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Greek mythology, feminist reclamation of lost/ancient tradition, and an interface issue: or, The Thing I Got So Cranky About The Other Day

by Diane Duane September 13, 2020

(The other day being April 2, 2014. This post is ported in from Tumblr — I’m in the process of moving some longer posts from there to here, where they belong.)

The passage below, when I ran across it last week, initially caused my mouth to drop open in sheer disbelief. And since then the thought that it is even now wandering blithely about unchallenged has been sort of gnawing at me. So some ranting is about to ensue. If you’re not in the mood for that, best turn your eyes away now and look at some nice pics of kittens drinking beer or something.

…I can’t now even remember what brought me to this particular page, and I want to emphasize that this isn’t in any way about the OP, who doubtless thought the source (or at least the quote) was reliable.

However…

…it’s not. And since this (as some around here like to say) is relevant to my interests, I just want to drop a few notes about this one quote, and leave further considerations to those who feel like going into them.

So here’s the material that got up my nose.

Greek myths mention several Islands of Women, where Amazons lived without men, only consorting with neighboring colonies of males at certain seasons when they wanted to conceive their children. Taurus, Lemnos, and Lesbos were said to be such all-female societies. The Greeks apparently feared them. They said the women of Taurus sacrificed to their Goddess all men who landed on their shores; and the women of Lemnos had risen up against their husbands and murdered all of them at once. The Greek writers seemed to have no doubt that women could destroy whole populations of adult males, and there was no effective defense against them.
The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara G. Walker (p. 26)

(rolls up her sleeves) It’s hard to even know where to begin shredding this like wet kleenex analyzing this…

In order, I guess:

“Greek myths mention several islands of Women, where Amazons lived without men…”

Okay. Even though the Amazons were specifically known1 for living on the Anatolian coast of what is now Turkey — this being the location of their main city, Thermyskira or Themyskira, depending on whose orthography / spelling you prefer: Wonder Woman fans will of course recognize the name — well, who knows? Maybe the Amazons had some all-female island colonies as well. (They are reported by a historian or two as having founded Paphos, but that city [on the island of Cyprus]  was co-ed, and all the other colonies mentioned in connection with Amazons were in mainland Turkey.) So let’s run with that possibility for the moment.

“…only consorting with neighboring colonies of males at certain seasons when they wanted to conceive their children. Taurus, Lemnos, and Lesbos were said to be such all-female societies.”

…WHOOPSIE!

Let’s look at the islands in question.

Taurus / Tauros: Or as the more recent ancients came to call it, Taurica. Only an island by courtesy. It’s a peninsula (though one sort of hanging by a thread): in fact, the southernmost peninsula of the Crimean region, which has been somewhat in the news of late. Nonetheless, whether it’s an island or a peninsula, that didn’t stop the near-classical-era ancient (male) Greeks from planting trading towns all over it.

image

Lemnos:

A genuine island, maybe two thirds of the way between mainland Greece and Turkey. Myrina is its main town.

Lesbos:

Right there southeast of Lemnos, off the present-day Turkish coast. Mitylene / Mitilini is the major city.

…These places’ mythological associations are no less valid just because they’re real than are those of places like Circe’s island of Aeaea or the Isles of the Blest. But because these places do exist, that means we’re kind of forced to apply physical laws and common sense to them.

Two out of three of these places, with good weather and the right wind, are within two to four days’ sail (if not less) of the home harbors of some of the greatest sailors of antiquity. The third one is a slightly longer trip, maybe a week to ten days of coasting depending on the weather. But even if we knew nothing else about these places, their generally exposed nature and their propinquity to a significant group of the time’s major interlocking patriarchal cultures force us to set the odds very, very low against any of these places being woman-only islands… whether the women are Amazons or not.

And as it happens, we know a lot more about all of them. We can handle that issue one island at a time as we move through the quotation.

But first a warning about something specific: the phrase “were said to be…”. Anyone who’s spent enough time on the Discovery Channel to find themselves watching some of the dodgier documentaries — the ones where the bar for telling where you got your facts is set fairly low — will recognize this phrase and its friends “It is said that…”, “Legend has it…”,  “Some say…”. This formulation is a sign of someone who either can’t be bothered to provide you with a solid citation or doesn’t have one and just wants to get on with selling you their own merchandise without being bothered too much about the sordid details (i.e., “verifiable data”). Any use of these phrases, especially in a scholarly work, should make the reader slow down and look carefully at the details.

So, island by island:

[The Greeks] said the women of Taurus sacrificed to their Goddess all men who landed on their shores…

Bzzt! Sorry, wrong answer. No women of Tauris. In fact, no women. Just one.

The writer is here referring to the myth that is the source for Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Tauris, in which Agamemnon’s daughter, theoretically sacrificed by the King for good winds on the way to the war in Troy, is instead actually caught away in the act by Artemis (who as protector of maidenhood and young innocence wants no such crap done in her name, thank you very much). Artemis proceeds to dump a deer with its throat cut onto the ground by the altar as a substitute sacrifice, and then deposits the doubtless very confused maiden in Tauris to be priestess of her temple there.2 Iphigenia is understandably shocked and horrified to find that her duty as priestess is to sacrifice to the Goddess all strangers3 who come to Tauris. Not just the men: all woman strangers too, should any turn up.

And there are definitely men living in Tauris, before, during and after the unfortunate princess’s arrival. When Iphigenia’s brother Orestes and his best friend show up to rescue her, the messenger who brings the news that she’s going to have to sacrifice these strangers is male. Additionally, Iphigenia at one point, doubting whether Artemis is actually behind this barbarous rule at all, says to herself, “Would a Goddess command such things? Would she take pleasure in sacrificial murder? I do not believe it. …It is the men of this land who are bloodthirsty and they lay their own guilt on the Gods.”4 And finally there’s the King of the Taurians, whom Iphigenia refuses to be allowed to be killed as part of her rescue because “he was kind to her”. You would think all-female cultures who only send out for guys when they want to have babies would generally be kind of short on kings. Also: you will look in vain for any evidence of the women of Tauris being Amazons.

…So we have a bit of misrepresentation here about the population of the island, and about who they were killing, and (granted, the motives being unclear by the principals’ own admission, but we’re plainly meant to think it was a let’s-all-us-women-kill-all-the-men thing) about why. …Well, maybe the writer got confused, or it was an error: these things do creep in. Let’s move on.

…[the Greeks said] the women of Lemnos had risen up against their husbands and murdered all of them at once.

In myth, this did happen once. But it was (a) “a long time ago”, and (b) extremely situational and something that the participants seemed willing, if not glad, to get over and done with.

The tl;dr version of this story comes in a number of versions spread across five or six centuries. Basically it breaks down like this:

  • Women of Lemnos fail to perform proper rites honoring Aphrodite for (apparently) several years. No one seems to know why.
  • Aphrodite gets pissed off at the women and “afflicts them with a foul odor” which causes their husbands to avoid them and instead run over to Thrace and raid the place for female sex slaves. These they bring home and screw instead of their wives.
  • The Lemnian women, very very annoyed by this turn of events, all kill their husbands (some writers say their fathers, too). The only woman in on the plot who fails to do likewise is the Lemnian princess, Hypsipyle, who manages to smuggle her father the King offshore before the mass murder goes down, and then becomes Queen of an all-female island.
  • Jason and the Argonauts arrive. They apparently have no problem with any foul odors and during a visit of at least several months quickly bed down with various Lemnian women (this turn of events being from all available data quite consensual). Numerous children are conceived. Most if not all of these children are boys, as they’re given Argonauts’ names when they’re born. Regardless of their maleness, they are not killed or sent away.
  • Jason himself hooks up with Hypsipyle during this period, and she later bears twin boys as a result, one of whom when grown becomes King of Lemnos and turns up in the Iliad. (There are ancient writers who claim that this was the cause of the odor problem: Medea, they say, inflicted it on the Lemnian women in revenge on Hypsipyle for Jason’s infidelity. In any case, you wonder what the heck he was thinking; you’d think he’d have worked out by then that you seriously did not screw around with / on Medea. But it’s also true that evidence suggests Jason was not exactly the sharpest knife in the block.)

Anyway, the ancient writers go out of their way to make it plain that this long-ago event, distant even in mythological terms, had been a temporary situation (cf. Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 114: “Lemnos happened to have no males at the time [when the Argonauts visited the island]”) and had nothing to do with the way things normally went on Lemnos.

So… a wee bit more of the truth being bent, there? Or not being completely told, in order to buttress a point the writer’s trying to make? Also: these women are not Amazons, either. Somewhere along the line, with all this other stuff going on, someone surely would have mentioned.

Anyway. Last of all comes Lesbos, “said to be…” one of three “all-female societies.”

Well, not in any myth I can find a record of. And, historically, never. Certainly the mother-goddess Cybele was worshipped there in deep antiquity, to judge by the pottery, but there is no sign of the island ever having been an all-female reserve. As one can judge from the Lemnian situation, when such things existed or occurred, notice was taken in the literature.

Sappho in particular would probably have been amused to hear about this allegation. She lived in the island’s main town of Mitylene for most of her life, as far as we can tell, and had two (maybe three) adult brothers who to present best knowledge show no signs of having been murdered or exiled for their maleness. Yes, she sponsored a thiasos where the possibility or benefits of an all-female society were discussed with the participants. But Lesbos was co-ed — cf. famous male Lesbians5 like Alcaeus, Phaenias and Terpander. (And still no sign of Amazons.)

(sigh) So.

The multiple errors in the paragraph above could have a number of causes: (a) A confused writer. (b) A lazy writer. (c) A writer who’s pushing a specific thesis or agenda and doesn’t mind the reader being accidentally misled into it. I am not a mindreader and can’t be certain of which of the above might be accurate. But the impression I’m left with is that of someone trying to bend a complex set of facts to her own purposes.

Now, in fiction, as fiction, that kind of thing has its place. But in what purports to be a genuine history of the suppression of truths about female roles in religion, mysticism and spiritual life in the ancient world? Engaging in jiggery-pokery with the facts as they are known is not a good thing, no matter how good one considers one’s own intentions to be. One does not combat lies or suppressions of the truth with misrepresentations and other truths themselves bent out of shape.

All I can say further about Walker’s book (as I don’t have it and have never read it in detail) is that I have dipped into numerous quotes from it here and found a significant number of them to be at best kind of factually suspect and at worst as potentially error-ridden and misleading as the single paragraph discussed above.

I’m not saying that the book will not have been useful in forming (or opening up) potential feminist thought in many ways for its readers as  regards the ancient world and what has happened to the Goddesses of old, and as regards women’s interior/mystical/mythological lives and how they may be enhanced and enriched by thoughtful reclamation of the lost, strayed or stolen. But I do want to suggest that content in this book should be taken with a grain of salt, and checked before internalizing. Because if the above is broadly representative… then it needs checking.

…That’s all.

1Appolonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2. 370 ff (trans. Seaton): “[regarding the Black Sea coast of Anatolia :] Onward from thence the bend of a huge and towering cape reaches out from the land, next Thermodon at its mouth flows into a quiet bay at the Themiskyreian headland, after wandering through a broad continent. And here is the plain of Doias, and near are the three cities of the Amazones, and after them the Khalybes…” Plainly not some vague description of Someplace Far, Far Away In The Story, but a landscape the writer thought might possibly have been familiar to some of the people reading or hearing this. It’s like something out of a Michelin Green Guide.

2One has to wonder whether this particular misfortune of Iphigenia’s is meant to be thought of as a near-final operation of the curse of the House of Atreus, a godawful karmic trainwreck that had already gone on for generations. Certainly the ancient writers return again and again to the family’s alternately horrible and tragic doings with a near tabloid-like fascination.

3Edith Hamilton‘s great classic Mythology (liberally studded with Hamilton’s beautifully clean translations from original sources) narrows this specification down to “all Greeks”. Whatever: gender isn’t the issue here.

4Hamilton, ibid., pp. 366ff.

5How often does one get to use that phrase legitimately? I couldn’t resist.

September 13, 2020
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Mjolnir the Mighty
ComicsEuropeFairy talesMythologyYoung Wizards meta

Mjolnir the Mighty and the Worthiness Issue

by Diane Duane March 25, 2015

(Note: This post originally appeared on DD’s blog at Tumblr, and has been ported over here for those who don’t care to deal with Tumblr’s present T&C. [And who could blame you? Seriously.])

A question from a reader at Tumblr:

[In the Young Wizards universe,] you list Thor as one of the aspects of [the demiurge known as] The One’s Champion. Would Ronan (who carried the Champion around at the bottom of his soul for a while) or Peach (who as the Champion on assignment spent a good while in the shape of a macaw, associating with major YW characters) be able to wield Mjolnir? Or perhaps would just about any uncorrupted wizard be able to seeing as the Wizard’s Oath is a noble, worthy purpose that’s an essential part of them?

Well, first let’s be clear that we’re dealing with a new-myth-overlaid-on-old-myth situation here.

In the original Norse myths — specifically the material in the Poetic / Elder Edda and the Prose / Younger Edda — there’s no question that Mjolnir is a very special weapon. It was created on a dare, after Loki had commissioned the two master-craftsman sons of the dwarf Ivaldi to make replacement golden hair for Sif. (As a practical joke, Loki had cut all Sif’s hair off.) They also forged the indestructible spear Gungnir for Odin, and for Freyr they made the magical ship Skidbladnir, which could be folded up and put in Freyr’s pocket.

For reasons best known to himself, Loki then sought out a couple more dwarf-craftsmen named Brokk and Eiti, and bet them his head that they couldn’t make three more wonderful things than the sons of Ivaldi had made. Brokk and Eiti immediately got busy proving Loki wrong.

First they made (built? engineered? created? pick your verb…) the boar Gullinbursti, who had bristles of gold (hence the name) that glowed bright enough to light up the night. Gullinbursti could run faster than any horse, as well as being able to fly through the air and run on water. Loki, in the shape of a fly, and with what Gods only know in mind — besides making them fail in their task so that he could keep his head — kept buzzing around and biting the dwarfs and trying to interfere with the process of Gullinbursti’s creation, but failed.

Eiti and Brokk then forged the gold ring called Draupnir, which magically “dropped” eight other rings exactly like it every nine nights. (I think the word being translated here as “ring” indicates “arm ring”, so this means fairly significant quantities of gold appearing out of nowhere every week and a half or so. Unquestionably a useful thing for any pantheon to have lying around.)

They then started work on a great iron hammer that would be “the most powerful weapon in the world”. The Eddaic explanation of what this implies simply states that the hammer would hit whatever it was swung at or thrown at, and that if thrown it would always return to the thrower’s hand. Useful, especially on the battlefield. Because Loki had been buzzing around again and stung Brokk right between the eyes while he was forging Mjollnir, the hammer came out “a little short in the handle”, but that was its only imperfection.

All the gifts were then carried together to Asgard and were the subject of a kind of committee meeting where they were assigned to their new owners and judged as to which one was best. The vote came down in favor of Mjollnir, which was deemed to give the Gods the best chance of prevailing over the various hostile giants at Ragnarok. And it made sense to give this peerless weapon to the strongest of the Gods, so it was assigned to Thor.  

Note that there’s no mention whatsoever of the bearer/user-must-be-worthy trope here. Which is just as well, as otherwise the whole “Theft of Mjollnir” story told in the Thrymskvitha could never have happened. The poem tells us in its first stanza  that “Thor woke up and his hammer was missing” — from the bedside table, one gathers — “and he went bugfuck.” (Well, that’s how I’m translating vreiðr today.)

Actually it should be more like this:

Thor went bugfuck when he woke up | and found that mighty Mjolnir was missing:

he tore his beard and his hair stood on end | as the Hurler searched everywhere for his hammer.

First thing he said was: “Listen up, Loki, | Mjolnir’s missing, it’s nowhere in heaven:

Nor on Earth either, nobody’s seen it. | Mjolnir the mighty has somehow been stolen!”

…And now we get Loki borrowing Freyja’s featherhame to go find out what’s what (because he’s certain from the start that the Giants are to blame), and a (theoretical) arranged marriage between Freyja and Thrym, and plotting and planning, and Thor getting dressed up as a bride-to-be (and whinging about it most ineffectively**)…

"Oh what a lovely maid is this", Elmer Boyd Smith

“Oh what a lovely maid is this”, illustration by Elmer Boyd Smith

…and a trip to Jotunheim, and Mjolnir being brought out to hallow the “bride” (by laying it in “her” lap: YO FERTILITY SYMBOLISM…), and Thor, once he’s got his hands on his hammer again, rising up and killing every damn giant within reach. And then he and Loki go home.

What’s interesting about this, besides the theft itself (managed how? magic? we’re never told), which would naturally have been carried out by someone unworthy — is the implication in the verse that one of the servants or other functionaries in Thrym’s hall fetched in the hammer for the wedding service when requested. So plainly as far as the original mythographers were involved, you don’t need to be worthy, or even particularly strong, to carry Mjolnir around. As for wielding it, it’s going to be more about the user’s strength than the hammer itself.

So now we move ahead seven or eight centuries.* Stan Lee first brings Thor into the comics world in the early 1960s, and various additions start to be made to the basic character. Naturally since Thor is the god of thunder, we get a fair amount of summoning of lightning and storms and so forth in the comic, and Mjolnir starts getting involved in this… which never happened in the old myths as far as I know. Also the whirling-Mjolnir-really-fast-around-your-head-so-that-you-can-use-it-to-fly is a comics trope as well. In the original myths, when Thor needed to travel, he did so in a chariot pulled by the two magical goats Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr (Gurner and Gnasher, more or less). …Hitting the hammer’s handle on the ground to produce a localized earthquake: comics trope. Mjolnir being forged from Uru metal? Comics trope. (Or in the heart of a dying star? Film trope.)

And finally comes the addition which I think probably began in the comics but has become much better known in the films: the concept that one must be worthy in some way or other to use or even lift Mjolnir. And the definition of what “worthy” means is obviously going to be exercising everybody’s minds. (Because what’s not to love about that moment in Avengers: Age of Ultron when Thor is watching everybody (not Natasha, of course, who I suspects understands way too well the underlying context…) trying unsuccessfully to lift the Hammer off the coffee table, and when he takes his turn Steve budges it just the slightest bit… and the shot is so framed as to favor Chris Hemsworth doing the most restrained version of [Thor REACTS] imaginable.)

…Anyway, let’s step back. The question we’re considering here involves the intersection of the Powers that Be of the Young Wizards universe with not the original Norse god that people in the Northlands actually prayed and sacrificed to — the working man’s god, the god nowhere near as clever as his half-brother but admired for his direct approach anyway, the great power who was nonetheless as doomed as all the rest of his pantheon and who would fight to the end regardless — but the Marvel Comics version of Thor. Who is worthy (by canon definition and in the larger sense) for reasons of his own.

In that sense, the details of how any given YW character would handle the holy Hammer are probably best left to any reader’s own judgment. I would assume that the One’s Champion, if he/she/whatever were to run into Marvel!Thor — either in film or comics format — would find an immediate kinship with him/her on some level***, and that the Hammer (which it seems to me from the films we’re meant to get a sense is a bit sentient) would not object to being wielded. As for Ronan, I suspect he could at very least wind up carrying it around, due to his previous association with the Champion. And if he got too insufferable about it, I suspect that at some point he might turn his back on the Hammer briefly, and on turning back again, find that Darryl had borrowed it and was using it to crack nuts with.

…Hmm, maybe I should ask Walt and Weezie if they’d like to do a crossover.  🙂

Hope this helps.

*The Codex Regius in which the Elder Edda was (as far as we know) first written down dates back to the 1200s, but there’s no telling exactly how much older the myths recorded in it were.

** “All the Gods in Asgard are going to make fun of me if I get dressed up in bride’s clothes. They’ll say I’m gay.” “Thor, if you don’t get dressed up in bride’s clothes, pretty soon there will be no more Gods in Asgard because the Giants will overrun the place. So shut up and let me fix this veil.” (NB that Loki is already dressed as Thor’s bridesmaid at this point and has been making a lot less of fuss about it. But then Loki has always been, well, flexible.)

***Or actually the other way around, since the Michael / Thor Power is the archetypal being from whom the Norse God, and in turn the comics / film character, would have been — at whatever distance of times and dimensions — derived: It includes them.

ETA:

@dduane Ooooooh! Lemme get a few more issues under my belt. I’d love to do a nutcracker cross-over in Ragnarök. Dedicated to Mark Twain. 😀

— Walter Simonson (@WalterSimonson) March 25, 2015

March 25, 2015
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