2900 words | 16 minute read
Content Note: Mentions of sexual violence, child sexual abuse, abduction, and child murder
By Pierre Bamin
When it comes round to the Spring Equinox, the discourse begins. It is more clockwork than Persephone’s ascent from the Underworld, where she ruled as Queen, only to return as the goddess of spring. Whether it’s a feminist retelling of the myth of Hades ‘rape’ [1] of Persephone that claims it was a forbidden love, or it’s people who shout from the rooftops that Hades is a rapist god, people get into… spirited arguments every. fucking. time. What I notice people fail to do, however, is to actually analyse the myths.
Media literacy and analysis have become even more of a pressing issue with the rise of fake news and generative AI. People around the world are trusting the media less, and the majority of people in the US say that fake news is muddying the water of understanding. Belief in fake news varies across the population, but there are ‘risk factors’ for those more likely to believe it, with the elderly, people with right-wing views, and those with lower education levels being more likely to believe what they read. The ability to read or concentrate on what one is reading beyond just a few minutes presents difficulty, with 30% of UK adults struggling with this. Around 70% of the UK population also does not have education beyond those now expected in high school, priming them to take what they do read at face value. Research has also shown that most adults in the US have not been taught media literacy skills. Despite this, however, it is important to say that we are all at risk of believing incorrect information due to confirmation bias.
So, basically, media literacy and the ability to analyse and evaluate what you see is in the gutter. How great for the future of the planet and its inhabitants! But I digress: what I want to talk about is how these lack of skills apply to how we read and believe in the myths of our pantheon. I’ll especially focus on the Ancient Greek gods due to 1) me being a Hellenic Polytheist and 2) the Greek myths being full of violence and otherwise questionable behaviour.
The First Step for Any Analysis: Assess the Context
Nothing exists in a vacuum. Objectivity is a lie. Feminists and others such as Donna Haraway have been critiquing the “the view from above” for decades. It is from the Enlightenment that the notion that we can act with pure reason comes. This view in particular privileges the white man’s idea that his thoughts are not clouded by emotion. I have critiqued this idea of reason being in binary opposition to emotion before. This privileged view from above behaves as though we are free of cultural conditioning and can detach our emotions when we are making hypotheses, carrying out research, and analysing data.
Instead, as Haraway writes, we need a “view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity”. This is not quite standpoint theory—Haraway in fact critiques this in her essay—but it is instead a polemic to make us consider how our minds are always clouded by experience and the socio-cultural conditions in which we live.
“Elle,” you may be wondering, “why the fuck are you talking about epistemology? How is that relevant to myth?”. Well, dear reader, allow me to return to our main point. In order to analyse any media—and mythology is comprised of various mediums, but it is crucial to note that as a whole it is still a form of media much like the news—you must remove the notions that these are objective spiritual truths. Even if these are the words of gods—as many believe the Delphic Maxims to be, for instance—they are still then filtered by a human consciousness, which is fallible. Myths come from men, not gods.
As I have hopefully just demonstrated, the fallible human consciousness (and thus its creative spirit) is not free of influence. Humankind has always had implicit biases implanted in their minds about all kinds of things. I wrote about this briefly on the topic of decolonising spirituality over on Instagram. These biases, by nature, colour our media because it is created by us, for us. It is infused with social, cultural, and political influence—just look at any of Murdoch’s News Corp output. It is also produced by humans with different outlooks based on ability and psychology. Additionally, media is also a product of its historical and geographical location—look at the history of the Hays Code and the Red Scare, which were certainly products of their time and place. With all these influences, media must be analysed with this in mind, while also acknowledging our own situated knowledge, as Haraway would put it. This is true for contemporary media, but it is also true to that which is ancient—especiallly so here, lest our reading of myth is filled with anachronisms based on these factors affecting our perception.
So, What Was the Cultural Context of Ancient Greece?
It is difficult to come to an understanding of what life was like in Ancient Greece as a whole. This is because it was, before the Hellenistic era brought about by Alexander the Great, a collection of city-states with different rules and values. However, literature around discoveries from Athens can be used to give a brief overview of what is most well-known in the Classics. I will use this here to paint a picture of the socio-cultural and political elements of (Athenian) Greek life.
From what we know, Athens was a deeply patriarchal society. Women had few rights in comparison to men. Their movements outside of the house were limited, although visiting family tombs and collecting water gave them some ability to socialise (as did certain religious festivals, such as the Thesmophoria). Outside of this, however, they were expected to remain at home. In terms of marriage, girls around the age of 14 were married off to men in their 30s and had no choice in who these men were, with abductions being a common and valid form of ‘obtaining’ a bride (more on that later). Rape culture was commonplace, with jokes about women “weeping and tearing [their] hair” after being raped featuring in comedies.
It wasn’t just in terms of gender that Ancient Greece was unequal. Voting was limited to free, male citizens. Slavery was a common part of life and the city. It was thus not free of class struggle because of this exploitation being at the root of the society’s mode of production. Between being enslaved or a citizen, there were also the ‘metics’, migrants and freedmen, who only partially enjoyed rights and had restrictions on their property ownership as well as marriage.
Ancient Greece is known for its acceptance of homosexuality [2]. However, it is not quite as progressive as one might imagine. Older men frequently had sex with boys who would in the present day be minors. While the Greeks had no conception of homo- or heterosexuality as we now do, they did have roles revolving around gender, sexuality, and age. Essentially, the Greeks categorised between ‘penetrator’ and ‘penetrated’, which mapped on to ‘active’ and ‘passive’. To be penetrated was to occupy, in the Greek mind, a passive and feminised role, and was also the role expected of the boys and young men who were in relations with older men. As David Halperin (quoted in the above link) writes:
…to be sexually penetrated was always potentially shaming, especially for a boy of citizen…
Thus, to be in the role of the penetrated was considered to be potentially shameful at the same time as being gender and/or age-appropriate. This speaks to unequal roles and prejudice in the realms of sexuality.
All of this is to say that Ancient Greece was by far nowhere near a perfect society, even if it is considered the birthplace of democracy (or, at least, it was in Athens—Sparta, for instance, was instead a ‘militarised oligarchy’). We must bear these startingly inequalities—patriarchal, unequal sexual roles, age, class, citizenship—in mind when we analyse any myth because they will surely influence the way the mythmakers made sense of their gnosis and wrote/recited their tales. As Charles Segal writes (quoted in Frtiz Graf’s Greek Mythology: An Introduction, p. 55):
From a semiotic point of view… myth is a narrative structure whose sign- and symbol-systems are closely correlated with the central values of a culture, especially those values which express a supernatural validation, extension, or explanation of cultural norms.
The Purpose of Myth
Before we can look at a myth in a bit more detail to illustrate my points, we need to find more out about why mythology came to be in the first place. Fritz Graf, in his book Greek Mythology: An Introduction, lists many reasons for myths being created and disseminated. They include, but are not limited to:
- To explain the connection between a deity and something they are associated with, such as the myth of Apollo and Daphne or his slaying of the Python at Delphi to establish it as his oracular site par excellence.
- To explain part of (supposed) history, such as the various epics surrounding the Trojan War such as Homer’s [3] The Iliad and The Odyssey.
- To explain parts of ritual and why they were done, such as Prometheus attempting to trick Zeus with the burning of sacrifices.
- As an allegory to make a philosophical point, such as much of the works of Plato.
- For entertainment purposes, such as all of the great tragedies and comedies.
- To explain facts about life in general and the natural world, such as the killing of Niobe’s children because of her hubris (considered part of the world’s natural order and humanity’s place within it).
As we can see, then, myth fulfilled several different roles in the ancient world.
Analysis in Action: The Homeric Hymn to Demeter
To really get to grips with the idea of analysing myth as an allegorical piece of media, it’s worth returning to the story of Hades, Persephone, and Demeter. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter [4] begins with the story of Kore/Persephone’s abduction by Hades so that he can marry her. To do this, he gained the approval of her father, Zeus. We then see her mother Demeter’s resultant search for her to return her from the Underworld to the world of the living—which is only partial, for Persephone was tricked into eating food from the Underworld. This serves to eventually tie her there for a third of the year, with the other two-thirds being spent above ground.
However, this myth is quite a bit more controversial than even that sounds. Many will argue that this myth is literal and that this makes Hades an actual kidnapper and rapist. Indeed, we see these takes float around social media each and every year, and people get into rather heated debates about it all.
First, then, let’s look at the domains of the three main gods in this tale. Persephone, as she becomes known after her descent, is the goddess of spring as well as the Underworld, which only comes after her kidnapping. Hades, depicted as an older male, is god of the Underworld as well as riches. Finally, we have Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, grain, and bread. Hades’ role is a little less important here, but the roles of Persephone and Demeter play a key part in this tale. Persephone gains her role as Queen because of her abduction and subsequent marriage to Hades—thus the myth succeeds in explaining one of the goddess’ domains.
What is also crucial is Demeter’s role as goddess of agriculture. In her desperate search for Persephone and attempts to rescue her, the world falls barren as she destroys the ability for crops to grow, both in grief and to challenge Zeus. Once the resolution of the tale has been met we see that Demeter continues to make the earth unable to grow crops every time her daughter must return to Hades. This is a mythological explanation of the agricultural year and the purposes of the seasons. While we may, through verified personal gnosis (that is, gnosis that fits existing knowledge), feel the change as Persephone begins her descent, it does not stop the fact that the myth is also a convenient way of explaining nature’s cycles.
We can go further with this, however. As already noted above, abductions were commonplace in Ancient Greece in order to ‘obtain’ a wife. As girls and women had no rights of their own to make a decision, it was left up to their male guardians to choose who their daughters should marry. It also meant mothers had no say in the matter. So, what this means is that taking a bride with her father’s permission, as Hades did with Persephone, was a completely normal state of affairs in Ancient Greece. We can see, then, that perhaps the story is more about the mother’s despair when their daughters were taken from them at the behest of their fathers, and the rage of a woman rendered powerless by patriarchal tradition—who nevertheless manages to use said rage against the patriarchs.
Additionally, as we have also seen, rape was commonplace during this time. Men could ‘take what they wanted’ from women and society turned a blind eye. If the gods are supposed to be perfect, and the male gods therefore the perfect embodiments of Greek masculinity, it makes sense that those who composed the myths would make them rapists.
Does This Make the Gods Rapists?
Does this mean that the gods actually are rapists? Well, I would pose the question to those who do believe this: why in the everloving fuck would you worship a rapist? And why would a god commit such a barbaric act? Even if we don’t believe in divine perfection, we can all agree that the gods’ are far closer to it than humanity is.
Instead, media analysis teaches us that these tales are likely both allegorical—the Homeric Hymn to Demeter being a tale of a mother’s grief—and representations of the culture in which the myths were conceived—hence the abduction and sexual violence.
To say anything else, to take the myths literally, is not only fundamentalist [5], it serves only to naturalise sexual violence. It makes out that it will always exist because it is a simple fact that even the gods, as glorious as they are, commit these violent deeds. It is deeply patriarchal and cynical to not only believe this but promote it online, and it undermines the work that feminists are doing to end sexual violence.
I hope now it is apparent that we need to analyse myths more carefully and within the context they were written. Indeed, to do so can promote a deeper understanding of cultus, the gods, and the culture from which they come. Media analysis in general is an important skill, so perhaps instead of sending out jaded messages about how the gods are as awful as laypeople accuse them of being, we can encourage others to engage with all media with a little more sense of scrutiny.
Footnotes
- The usage of the word ‘rape’ for the abduction of Persephone does not refer to an actual rape as we use the term today, but is an archaic way of referring to the kidnapping. The confusion comes from the translation of the Latin word rapere/rapina, which means ‘seizure’ or ‘robbery’.
- The terms we use for sexuality nowadays, such as ‘homosexual’, are actually an anachronism for Ancient Greece. The Greeks defined sexuality very differently, as I explain above, meaning they had no concept of straight, gay, bi/pansexual, asexual, or queer as we today do. When discussing historical societies and cultures, it is best to be aware of this fact when we try to label their perceptions and activities regarding sex and sexuality.
- Indeed, even the existence of Homer could be mythological. While depicted consistently as a blind, bearded man, very little is known about him and it is disputed as to whether or not the writings of the supposed Homer actually originated from one person. Still, the Greeks themselves did believe this to be the case.
- For the sake of making my notes consistent with something that you, too, can appraise and analyse yourself, I will be using the version of this hymn found on the ever-useful theoi.com.
- As we can see from this definition, the word ‘fundamentalism’ means strict and typically literal interpretations of scripture. While Hellenic Polytheism does not have any scripture in the same way as, for instance, Christianity, the myths are in effect often treated as such. I do not find it a stretch to say those who take myth literally are fundamentalists, and we should all be aware of the risks this poses. Indeed, my following point about the naturalisation of rape is one example of this.
If you enjoy my writing or find it informative, consider giving me a tip. I also have a wishlist of items that can be used for me to write new posts, and I’m always accepting ideas for these through the contact page. The wishlist also has things on there that are simply little treats to show me your appreciation.
I use YouPay, a newer platform, because it combines tips and wishlists, doesn’t reveal your legal name, and is sex worker-friendly, unlike most other platforms.
Leave a Reply