• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1231 0

story of a horrifying loss of innocence, but she wasn’t only stolen and overpowered; she was also seduced and enormously empowered. All three names—Kore the virgin, Persephone the Queen of the Underworld, and Demeter the mother—were often understood as life stages of woman. As is well reflected in the biography of a Greek goddess, life for a woman of this world was about bondage to place and master, and it was about abduction, rape, and loss, or at least the threat of these things. There was a bittersweet motherhood and a brutal experience of familial and romantic love. Women’s only source of control was the trouble they could make by freezing up in sorrow and refusing to bear fruit. Their icy silent treatments could make the earth cold. Now we know enough to go to one of their celebrations.

The Thesmophoria was an overnight outdoor party. Each polis had its own meeting place for this festival, and in various places it lasted from three to ten days. Athenian women headed to the Pnyx hill, near where the male assembly usually met.5 It was within the city walls, but still remote. Sources suggest that only married women could participate—no children (except for a few nurslings) and no virgins. Husbands were required to allow their wives to go and were required to see that the festival was well funded. When the Thesmophoria appears in Greek literature, often some man tries to spy on the women and is either captured, killed, or castrated. Men wrote these works, and the women are supported for their vengeance. The Thesmophoria was important to the whole community; men, too, prayed that their babies would thrive, their wives be well, and their fields be fertile, and they believed that the women’s secret rituals and bawdy frenzy could help. For the days of the festival most everything else stopped; courts were not in session, and all public business was closed.6

The first day of the festival was the “going up,” when the women all climbed the great hill, with bountiful provisions, and set up camp. The second day was gloomy and hard: they fasted and impersonated Demeter mourning for Kore. They sat on the ground and wept. They searched the bushes and called her name. When it got dark, they lit torches and kept looking.

Then at last, later that night and into the next day (and in some places for days on end), the women feasted and cut loose. This part of the festival is called “the good birth.” It was wild. The women ate breads baked in the shapes of penises and vaginas. They ate pomegranate seeds, which we saw were the image of semen in this myth, and they ate the roast pork that was the product of their earlier sacrifices. There was nothing very sacrificial about Greek sacrifices; they kept all the good meat for themselves. It was a feast. When the women were not eating, they were acting out the later scenarios of Demeter’s story. Ostensibly to copy Iambe (who cheered up sad Demeter while she was in the home of the king and queen of Eleusis), the women shouted sexually explicit jokes and insults, exposed themselves to one another, and spoke “obscenities.” Some got naked and ran around. At the center of the celebration was an agriculture and human-fertility ritual involving the sacrifice of piglets, the scaring away of snakes, and the scattering of seeds. Everyone was responsible for bringing her own piglet. The pigs had several symbolic meanings, but were in part echoing a herd of pigs that fell screaming into the underworld when Hades abducted Kore. The ritual was full of arcane symbols, darkness, and secrets. The whole thing was an explicit plea, not for forgiveness, victory, riches, or salvation, but just for life. It was a ritual to ensure a year of good births, births of the body and births of the soil. When you have a life inside you, you hope it will be well, and you never forget the tenor of that hope. When you farm, your whole being hopes for fruit.

Today we worry about our children as much as ever. Think of those families where the daughter disappears and they search for her and hang “Missing” signs of her everywhere.