When War Became The Norm

When War Became The Norm

When war was born

We blessed Gilgamesh

All transgressions were confessed

A great purpose to him was given

By the love of brotherhood enmeshed.

~

When war became the norm

We blessed Achilles,

Best of all heroes ever born

But a bloodthirsty warrior too,

See how the author warns,

“Oh sing, oh muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Acheans.”

~

Manhood is exalted in the throes of fighting

Glory is praised by the Gods’ proffered knighting

Soldiers flashy medals, the currency of privilege

Every Father tells his Son,

Go be a hero for your village.

~

Achilles’s mother, goddess Thetis,

Of the glistening feet says,

Two fates are before you, Son

Lay siege to Troy and perish young

Or go home where pride and glory die,

And you along with the aged lie.

~

Mortal women also share

Prophecies

Like the dire words of

Andromache

Holding her infant son

Bearing unshakeable truths of what will come

Husband, hear me.

Her words dissolve into infinity,

You will fall, while I will be encaged, and

Our child will be taken from me while still a babe.

~

Nationalism makes new monsters everyday

Desecrating symbols,

Slaughtering faith,

Rewriting stories of what really happened

Into tales of glory with glamour captioned.

~

Brash boys, petulant ones,

Individuals with their guns

Genius invasions, bravado

The very virile masculine.

~

Thumbs up from

Wannabes pardoning

War crimes with high fives

On living room couches

Tough Guys

Singing their entitlement songs.

~

Must we wait ten years

For clear eyes and heads

To realize war

Serves only funeral beds?

Women’s voices, power & anger are constantly challenged

The gorgon, Medusa, was once a priestess of the Greek goddess, Athena. When Medusa was raped by the god, Poseidon, in the goddess’s temple, she begged the goddess for protection. Athena, instead of offering comfort or any form of retaliation, punished Medusa by turning her into a gorgon, the well-known creature with serpents for hair.

We’d like to think that perhaps the goddess was protecting Medusa by turning her into a monster so that no man would ever bother her again. But in another story told by the Greek writer, Herodotus, we learn that Athena gives her shield to Perseus to help him kill Medusa. He uses it as a mirror, so that Medusa cannot make eye contact and therefore is powerless from turning men to stone. Perseus beheads her and continues to use her severed head as a trophy to subdue enemies.

Today there have been notable sightings of Medusa throughout pop culture (Rihanna on the cover of GQ, Uma Thurman in Percy Jackson movies, for starters). It’s not just the myth of her, but the face of her, too. Why is Medusa such a compelling figure? The spectacle of the medusa certainly gets a lot of uses. One such meaning behind her visage is the recurring trope of the angry woman, and ultimately, the personification of female rage and indignation. Writer, Elizabeth Johnston, says this indignation arises in response to her being a receptacle, “a go-to figure for those seeking to demonize female authority.”

But what authority?

Archeologists like Marija Gimbutas studied many ancient female figurines that spanned across Old Europe over many centuries. Gimbutas would argue that evidence exists of a matriarchal society that predates Greco-Roman culture. This “off with her head” scenario reflects the mythologizing of the patriarchy, a time in history when male heroes supplanted the power of a mother goddess. But why this look, why snakes? It’s not like we haven’t seen this vision of scariness before.

Johnston would argue that Poseidon’s rape of Medusa and Perseus’s subsequent beheading of her, “represents the same effort to legitimize male privilege.” There are stories like these found all over the world that coincide with women being tricked out of their power and down-sizing into secondary characters, or worse, monsters.

The brutal culture of the Babylonians tells a creation story that describes the world as being a formless mass, instead of solid ground, Tiamat, the mother of all, rose from the watery deep as first deity, a sea goddess. The sons of Tiamat began fighting, killing many in the family, including Tiamat’s new husband. When asked to go to battle against them, Tiamat refuses, saying she would not fight her own children.

Marduk, one of her sons, kills her and splits her body in two, creating a new world where her top half became the heavens and with lower half, the earth. Marduk becomes the new male creator of the world and Tiamat is forever remembered as the sea serpent that Marduk destroyed.

Before the conquering hordes of the Sea Peoples (Zeus among them) arrived to what we know today as the Greek Islands, images of gorgons as protective symbols decorated temples and other important spaces. According to Vice writer, Christobel Hastings, Medusa in Greek antiquity was a mighty force endowed with the power to both kill and redeem. Artists — sculptors and painters — used the Medusa head as an apotropaic symbol. The image and message of the snake throughout the flourishing of lunar agricultural goddess-based cultures was perceived as benevolent, part of the sacred reality of nature. The caduceus is a good example of the positive representation of power offered by snakes that lingered into not just Pan-Hellenic Greece but even our current era.

The timeframe of Medusa’s storytellers, including Hesiod from the 8th century BCE, and Ovid, a Roman poet, tightly intertwined with the same culture that enforced purity doctrines. The Greco- Roman world may have provided the bedrock of Western civilization for the arts, philosophy and democracy but it also codified misogyny. According to historian, Sarah Pomeroy, the Emperor Constantine inscribed a purity doctrine 2,000 years ago. “Constantine was explicit about the guilt of the victim. Regarding raped virgins, he distinguished between girls who had been willing and those who were not. Both would be punished.” Constantine’s reason for punishing the unwilling rape victim? If she truly didn’t wish to be raped, she should have yelled louder so that family or neighbors could’ve come to her rescue.

Authors and scholars of antiquity continue to soften words minimize stories of sexual assault when referring to ancient myths that include rape — and there are a large number of assaults in Greek myth. Seduction, divine raptus — gods pursuing women for sexual encounters — some consider them justified plot devices that drive the story to its conclusion. But it’s interesting how rape and its after effects were often seen as justification for the birth of a hero and whether or not that occurred, the odds are that beyond pregnancy and motherhood women faced fantastical transformations: into a tree, a monster, a constellation, or death.

In the myth of Callisto there was a young girl who was a devoted follower of Artemis. She drew the attention of Zeus who was not allowed to enter the private circle of the initiated, protected by Artemis. Instead, Zeus changed himself into the guise of Artemis and approached Calisto, who was unaware of this deceit. When Zeus raped Callisto she was forced to leave Artemis’s sisterhood. After giving birth to a son, one of the gods turned Callisto into a bear. When her son becomes a man he almost kills her in her bear form. Zeus intervenes and changes Callisto into a constellation where she abides forever the heavens.

Many women seeking higher status over the last few centuries have been compared to Medusa when they try to step into traditionally held men’s roles, or when they attempt to make changes to an unjust world. Look how Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was memed as the mythological snake-haired monster during the campaign. Clinton was compared to Medusa by conservative writers from Breitbart News and Right Wing Humor. Whether these conservative writers know it or not, the message is implicit: Symbolically cut the woman’s head off, to silence her when she acts up.

Cellini’s 1554 bronze statue depicts a triumphant Perseus standing on top of her body, her severed head held aloft. Cellini had been asked to use the hero narrative of Perseus, the son of Zeus sent to slay Medusa, as a way of reflecting the power of the Medici family over the Florentine people. Other artists followed suit: in 1598, Caravaggio painted his nightmarish ceremonial shield. He, too, wanted a piece that would win the admiration of the Medicis. There’s another opinion about sculpture of Cellini’s, however. Art historian Christine Corretti asserts that the Perseus statue was made intentionally by the artist as a strategy to symbolize the threat of female agency. Cellini believed Medusa symbolized, “both the threat of women’s burgeoning political power and a feminized Italy,” (Johnston).

Leslie Jamison draws the distinction between threatening females and women’s anger. In her article, “I Used to Insist that I Didn’t get Angry,” she argues that the figure of the angry woman is often framed as a threat. The list of archetypes are plenty: “The harpy and her talons, the witch and her spells, the medusa… The notion that female anger is unnatural or destructive is learned young.” Through stories we are told a children, specifically through the Greek myths, we learn that our ideas about women’s anger as unnatural is normalized.

Shaming women because of their anger is deeply rooted in our collective psyches. A study in 2000 at UCLA Berkeley by Ann Kring showed that women and men both self-report anger episodes, but women report more shame and embarrassment in the aftermath while men feel encouraged. Further, male anger is more often associated with positive adjectives but women’s anger, as you might imagine, is not. Kring also cited that men are more likely to express their anger physically and verbally, while women are more likely to cry when they get angry, “as if their bodies are forcibly returning them to the appearance of the emotion — sadness — with which they are most commonly associated,” (Jamison).

In the book, Gone Girl, the main character, Amy, goes missing on the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary and her husband becomes the prime suspect in her disappearance. Spoiler alert: As we learn that Amy has purposely disappeared in order to create suspicion around her husband in punishment for having an affair, we begin to see who Amy really is. In the public eye, everyone believes that she is a victim, but in a stream of monologues, we learn that she is the very antithesis of that. She is a woman with assertion, agency and strength — and she becomes vengeful.

In her article, “How the scathing Gone Girl rant about being the cool girl defined the decade,” Mary Elizabeth Williams says, Amy is “a singularly shocking figure, a liar who can destroy men with her tearful hints and accusations of physical and sexual abuse.” Amy’s mockery of the cool girl trope is her take down address to every woman who has ever played the good girl in order to serve the patriarchy: “Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot.”

The book-made-movie offers a commentary on how women are pressured into certain roles and how their renunciation of these constructs places them in the crosshairs of the culture’s scornful gaze. Cool girl keeps her mouth shut when she is unhappy about a situation. Cool girl can put up with anything her man does. Until Amy determines her husband is now playing with a new cool girl and crosses the boundary into vengeful harpy.

Amy’s character displays both suffering victim and angry girl, a dichotomy that reifies the construct of women as good girl/bad girl who is ultimately realized in the story as cool girl/medusa. All are the double helix of women’s emotional extremes. “Angry women make people uncomfortable,” says Jamison. “Sad women make people come to their rescue. It has always been easier to shunt female sadness and female anger into the “watertight compartments” of opposing archetypes, rather than acknowledging the ways they run together in the cargo hold of every female psyche.”

The movie, I, Tonya (2017) offers a textbook example of these two archetypes. The movie follows the real-life story of two talented figure skaters of the 1990’s. Tonya Harding becomes the first American woman to complete a triple axel during a competition. But then, the truth of her difficult life becomes evident. And her competitor on the ice, Nancy Kerrigan, an Olympic hopeful, is injured from an assault that Harding’s ex-husband was responsible for (the attack was actually carried out by a hired hit man).

Back in the day (the 1990’s) everyone was transfixed by the despised, trashy, immature Harding who had more than one whiny encounter with the judges throughout competitions. And Kerrigan appeared in the paparazzi as the complete opposite. The press and the public ate it up. Harding, in her homemade competition costumes and scrunchies with French braids was the perfect opposite for the sophisticated Kerrigan, silently suffering in her white-lace leotard.

The movie offers us insights into the source of Harding’s anger, that includes an abusive mother and husband and a poverty ridden life. It breaks open the molding of the stereotype to see what’s driving the behaviors and disfunction, helping us to understand why she behaved the way she did. And the movie was a hit in the depiction of the women as foils. Jamison again: “It was easier to outsource those emotions to the bodies of separate women than it was to acknowledge that they reside together in the body of every woman,”

SOURCES

https://www.salon.com/2019/12/26/how-the-scathing-gone-girl-rant-about-being-the-cool-girl- defined-the-decade/

Read More: https://www.thelist.com/44261/womens-perfect-body-types-changed-throughout- history/?utm_campaign=clip

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/magazine/i-used-to-insist-i-didnt-get-angry-not- anymore.html

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvxwax/medusa-greek-myth-rape-victim-turned-into-a-monster

Regula, deTraci. “Medusa’s Curse: Greek Mythology.” ThoughtCo, ThoughtCo, 1 July 2019,

Johnston, Elizabeth. “Medusa, the Original ‘Nasty Woman’.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 9 Nov. 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/the-original- nasty-woman-of-classical-myth/506591/.

Meier, Allison. “The Beauty and Horror of Medusa, an Enduring Symbol of Women’s Power.” Hyperallergic, 22 June 2018, https://hyperallergic.com/432102/dangerous-beauty-medusa-in- classical-art-metropolitan-museum/.

Maisie, Adrian. “What Does the Head of Medusa Symbolize?” GTHIC, GTHIC, 17 Mar. 2020, https://gthic.com/blogs/jewelry-blogs/what-does-the-head-of-medusa-symbolize .

Searching for the Goddess: Beyond the Meme

 Goddess worship in the modern era has always been relegated to counterculture, and so it is especially intriguing to witness the surge of renewed interest in the ‘craft, and with it the concurrent interest in crystals and astrology. But when searching on-line about the goddess, information is limited. For example, when inputting words like sacred feminine or goddess in the search engine on Instagram, what appears are pages dedicated to astrological advice or representations of Greco Roman goddesses. Google search “goddess” and you find the same. But none of these places (at least towards the top of any search engine) will provide a deeper understanding of goddesses before the conquering hoards came along. (Hecate may be the exception. But that’s a different letter).

If Greco-Roman goddesses are the mainstay of how we ingest the sacred feminine then we are left in a bit of a bind because of the misogynistic structures deeply embedded in the sources of how we have come to know the goddess. When worshippers reclaim a goddess from Greece, how can we experience them beyond the splintered, narrow version that the patriarchy has encoded? We might call upon Aphrodite, known as the goddess of love, beauty and sexuality, for instance, but these more common features reflect a diminished role, vastly different than the one of prominence proffered from her Mesopotamian heritage — and one where the earlier form held much greater importance.

Plenty of scholars would agree that Greece offers us concepts of divinity in woman-form but with strings attached. Ann Baring, from the must-read Myths of the Goddess, writes, “At its finest, Greek mythology can be seen as the working out of a right relationship between dynamic sky/sun gods of invading Indo Europeans and the older lunar agricultural stratum of pre-Hellenic goddess culture that had been established for many millennia.”

But unfortunately, at its worst, the succeeding mythology also emphasizes war and conquest, re situating the conquered culture as debased and trivialized (aka, othered) and codifies misogyny, ageism, racism, ableism and classism.

If we borrow from some well-known mythologists, they will argue that ancient myth correlates to the rituals and social values of the cultures who extolled the stories of their gods. If this is so, does that mean we are reifying the very values of those patriarchies we are trying to resist? How then do we do this if our only stories (keeping with Aphrodite as an example) are ones in which beauty is the center piece for the woman deity? (see Judgment of Paris if you need reminding) and let’s add along with it transgressions of adultery and mean spiritedness toward mortal women.

Perhaps the popularity of the Greco-Roman world is sustained not just because that is where we get ideas about Democracy but because, as Mircea Eliade espoused, archaic people were more attuned to life because of their connection to nature, which was considered sacred. He offers that when modern men use myth (like a time machine) they can regenerate their own hopefulness.

Though I love the keeping of a mantra where nature is a sacred reality, obviously, Eliade’s reasoning is problematic for witches and/or feminists. Stories enshrined in the canons of early western literature dignify women about as much as the Old Testament does. How are we to respond to the writings from misogynists like Homer and Hesiod for some “return to paradise time” for us to dip our toes in? By the time the Greek poets had put the myths of the gods to pen, much of goddess culture and the social values of women from those cultures, had been erased.

Erasure of Aphrodite’s earlier cults reflects women’s diminished power. It is easy to see how the Aphrodite of pop culture is extolled and then internalized into our own ways of thinking and feeling. Faking normal on social media, that includes air-brushed and photo shopped filters of professionally posed, hyper-sexualized teen-agers, demonstrates how misunderstood and misaligned goddesses are situated in the capitalistic, consumerist, longing for beauty-driven industry of modernity. Don’t get me wrong, I have ongoing conversations with myself about obligatory spending on beauty products and which photos of me I’ll let my husband post on Facebook. I am not immune. This continues to serve the patriarchies’ value systems that limit women’s worth. And though we have evidence that those with power are aware of the damage that is done to young women every day, nothing much changes. Instead, Instagram posts are strikingly similar to the story of three goddesses in a beauty contest in keeping with dominant culture’s narrow ideas (aka beauty and sexuality) about what the term goddess means. Because Aphrodite wins, she awards the judge, Pairs, the most beautiful woman in the world as a prize which afterward jumpstarts the Trojan War.

Don’t we owe it to the goddess, and to ourselves, to go deeper, beyond the meme, beyond the quick stop, drive-by scrolling of beautiful people?

Some of the earliest traditions honoring Aphrodite were those of the living marriage between her and Adonis. The stories proliferate through Aphrodite’s connection to Inanna, a Sumerian goddess whose sacred marriage rituals denote the lesser-known power and equanimity afforded to women in the Bronze age. These rituals were annual; two lovers displayed on two couches strewn with flowers and fruit. The following day an effigy of Adonis is thrown into the water witnessed by people singing songs of his eventual rebirth. By exploring the rituals, stories and imagery associated with a goddess before patriarchal bands decimated goddess cultures, we can claim a larger part of our prehistories that are rich in women’s leadership.

It may be easy to minimalize these traditions as fertility rituals but the world of our ancestor’s enjoyed nature as a sacred reality and the relationship between the goddess and her lover was evidence that the universe could be renewed. Such a vision helps us to imagine that the goddess was once as once as large as the universe itself.