I am currently running away from my problems.
There is no denying it at this point. This is how I see it. I am a coward. I am a brilliant coward. I am a beautiful coward. But I am a coward and it hurts.

What I intended, (for this blogspace) I now realize was immature. How can I possibly detach author from work? All of my thoughts, all of my time circle the circumstances of my life, and so there is no reason to think this blog will be, or should be anything other than just another reflection of the single most influential aspect of my world- my life.

And so I embark back toward reality, and post another discussion of woman and mythology. I wonder what You think. I am very passionate about possibilities and perspective. I don't want to ignore classic* interpretations and readings, but I want to integrate them, as I believe that is how our minds work, with the investigation of possibility and perspective. Once again, my ideas are of the world, for the world... but my ideas nonetheless. If more needs to be said on the subject, you probably won't like anything that comes after this anyway.

Please enjoy this little dance, I do it for myself and for you. ::Draws Curtain:: -- ::Readies highlighter and pencil:: -- ::Adjusts the bass:: GO

The fall of the Goddess
by genevieve purcell

The myth about mythology is that it is either a dictation or a reflection of society. To say that mythology is either is not enough. Mythology is the manifestation of the formation of an ideal held by a particular culture. In this way we can understand mythology as a product of the powerful. And so the question of the fall of the female deity and the rise of the male deity can be explained socially as the exchange of one ideal for another by those in power. In this way mythology serves the powerful, affirms the social order, and sets norms and cultural identity for each particular people. In this paper I will discuss how the role of woman has been altered over time by those in power in religions and society through the mythology they employ thus affirming and setting the social norm.

The origin of mother goddess in life came from the primitive societies where fertility rites were devastatingly important to the people in their agricultural lifestyles. The earth was seen as a mother figure, giving birth to all, like a woman. This myth is practically universally found throughout the many various societies of the globe, because of a similar feeling of connection between the growing of crops from seed to food and the growth of baby to man. The natural cycle of the moon also very closely related to female reproduction because of the menstrual cycle. The connections between nature and the woman were so evident for peoples so invested in agriculture that the idea of the mother goddess pervaded the mythology of the time.

As a result of this connection between women and nature, the glorious female form was revered as seemingly capable of transcending death. In mother goddess religions the woman was often associated with the serpent for their connection in the matter of transcending death. The serpent is born, lives and then sheds its former skin and emerges completing a cycle of life-death-rebirth which is god-like. Women similarly were thought capable of such a feat, because they are born, live as one, then live as two, and then live as one again after the birth.

The reign of the female goddess continued unchallenged until the emergence of the hunter-gatherer and herder communities. With the emergence of these groups came several challenges to the old religion. The hunter-gatherers were nomadic people who moved across the land in search of resources to live on for short periods of time. Similar to these people, the herders traveled across the lands with their animals for grazing purposes.

With the growing violence in the encounters among these groups a need for warrior gods developed. Just as the female goddess was valuable for her gifts to the agriculturalists, these new groups sought the protection of warrior gods who would help them as they moved dangerously through strange lands. As fertility rites had honored the female goddess, rites were developed and gradually religions formed around the warrior gods. The popularity of the gods grew with the prosperity of the hunter-gatherer-herder groups as they flourished.

In addition to the growing popularity of warrior gods threatening the dominance of the female goddess, the herders made observations about the relationship between the coupling of animals sexually, and the birthing of new animals months later. When the male animals were kept away from the females, the females didn’t reproduce the way they did when they were allowed access to the males. This challenged the idea that women were the ones wholly responsible for creation of life. The realization of the male’s role in reproduction then became aggressively adopted as the sole role in reproduction, and the woman became seen not as a divine transcendent of death, but as an incubator of the man’s seed.

These societal changes greatly impacted the way that women were treated within society and within mythology. As history annals establish the insignificance of woman through it’s omission of her, mythology emphasizes her secondary role by developing within her the characteristics by which society will judge her either good or bad. Where men are judged by their courage, women are judged by their virtue, and very early on mythology establishes what it means to be a good or bad Greek woman.

The ideal Greek woman is drawn through mythology. She is either made of stone like the love of Pygmalion, or the patiently faithful penelope. Her passivity is her virtue. The woman deity has been pacified in the wake of the male deities, and therein lies her only charm. The Goddess has been disarmed by societal change, and the woman has been silenced. The silence of the woman is countered by the powerful speaking power of the male gods. In Christianity for example, the male god impregnates the female vessel by his "word". Passivity and silence are the combination of qualities in a woman that best suite the male gods.

This pacifying and silencing is often showcased in mythology in scenes where the woman is brutalized physically, compromising her ability to speak or act. One such myth is that of Procne, Tereus and Philomela. The raped Philomela threatens to tell everyone of Tereus’ cruelty, and so he responds by cutting out her tongue. Philomela represents the seemingly disarmed and debunked female goddess. Everything is taken from her, her position of regard, her body, her voice. However despite her silence she is able to express herself and communicate her suffering through her weaving.

Philomela is not the only woman in mythology who finds satisfaction in expressing herself through weaving when words don’t serve her. Another myth that perhaps more closely reflects the fall of the goddess into silence, is the myth of Arachne and Athena. Arachne is a very talented weaver who incites Athena in competition for the reputation as ‘the best’. Arachne’s tapestry is filled with images from mythology of women being mistreated at the hands of the gods. This subversive work of art can be seen as an object of meta-myth because it is the production of her role as critic of the mythology in which she finds herself. And this token reflects the plight of the female writer who finds herself within the ancient Greek mythological tradition and decides to work within it to expose certain injustices.

Unlike Arachne’s subversive tapestry, Athena’s tapestry displays the punishment that awaits those who refuse the will of the gods. Athena’s tapestry is the propaganda support, the traditional mythologically set social norm. Athena’s tapestry warns the onlooker to beware the rigidity of the social order, whereas Arachne’s tapestry forces the onlooker to confront the injustice of that order. Athena proclaims herself the victor, and punishes Arachne as it is well within her power to do so. Critics have read this punishment as the reduction of Arachne’s ability to express herself aesthetically; "Arachne is punished for her point of view. For this, she is restricted to spinning outside representation, to a reproduction that turns back on itself. Cut off from the work of art, she spins like a woman." (Miller, 274)

Arachne and Philomela are both women beaten and abused by the mythology that surrounds them. And yet this mythology is a reflection and dictation of social reality. This is because these women face the same situations and tragedies that face real women. No, no one is transformed into a spider in reality, but there is a very real degradation that exists and existed for women who voiced opinions that went against the social order. Perhaps what can be drawn from the lines of the Arachne myth goes beyond mere punishment by a deity, but is instead a comparison of the displaced Goddess to the new and improved /approved goddess. Athena represents the ideal woman who is skilled and supportive of patriarchy and man-like in all the ways that make her admirable and none of the ways that would make her monstrous. Athena is the non-sexual female goddess who basks in the love of her father without going against him. Athena is the good woman who supports the patriarchal society with skill and pride. Not only that, but she punishes women who are not so ‘good’. Her punishment of Arachne may be billed as a reaction for Arachne’s impious statements of hubris. However what seems to really be behind the encounter is one woman destroying another woman because she stands against the patriarchal order and calls on the women who support such an order to be accountable.

Since the fall of the Goddess, women have had to fight to gain self expression one of the biggest problems facing women in this area is the problem of language. In Alicia Ostriker’s work The Thieves of Language she quotes Helene Cixous words on the dilemma facing women in language; "What would become of logocentrism...if it were to come out in a new day that the logocentric project had always been, undeniably, to found (fund) phallocentrism, to insure for masculine rder a rational equal to history itself? Then all the stories would have to be told differently, the future would be incalculable, the historical forces would, will, change hands, bodies, another thinking, as yet not thinkable, will transform the functioning of all society." (Cixous, Ostriker, 314)

Here Cixous, and through her Ostriker, and similarly with Nancy K. Miller in her
Arachnologies, the charge is put to women to respond to the challenge of self-expression through language by revisioning and rewriting that which has been oppressive. To expose the phallocentric motives of language and to transform the society through female writing. Through this process of revisioning and rewriting mythology, the fall of the Goddess in mythology, and the fall of the woman in society can be rectified.

This process is already at hand. As Van Dyck testifies in her work, Myth in Contemporary Greek Women’s Poetry there is power in the retaking and rewriting of myth; "What is left of ancient myth in these collections are the signs, the residue, of a violent struggle to resist patriarchal structures of meaning, to resist men’s representations of women. The bruises, the crumpled petticoats, the blood, the shredded garments that abound in these collections are the result of this struggle, but also the very material of an alternative poetics which does not console or offer explanations, but instead exhibits the violence of rhetoric at work in the act of representation." (Van Dyck, 123-124)

Mythology, perhaps more-so than most literatures, is an important cultural tool because of the powerful influence it has on society, and because of it’s nature as a reflective creation of society. By understanding mythology as a product of the powerful, the question of the fall of the female deity and the rise of the male deity can be explained socially as the exchange of one ideal for another by those in power. In this way myth serves the powerful, affirms the social order, and sets norms and cultural identity for each particular people. Through the examination of the myths of Philomela and Arachne the role of women on both the human and divine plane have been shown through mythology as subject to the patriarchal order in which they struggle and yet capable of self-expression that transcends mere reproduction to be representation.