Greek literature has a strong streak of misogyny (the hatred of woman) that begins with Hesiod and continues unabated in Roman times. Hesiod’s story of Pandora, the first woman, is described as “the beautiful evil, the lovely curse, and from her has sprung the race of womankind, the deadly race and tribes of womankind, great pain to mortal men with whom they live … so women are a curse.” The language of “deadly race and tribes of womankind” sounds very much like the old Greek fear of the Amazons, with whom they fought bitter battles over Goddess sites under the protection of the warrior Queens and their female armies, at Delphi, Troy and Ephesus. There is evidence of those battles in the artwork left at both the shrine at Delphi, the sacred Oracle, and also at Ephesus, the city in Anatolia originally built by the Amazons and later dedicated to the Greco-Roman Goddesses Artemis/Diana. Though the Greeks eventually defeated the Amazons in Greek territories, they remained quite terrified of what they called the “ghosts of the dead Amazons.”
But Greek misogyny has another powerful component: homophilia, which is the love of men by men, a love elevated above heterosexual behavior and done so openly and proudly by Greek men of status. Misogyny remained an important Greek literary motif, with anti-woman themes and comments prevalent. The Greek philosophical tradition proceeds from a presupposition of both the otherness and inferiority of women. Aristotle “proves” women inferior and defective, bringing “scientific language” to popular conceptions.
In such a system, Frymer-Kensky continues, erotic desire is clearly a problem. The great fear, she says, was that erotic desire was an absolutely uncontrollable force, and much Greek discussion of sexuality centers on the need to control it, to master one’s passions, to impose discipline, refinement, and civilization on this unruly emotion. She goes on to say that the “coming of this tradition to Israel had an enormous impact on Israelite thinking.” In the book of Ecclesiastes, clearly written in the early Hellenistic period, there is this: “Now I find woman more bitter than death; she is all traps, her hands are fetters and her heart is snares. He who is pleasing to God escapes her, and he who is displeasing is caught by her … I found only one human being in a thousand, and I never found a woman among so many.”85
However, this was not taking place in a setting where the males, particularly the upper class, the scholarly, the political/lawmaking males were primarily engaged in heterosexual behavior in either their private or public lives. Quite the contrary was true. Frymer-Kensky states, “as is well-known, there is a strong glorification of pederastic homophilia in Greek writing,” and in Greek life which is obviously reflected in the writing. “Pederastic homophilia” is translated into plain English as sex with boys by male-loving men.86
At this point it is fitting to mention the philosopher Socrates of Athens, living from 469 to 399 BCE. His life and death give us insight that is otherwise difficult to understand. Socrates was married and had children, which was normal for men of status in Athens, almost required if they were to produce sons who would legitimately carry on the family name, so critically important in the patriarchal systems. Socrates left nothing of his work in writing; therefore, what we know of him comes from others, primarily his students such as Plato and Aristophanes or from Aristotle who was born after the death of Socrates. Plato writes that Socrates often spoke homosexually when teaching. But this was not outside the bounds of conduct at the time, as Frymer-Kensky mentions. In this context, his death is of interest because, according to Plato, “Socrates was tried, voted guilty, and executed (by being given poison to drink in prison) for ‘corrupting’ young men and not believing in the gods of the city.”87
So, the men who preferred sex with little boys instead of sex with a woman spent much of their time teaching the inferiority of females and promoting anti-woman sentiments. If this were just relegated to a certain portion of Greek history it would be serious enough, but this teaching, when exported as it has been for centuries, carried with it the weight of authority since later generations became enamored by the idea of “advanced” Greek scholarship which ignorant men later copied over and over again, used as irrefutable proof because it came from classical Greece, until these ideas assumed the prestige of assumed fact, without further proof being necessary. In ancient Greece, these ideas and teachings were secular, without the disguise of religious doctrine. However, when they were later incorporated into both Hebrew and Christian precepts, they became associated with the laws of the newly created male deity instead of remaining the disinformation of pederastic homophiles.
Greek women, women of any status, were supposed to be married women, and married women were intended to be baby-makers, supplying husbands with male heirs and generals with new troops for the never ceasing wars. Therefore, if women refused the services of male doctors and insisted on being treated by female physicians and midwives, the men who were openly homosexual, or bisexual and misogynistic, assumed conspiracy. This conspiracy, created out of their own anxiety, was that women would seek retribution against them and not let the male babies live, thereby preventing men from having heirs, sexual partners, and warriors. Therefore, because they lived in a society which said that they, male citizens of Athens were the only ones allowed to be in control, and because none of them were permitted into the birthing rooms, they had to take the only option of control left available to them: They exercised their power of legislation and tried to make it illegal for women to exercise their rights of choice.
Throughout these times, there were many women of accomplishment, but those who controlled society did not wish their voices to be heard, either in public (which they were prohibited from doing) or in private, which they did anyway. Therefore, much of what the women contributed was subsumed into the writings of males, plagiarized by male doctors or simply destroyed. When one is told, subsequently, that there were few, if any, female writers, artists, doctors, it is because their work was consciously eliminated from public record.
Possibly what we see of these female ancestors with our highly socialized eyes today appears chaotic, erotic (which was intended), uncontrolled. Is it possible to envision that because they shared a cultural system universal in their own time, they were able to experience greater freedom within that shared context, not worrying about controlling everyone around them? They belonged to their world, understood the vast energy surrounding them. We are the ones who may have difficulty comprehending that which was so familiar to them. They probably never realized it might be lost to us who have followed at a distance. They left us the clues. It is our challenge to understand them.
WOMEN AND THE ARTS
Women have been directly involved in architecture, invented weaving and the loom on which to manufacture cloth for the entire ancient and near modern worlds, invented ceramic pottery and the potters wheel, created stable food production now called agriculture, understood astronomy based on studies of the cycles of the Moon, sun and stars, then created the monuments for celebration of festivals based on that understanding. Moreover, they understood the complex connections that existed between all these energy systems and how to rekindle them, should that be necessary. To the ancient woman, everything was energy, whether manifest or still unseen.
Sappho As written art, only the work of the Greek poetess Sappho is available today in somewhat complete form. The rest come to us in fragments which were found in excavations in the Nile Valley, dating from 1 BCE to 1000 CE wrapping mummies and animals in Egyptian coffins.
Sappho composed not only her poetry but also the lyre music which was to accompany its recitation. Most importantly, Sappho moved her poetry from a focus upon gods, goddesses, and muses, to a style of personal, sensual imagery centered on individual viewpoint, a radical change developed by “new wave” Greek lyricist in ancient times. She was one of the first poets to write in the first person, describing her feelings and emotions, particularly as they applied to relationships. Young women were recommended to her for their education. She wrote poems to them, nurtured them, educated t
hem, loved them, and then finally when it was time for the young women to return to the mainland to be properly married, Sappho wrote their wedding songs.
Love for and between women in ancient Greece was equally acceptable as love for and between men, and we know that love between men was considered the highest form of love at that time by male writers.
This Greek lyricist and female poet was born between 630 and 612 BCE as an aristocrat. She married a wealthy merchant, and with him she had a daughter named Cleis. Her home was the cultural center on the Greek island of Lesbos, but because of politics involving her family, she was exiled from Greece to Sicily. Upon her arrival, the residents of Syracuse were so honored by her visit, they put up a statue in her honor. While she lived, because of her acclaim and stature, the coins of Lesbos bore her image.
As was the custom, her poems were written to be recited aloud to the accompaniment of a lyre (a stringed instrument resembling a small harp). The following is from the one complete poem:
I have not one word from her
Frankly I wish I were dead
When she left, she wept
A great deal she said to me, ‘This parting must be
Endured, Sappho. I go willingly.
I said ‘Go and be happy
But remember (you know
Well) whom you leave shackled by love
If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we
And all the violet tiara,
braided rosebuds, dill and
Crocus twined around your young neck
Myrrh poured on your head
And on soft mats girls with
All they most wished for beside them
‘While no voices chanted
choruses without ours,
no woodlot bloomed in spring without song.’
Translated by Mary Barnard
To Atthis
Though in Sardis now,
She thinks of us constantly
And of the life we shared.
She saw you as a goddess
And above all your dancing gave her deep joy.
Now she shines among Lydian women like
The rose-fingered moon
Rising after sundown, erasing all
Stars around her, and pouring light equally
Across the salt sea
And over densely flowered fields
Lucent under dew. Her light spreads
On roses and tender thyme
And the blooming honey-lotus.
Often while she wanders she remembers you,
Gentle Atthis
And desire eats away at her heart
For us to come.
Translated by Willis Barnstone
In addition to being lovers of poetry, the Greeks were devotees of the theatre, which was public. Besides attending the Mystery festivals, Greek women of all status in Athens must have been theater-goers. The majority of the Greek tragedies that have come down to us contain plots involving women as central characters.
A collection of extant Greek tragedies was published by University of Chicago Press, 1959, and contains the plays in translation all of which were written by men.
From Sophocles (495–406 BCE) we receive Antigone, the Women of Trachis, and Electra. Aschylus, born in Athens 13/12 BCE, died 456/55 BCE in Sicily, wrote more than 70 plays, of which seven survived. Of those seven, three are about women: They are the Suppliants, the Libation Bearers, the Eumenides and as a tour de force of character: Clytaemestra in Agamemnon.
The Suppliant Maidens (470 BCE) plot is that fifty daughters of Damanus (Greek in descent, Egyptian in appearance) flee from Egypt to Argos because their Egyptian cousins (without the daughters’ consent) want to marry them. The women come to a sacred grove, a Goddess sanctuary near Argos, and await the “will of the people” to decide their fate. (Through this play, we learn a democratic process far more evolved than that on the Greek mainland.) Athena, the goddess herself, is called forth at the end to resolve the dilemma.
The Eumenides is fascinating and well worth reading in its entirety for what it discloses to us today. The opening scene is at the Oracle at Delphi, the sanctuary of the Pythia, now priestess to Apollo, originally to the Goddess. Other characters are Apollo, Hermes (silent), the Ghost of Clytaemestra, Orestes, Goddess Athena, Chorus of Eumenides (the Furies), second Chorus is the women of Athens, and the silent jurymen of Athens.
Chorus – the Furies who guard the Goddess
Gods of the younger generation, you have ridden down
the laws of the elder time, torn them out of my hands.
I, disinherited, suffering, heavy with anger
Shall let loose on the land
The vindictive poison
Dripping deadly out of my heart upon the ground;
This from itself shall breed
Cancer, the leafless, the barren
To strike, for the right, their low lands
And drag its smear of mortal infection on the ground.
What shall I do? Afflicted
I am mock by these people.
I have born what can not
Be borne. Great the sorrow and the dishonor upon
The sad daughters of the night.
Athena replies:
No, not dishonored. You are goddesses. Do not
In too much anger make this place of mortal me
Uninhabitable …
Be reasonable
And do not from a reckless mouth cast on the land
Spells that will ruin every thing which might bear fruit.
No. Put to sleep the bitter strength in the black wave
And live with me and share my pride of worship. (Zeus)
Here is a big land, and from it you shall win first fruits
In offerings for children and the marriage rite
For always. Then you will say my argument was good.
Chorus – Furies
That they could treat me so!
I, the mind of the past, to be driven under the ground
Out cast, like dirt!
The wind I breathe is fury and utter hate.
Earth, ah, earth
What is this agony that crawls under my ribs?
Night, hear me, o Night
Mother. They have wiped me out
And the hard hands of the gods
And their treacheries have taken my old rights away.
Athena finally prevails, and the anger of the ancient Furies subsides, but the deeds are done, and we have their voices of despair in as close to their own words as is possible, given the passage of time.
Euripides (480–406 BCE) Ion takes place at the Oracle of Delphi; Suppliant Women is at the Temple of Demeter at Eleusis and is a plea against war with its suffering; Iphigenia in Aulis is the sacrifice of the heroine to Artemis the Amazon to save Greek ships; Electra, Phoenician Women and the Bacchae written at the end of his life give us even more information too lengthy to detail here, but well worth in-depth study.
In addition, he gives us Medea and Hippolytus, a mother-stepson liaison with prologue and epilogue by Aphrodite and Artemis. Iphingenia in Taurus is the drama of the high priestess and the bull-blood soaked altar; Helen in Helen of Troy a matriarchal city; Hecuba, a female character in the process of annihilation who goes mad; Amdromache set at the shrine of the Goddess Thesis; the Trojan Women after the burning of Troy, men killed, women and children held captive.
These plays were written fifth century BCE at a time when Goddess worship was practiced throughout the Mediterranean region. While many of the women in the plays are characterized as vengeful, conniving, engaged in mother-stepson relationships or as suppliants needing justice, safe haven or both, the Goddess Athena, patroness of the city of Athens, but now part of the Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses subservient to Zeus, is still called upon to mediate a just path, to provide mercy, as would have been done in the old days.
Of course the
re is always a disconnect between what is codified and what is reality. Through the Chorus voices, we hear the people of the day, a parallel world of dissent: voices from women realizing they were losing their rights, just as in the passages of the lament of the Furies, and therein the rage of repression can be heard.
PART THREE
The Inquisition
WomanSpirit – Demonized Burnt to Ashes
TRANSITION TIMES CLOSE
At the close of the Transition Times, the Western world was in a constant state of chaos throughout the Mediterranean. A new stage was being set, which would become the backdrop for the coming Inquisition. The Inquisition could not and would not have taken place if it had not been for the birth of the new religion, Christianity. And Christianity probably would not have taken the extreme course which is now its historical legacy if it had not been for the geographical location it inherited: Rome. The Christian Church of Rome, in turn, was built on the corrupt and dying legions of the Roman Empire about to expire, upon which this church modeled itself. This model of male hierarchy was a far cry from the life of its initial founder, Jesus, but by then the real message of his life was overshadowed by the preaching of Paul and soon disappeared. Out of regional chaos the Church of Rome built a structure within which to function, with proscribed rules and regulations, with specific criteria for behavior and with increasingly severe penalties for infractions or dissent. The new regional churches of the Christian faith inherited a mixed cultural framework from which to draw converts. Among the people were those of Eurasian descent, Hebrews, North Africans, Middle Easterners, Goddess worshippers, Greeks, philosophers and Romans who belonged to popular, state authorized religious cults such as Mithra and Cybele. As an integral part of the process of the Inquisition which they orchestrated, the Christian Church of Rome would emerge as the most culturally influential, politically powerful and economically aggrandized institution on the continent of Europe, as the Western World emerged into modern times. This unrepressed power would have the consequence of disaster for untold thousands of women and men who would be inextricably caught in the net of repression. And, for women it would not just be repression of dissent: The Inquisition sought to annihilate her totally. This would require an attack and destroy mission as a concerted assault by church and state against her public image, her sense of dignity, her self-esteem, her networks, and her inherited power of service in the community for hundreds of years.
Daughters of the Inquisition Page 17