy say snake, what they really mean is goddess. As when Saint George killed the dragon. Or when, in Mesopotamia, the hero Marduk killed the dragon goddess Tiamat. She was creator of the universe; she held the Tablet of Destinies that allowed her to know all things. Marduk the hero came and took care of all that:
And the lord stood upon Tiamat’s hinder parts,
And with his merciless club he smashed her skull.
He cut through the channels of her blood,
And he made the North wind bear it away into secret places.
Of course, if you invade a territory, take over its temples, and impose a new god, the conquered people won’t just suddenly stop fighting and do as you tell them. In order for your new ideology to succeed, you have to either vilify the old gods (Snake Goddess becomes Satan, evildoer responsible for the downfall of humankind), or you allow people to follow their old traditions but tell them your new god is speaking through their old gods’ mouth (Apollo speaks through the mouth of the Pythia).
After the Apollonian invasion, priests were assigned to “interpret” the Pythia’s words. She still spoke her oracles, but the priests would follow up by saying, “What she really means is…” One time, the Oracle told Emperor Nero that, because he’d murdered his own mother, his presence at Delphi was an offense to the gods. Furthermore, she continued, his own days were numbered. “Seventy-three is going to kill you,” she said. A prophecy I’m sure the priests found difficult to spin in Nero’s favor. But it was also true. Eventually, a seventy-three-year-old man slayed the emperor. In the meantime, furious at her impertinence, Nero had the Oracle burned alive.
On the ferry to Crete, I splash myself in lavender oil and obsess about female pattern baldness. Does everything in a woman’s life come in a female pattern? I didn’t have a pastry at breakfast because I don’t want to get female pattern diabetes. Over a chocolate croissant, my mother insists sweets and fat and food do not cause diabetes. It disturbs me when she makes assertions like these, because then I feel that I must cast into doubt all the other things she says that I trust and believe in. Her ideas about spirituality, her ideas about feminism and history, which I love and admire. “Either you have diabetes or you don’t; there’s nothing you can do about it,” she says as she gobbles a piece of baklava as big as one of Aphrodite’s golden doves. I don’t believe her. Everyone in my family has diabetes. Before my grandmother died, she had her legs amputated because of it, but I tell myself I can stop it. Corkscrews of neuropathy twist through my mother’s feet as if she were an accused witch of the medieval period. In Athens I’d watched her hobble over the cobblestone streets with her cane, protesting the distance between things in that ancient walkable city built before anyone had even thought of cars, when they still had to carry ceramic urns of water up the hills on their heads. It hurt to watch, but I consoled myself with the fact that the last time I’d tested my blood sugar about a year before, it was a satisfyingly low 73.
We arrive in Heraklion and convene on the rooftop of the Olympic Hotel for the opening ceremony of our Goddess Pilgrimage through Minoan Crete, led by Yale scholar Carol P. Christ. My mother is a fan of her work, so she arranged the tour for us. Twenty women sit in a circle: lawyers, herbalists, college professors, social workers, artists, writers, PhD students, folk singers, seminary students, all ranging in age from twenty-five to seventy-five, with the bulk, not surprisingly, being in the later end of the age spectrum.
While we make introductions, I watch the swifts swooping in endless silhouette over the Mediterranean. Don’t the swifts get tired? They never rest. They live to fly. Swifts are like swallows, only they never land; they even sleep midair, and they twirl in endless spirals above the white spires of this ancient city named after the conquering hero, Heracles.
We state our lineage. “I am Amanda, daughter of Lucinda, daughter of Patricia, daughter of Lila, daughter of Marianna, daughter of Emma…I come from a long line of women, some whose names are known, many unknown, going all the way back to the primordial Eve in Africa.”
Our tour host, Carol, a blond septuagenarian, tall as an Amazon, wearing a purple straw hat and dripping with snaky gold jewelry, explains to us that on the island of Crete, before the age of heroes and war, there may have been a golden age where priestesses governed from sacred sanctuaries like the one at Knossos, which we will visit the following day. She tells us that women invented agriculture, weaving, pottery, and poetry. In Neolithic times, women were valued for their intelligence and so they had a lot of power. Crete was the last flowering of that culture because they were far away from the patriarchal hordes of the Indo-European invaders.
The next day we visit the sacred center of Knossos, an ancient complex of shrines, courtyards, and divination chambers. I inspect what remains of the frescos: Minoan priestesses dance in tiered skirts made of linen, stained as red as berries, as blood, serpents coiling up between their breasts and aro
und their wrists, whispering secrets of the earth. In the frescos and figurines of Knossos, the people and animals are always smiling. The smiling priestesses dance, their long black hair arcing up toward the sun. They stand holding instruments, a lyre, a lute, or with their arms raised in joyful celebration. Even the men dance and leap, jumping over the smiling bulls, bringing offerings of fish to the Goddess and urns of wine.
At the museum, we see gold coins, rings, and other objects all depicting “the epiphany of the Goddess,” the moment when the Goddess emanated from the earth. Bees roll in ecstasy inside juicy golden flowers. Like the bees, the Goddess appears hovering above her sacred tree; its fruits engorge and grow succulent. Below, her priestesses dance their exultant rites. Throughout the ancient world, the Goddess is often associated with groves of trees. In Sumer, priestesses of the goddess Asherah wore long woolen cloaks inlaid with white spiral shells and lapis lazuli. In groves of trees they worshipped her. In fact, in Greek, Asherah is translated as grove. When the Christians came, they cut down Asherah’s trees and told her worshippers that their sacred grove was a thing of the past, a Garden of Eden that was no more. Besides, the garden was haunted by an evil snake.
Carol is careful to call the ancient sites we visit “sacred centers,” rather than “palaces” as they are traditionally called. There is no evidence that these sacred centers were ruled by kings, no evidence that there was the concept of “rule” or a segregated class-based society as we know it at all. In the Minoan sacred centers, half the village was dedicated to the storage of grain, wine, and olive oil, collections from the surrounding community to be shared with all those in need.
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