Women and Religion

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Women and Religion in Classical Athens
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Hera

• goddess of marriage
• city protector
• mythic embodiment of positive and negative
  potentials of marriage

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Hera

• Ixion is punished eternally for trying to rape
  Hera.
• The womans sexual virtue represents the
  integrity of the household.
• An assault on her is an assault on the household.
  
• In Athens, seduction was a worse crime than rape
  . . .

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Athena
Athenas special powers of military prowess and
wisdom derived from her special relationship to
Zeus, and symbolize the magnitude and beneficence
of female potency when submitted to benign male
control.
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Artemis
Artemis, the huntress, remained forever a virgin,
roaming the wilderness, a liminal and often
threatening figure
Yet another aspect of this goddess was to promote
the fertility of animals, aid in childbirth, and
oversee the transition of virgins into brides
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Artemis
Prepubescent Athenian girls ran races and did
bear dances at her sanctuary at Brauron
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Aphrodite

• goddess of love
• embodies intoxicating sexuality and beauty.
• prayed to by married women men might favor Eros
• in Sappho, personally accessible
• In myth, often inconsequential
• Focus of both private worship and public cult
• Other duties civic business ...

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Terracotta sphinx head temple of Artemis
Laphria in Calydon c. 630 BC
Female Monsters
Female monsters also proliferated in Greek
mythology the boogeywoman Mormo, the sphinx,
Roman copy of a Greek sphinx with victim
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And the Gorgons (Medusa is the most famous), a
vagina dentata with an apotropaic function . . .
Sirens with their deadly singing
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Womens Rituals
Womens main civic role was in religious rituals,
and women were central to the family and
household rituals that ensured the continued
favor of the gods and right living in a complex
world.
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Womens Rituals
Women maintained the household rituals. Here a
woman brings offerings outside to the altar in
front of her house.
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Womens Rituals
A wife tends her household altar (painted inside
a wine cup)
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Womens Rituals
Women were responsible for the daily and cyclical
duties of maintaining family and household cult,
thus keeping the world running smoothly. This
woman brings offerings to the grave of a family
member.
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Religious rituals in which young girls
participated
Once I was seven I became an arrephoros. Then at
ten I became a grain grinder for the
goddess. After that, wearing a saffron robe, I
was a bear at Brauron. And as a lovely young girl
I once served as a basket-bearer (kanephoros),
wearing a string of figs. Aristophanes,
Lysistrata

• Rituals provide
• opportunities for social connections
• value in the community
• models for relationships and transitions

• Rituals symbolize
• womens work roles
• womens fertility
• womens association with nature

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Womens roles in the Panathenaic procession

• women made the robe dedicated to Athena and
  probably carried it as well
• The (hereditary, aristocratic) priestess of
  Athena Polias (the citys patron deity)
  officiated. (Gods were typically served by
  priests, goddesses by priestesses.)
• women carried other ritual equipment (stools are
  shown)

• Women played roles in sacrificial processions
  that reflect their cultures appropriate symbolic
  duties for women.
• the kanephoros (an aristocratic virgin girl)
  carried a basket of grain in which the
  sacrificial knife was held
• women carried jars of water for use in the
  sacrifice

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Womens Rituals
The sacred procession of the Panathenaia led up
into the acropolis and around the Parthenon
before ending at the altar in front of the
building.
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The Parthenon Frieze
The Parthenon Frieze shows the robe woven by
Athenian women dedicated to the goddess at the
Panathenaia
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The Parthenon Frieze
Women carry stools in the procession
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The Parthenon Frieze
Marshals direct young girls in the ceremonial
procession (emphasizing male supervision of
female symbolic roles)
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Parthenon Frieze
The Parthenon Frieze
Girls carry vessels to aid in the ritual libations
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Thesmophoria

• 3-day festival in October/November
• held a central role in state cult
• celebrated by adult, married citizen women (or
  women who had been married)
• held on the Pnyx (where the all-male, political
  Assembly usually met) and displaced the Assembly
• the women camped there the whole time

• Schedule of festivities
• Day 1 Anodos (way up) procession carrying
  sacred items
• Day 2 Nesteia (fast) Demeters mourning, or
  recreation of prehistorica way of life
• Day 3 Kalligeneia (beautiful offspring)
  celebration with sacrifices and feasts

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Thesmophoria
Before the ritual, piglets and phallic cakes were
buried on the site. During the festival, they
were removed (nicely rotted) to be mixed with
seed grain and ensure fertility of
crops. Piglet was slang for vagina. Women
observed chastity just before and during the
festival, and celebrated with obscenity and
joking. Contradictory?
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Thesmophoria Modern interpretations

• Male attempt to control feminine fertility, a
  ritual taming of womens sexual organs
  (Golden/Blundell)
• Contradictions inherent within a society which
  relegates the female sex to the periphery of the
  political-religious space but due to its own
  complex, polarized ideas about male and female,
  must give women a determining role in the
  reproduction of the entire system (Detienne)
• A double bind . . . demands chastity from the
  wife but insists on her sexual nature but
  Thesmophoria also offers the initiation of the
  female into her own interior space (Zeitlin)
• establishment of a society of women through
  which they were able to demonstrate their
  independence and responsibility
  (Burkert/Blundell)
• Women saw in their religious actions involving
  grain and sprouts a celebration of their female
  power over life and sexuality within the
  peripheral and annoying constraints of male
  pretensions (Winkler)

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Adoneia
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The Pythia at Delphi

• Chosen from maidens (later, older women)
• prophesied / transmitted Apollos will
• Relationship between Pythia and priests?

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Anthesteria
3-day Athenian festival much of the second day
was devoted to wine tasting and drinking
contests, open to all men above the age of three,
slave and free alike. Basilinna has ritual
marriage with Dionysus
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Anthesteria
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Religion can be fun Anthesteria
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Lenaia

• civic wine festival
• archaic image of Dionysus

• women prominent in rituals
• January, month of marraige

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Lenaia
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Religion can be fun Maenads
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The Worship of Dionysus
Dionysiac celebration involved loss of self and
ecstasy
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The Worship of Dionysus
Greek mythology emphasized the foreignness of
Dionysus, but archeological evidence suggests he
is as old as the other Greek gods. As god of
wine, he appealed to men as well one 3-day
Athenian festival, the Anthesteria, devoted much
of the second day to wine tasting and drinking
contests, open to all men above the age of three,
slave and free alike Major civic festivals, such
as the dramatic festivals of Lenaia and Dionysia,
as well as the more sober parts of the
Anthesteria, emphasized Dionysus role as a god
whose power supported a well balanced life, both
family and civic.
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The Worship of Dionysus
Maenadism provided women with a temporary
respite from the routine and isolation of their
domestic existence, but it also allowed them,
through their experience of ecstasy, to a mode of
expression which gave free reign to pent-up
emotions and hostilities (Blundell)
The term maenad (mad-woman) signified
possession by a god but at the same time carries
derogatory connotations, implying masculine
disapproval of uncontrolled feminine behavior
(Blundell)
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The Worship of Dionysus
Here mythic Maenads practice the ritual of
omophagia, eating raw, as they tear apart the
Theban King Pentheus, who opposed the rituals of
Dionysus.

• The violent and sexual images of Dionysiac
  worship show gender tensions implicit in Greek
  society
• women nature (which can be terrifying)
• women away from home are wild and dangerous
• women symbolize scary ideas like self-loss and
  unreason

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The Worship of Dionysus
A large body of vase painting revels in mythic
scenes of Dionysiac worship and erotic pursuit of
Maenads.
But does this show us anything other than mens
erotic fantasies?
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The Worship of Dionysus
While maenads are often shown under sexual attack
by Satyrs, as shown here, they defend themselves
effectively . . . Perhaps emphasizing that the
cult was sexual only in fantasy real maenads
were faithful wives . . .
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The Worship of Dionysus
How many real women worshipped Dionysus as
maenads? Evidence suggests the practice was
more common in some parts of the Peloponnese and
Asia Minor than in Athens Pausanias mentions
Athenian women who traveled to Delphi, performing
dances at set points along the way, in the 2nd
century CE could this reflect earlier
practices? Feminine solidarity is reflected in
the story of the women of Amphissa
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The Worship of Dionysus
I. M. Lewis, in a study of possession in many
different societies, argues that rituals like
Maenadism allow women (and other disenfranchised
groups) to express their pent-up frustrations at
their subjected social role, but is only
tolerated because the men in power recognize this
outlet as essential for the maintenance of the
status quo. Zeitlin (Blundell) Dionysiac
worship which incorporates rituals of inversion
(such as abandonment of home and children,
demonstrations of aggression, and eating of raw
flesh) would have conformed to the male view of
womens nature as a subversive and less fully
integrated element of society. This supports a
negative ideology of the female as unruly and
disorderly
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finis