NAHA, OKINAWA PREF. – Coins issued in ancient Rome have been excavated from the ruins of a castle in a city in Okinawa Prefecture, the local education board said Monday, the first time such artifacts have been recovered from ruins in Japan.
The education board of the city of Uruma said the four copper coins believed to date back to the Roman Empire in the third to fourth centuries were discovered in the ruins of Katsuren Castle, which existed from the 12th century to the 15th.
Okinawa’s trade with China and the Southeast Asian region was thriving at the time and the finding is “precious historical material suggesting a link between Okinawa and the Western world,” the board said. Read more.
Screw gender norms. Women can definitely fight too.
I know I’ve reblogged similar stuff before, but I suck at consistent tagging so u can’t find the other commentary.
But yeah, maybe my favorite part of how this keeps happening is that some earlier researchers actually found it easier to believe that all the adults buried at a given place must have been high status men. (Maybe that earlier society was even more backwards, and didn’t bury women at all? Maybe those women were really immortal? Who knows. They didn’t have any graves.)
Rather than even starting to question their own assumptions around findings like not nearly as much variation in people’s heights and grave goods–and access to resources in general–as they would expect based on their own society at the time. When yes, it turned out to be a fairly even mix after all.
I have read about a number of cases around the world where exactly that has happened, but somebody did reexamine the evidence and reevaluate those conclusions later on. And there are probably many more which haven’t gotten another critical look. (No doubt plenty of cases I haven’t learned about, either. Plenty.)
This is one of those interesting examples where the media went in a very different direction from the research. Even though I would like this headline to be 100% unqualified truth, I feel like it’s important to note some important stuff before we proceed.
I am very sorry about all this stuff. IT IS A ROCKY FUCKING RIDE.
We have to differentiate between Vikings and the Norse. Everyone has heard of Vikings, and we have a really clear idea about who the Vikings were and what they did, so “Viking” is used to refer to seafaring Norse culture (and that’s fine – language evolves, and if you say “Viking” you can IMMEDIATELY communicate what you’re talking about.) However, “Viking” is more of a professional term than the name of a culture – going viking is kind of like going hiking, or biking, but with more quaffing and stabbing. There were NOT entire civilizations consisting entirely of male berserker warriors pillaging their heads off, with maybe one or two shieldmaidens and a drippy ethereal blonde waiting nonspecifically back home, and if you think about it for about five seconds, you will see that this is a silly idea. After all, what’s the point of pillaging and conquering and raiding the locals in soft green fertile countries if you don’t… settle in the nice soft fertile area you have just conquered, and colonize it and keep it?
So while there were Vikings crashing around Europe/Africa/North America, frightening the livestock, their families also existed, and they were just plain Norse people. The Norse invaded and settled in plenty of places, and while we all prefer the sensational headline (”THE VIKINGS INVADED BRITAIN”) there is also the historical truth (”Norse families settled down and farmed in close-knit British communities for many generations, and practiced extensive trade along their famous sea routes.”) The 2011 paper this headline appears to be based on is not about Vikings, it’s about Norse migrants. It’s calledWarriors and women: the sex ratio of Norse migrants to eastern England up to 900 adand it basically says “Yes, the Norse people who seized Eastern England were a balanced mix of men and women, BECAUSE THAT IS HOW HUMAN COLONIES USUALLY WORK.”
Now that being said, we do have to recognize that our concept of Vikings = warriors = men is false, because evidence suggests that even the original campaigns to conquer eastern England had a balanced mix of male and female people from the very beginning. And presumably they had a fair mix of farmers/crafters/diplomats/holy people/healers as well, on account of how they then proceeded to establish English colonies that traded and thrived for generations. But there was no reason to ever think otherwise, apart from our own weird beliefs that colonizing is an exclusively militaristic and violent enterprise, which can ONLY ever be done by warriors, who can ONLY ever be men. And that is a weird, convoluted, and frankly inefficient train of thought. Like clatterbane says, we’re just riffing off some of the silliest assumptions you can make about cultures. Think about it for five seconds. WHY WOULD YOU THINK THIS? DO ROLEPLAYING PARTIES EVER CONSIST ENTIRELY OF BERSERKERS? HOW WOULD THAT EVEN WORK? HOW WOULD THIS WAR PARTY THEN POPULATE AND INFLUENCE AN ENTIRE NATION? FOR GOD’S SAKE. “Ooh, I found a skeleton with a Nordic sword in England, ooh, he must have been a ferocious Viking who pillaged and raped his way here and was killed in battle” OR MAYBE IT WAS A NICE NORSE MATRIARCH WHO LIVED HERE ON PURPOSE, SHE ONCE CUT A ROBBER’S HEAD OFF IN HER YOUTH BUT WAS LATER KICKED IN THE HEAD BY HER OWN COW. GOODNESS GRACIOUS ME.
I should demand to be buried in a bathtub in Kirkwall, wearing a bulletproof vest, with the skeleton of Myrtle the Fruit Bat clutched in my hands so that future anthropologists can be like “Oooh yes this is the famous Batman we’ve heard so much about, half man, half bat. He colonized the Orkneys in his famous porcelain boat and practiced a vampiric religion. He was a famous warrior who did a lot of nonconsensual pillaging, and that’s why everyone in Scotland is so grim and dark. Preps stared at him, that’s why he’s putting up his middle fingers”
ANYWAY
that leads me to
Sexing from graves is not super reliable. So the paper that explains how Norse migrants included women did so by examining the bones of Norse graves. They concluded that many of the skeletons were female, rather than male, as had been previously assumed as the default. (NB: MOST OF THESE WERE NOT WARRIOR GRAVES – THEY WERE THE GRAVES OF NORSE MIGRANTS IN GENERAL. THERE WERE SOME MIXED GRAVE GOODS BUT NOTHING PARTICULARLY SUGGESTIVE OF GENDER, EVEN IF YOU BELIEVE THAT GENDER IS STRICTLY DETERMINED BY MALE SKELETONS HOLDING SWORDS AND FEMALE SKELETONS HOLDING, IDK, FRYING PANS. TO COOK PANCAKES FOR THE DEAD. LIKE WOMEN DO.) Like Clatterbane says above, we are FAR too used to making ridiculous assumptions just because we found some skeletons. “ooh, these were high-status men from a fierce and amoral warrior culture that reproduced by kidnapping native women, and all the women and female children of the population were removed by evaporation. You can tell because the skeletons were buried with clothes on, and looked kinda cool.” Because sexing from grave goods is just a series of foolish, unfounded decisions. If you assume a skeleton is male because it was buried with weapons and armor, you are not making publication-worthy decisions. Many of these “X skeleton discovered to be female!” papers are based on osteological sexing, in which people with training in forensics or anthropology actually looked at the skeleton and went “Hey wait, these are lady bones.” Which is what this paper is about – examining the bones and seeing that they are a balanced mix of male and female bones. But that is in ITSELF problematic because…
Sexing from bones is hard work. Osteological sexing is just not as clear cut as it sounds on CSI, or in archaeology, where people declare with total certainty that a rotting skeleton is a young white female, by holding up a fragment of bone and squinting at it. (Trans and intersex people will also argue that sexing humans from our squishy flesh bodies, with genitals attached to them, is also unreliable. They are correct.) The only real areas in which gender can be suggested from bones is the chin sort of area (unreliable) and the pelvis. The pelvis usually wins. You can get a PERFECT male skull on a skeleton with a TEXTBOOK female pelvis, and in that case you would probably call your skeleton a female. She probably had a fierce strong chin in life, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The thing that you are looking for in the hips is the characteristic wider bowl shape of the pelvis, that allows most cis women to give birth via the vagina. Men’s pelvic bones theoretically make a circular hole, and womens’ are supposed to suggest more of an oval. Men should have a pointier bit like a v-neck sweater where the bones join in front, and women should have more of a scoop neck. And while the difference looks clear when you’re looking at the Textbook Examples in Gray’s Anatomy…
Figure 1. “ooh, this is easy! the male is on the left. You can tell because the textbook says the male one is on the left.”
… The real world is often not quite so obliging. After all, plenty of the women you know don’t have curvy hourglass figures, with textbook female hips that are as broad as their shoulders. There are definitely women with “masculine” builds – and men with wide hips, too! There are slim, snake-hipped women whose narrow “male” hips were historically associated with complications in childbirth, but women with that bone structure still exist today. In great numbers. Which we know because female pelvic bones are of IMMENSE interest in the field of…
OBSTETRICS. Childbirth. The whole “ooh the female pelvis is DESIGNED by NATURE to be the PERFECT BABY DELIVERY CHUTE” that skeleton-measurers will try to sell you? “Oh this was definitely a lady skeleton because of the thing and the widget, which are Designed that way Because Childbirth.” Well, that does not stand up well against the filthy reality of childbirth. If you study obstetrics, or are carrying a fetus, you don’t get the cutesy Male And Female pelvises. You get handed the Four Pelvic Types (“Good luck, bitch”) and if the screaming pregnant lady in front of you has an Android (male) pelvis, then this is going to be A Fun Experience for all.
Figure 2. “Fuck me. Sorry, Ms Viking Lady, we haven’t invented c-sections yet so my book says you’re fucked. I … don’t suppose it will cheer you up to know that you’ve secretly been a man all along? I mean, when we bury you tomorrow, your skeleton will really confuse future historians. WHOA PUT THE SWORD DOWN”
This is called the
Caldwell-Moloy Classification and you are welcome to google it. In the 1930s up until very recently, this chart was used to suggest whether a woman should have a C-section (we use ultrasounds for that now.) Only about half of women are said to be gynecoid (female) in shape, but I would LOOK THAT UP before quoting it. It’s just something that stuck firmly in my head in college ten years ago, and I remember it clearly because I went and measured my hips in anxiety.* If you really want to get to grips with “how many women have textbook male pelves” then….
HEY GUESS WHAT KIDS, GET READY FOR RACIAL DIFFERENCES because you’re going to see casually mentioned things like “Oh yes, about 30% of white women have male pelves. And half of WoC have anthropoid pelves.” And you’ll be like SHIT WHAT?! DOES THIS… DO PEOPLE KNOW? And then there will be some throwaway fact like “Oh, BTW, with an anthropoid pelvis, people just won’t be able to achieve a flat butt and stomach with dieting or whatever, the bones just won’t allow that look. The female skeleton can really only get that ‘ideal’ modern model figure with an android pelvis – it’s fairly common in white women, presents a challenge in childbirth, and the skeleton looks male. Anyway, moving on -” And you’re still going WAIT WHAT, GO BACK. DOESN’T THIS CHANGE, IDK, ALL OF DIETING? ANTHROPOLOGY? HISTORY? FORENSICS? HELP? DO THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE KNOW THIS?
How many men have “female” (or anthropoid, or platypelloid) pelves? Well, traditionally cis men do not go through childbirth, so they’re less interesting, so… I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. I have no fucking idea. Go find out and then tell me.
How many skeletons that we pronounced female were male all along? Who knows. How many skeletons assumed male are actually female? Who fucking knows.
Because childbirth isn’t actually very interesting to most people, it’s hard to work out exactly what the fuck is going on, but apparently in 2015 researchers published a paper called Female pelvic shape: Distinct types or nebulous cloud? in which they concluded that female pelves are actually a nebulous cloud. A NEBULOUS CLOUD. FORGET THE NEAT AND TIDY LITTLE GRAY’S ANATOMY DRAWING, WE HAVE OFFICIALLY ENTERED THE REALM OF THE NEBULOUS FUCKING CLOUD. These researchers argue that Caldwell-Moloy is way too simplistic to be practical, and rather than clustering conveniently as obviously masculine, obviously feminine and ‘other’, all female pelves actually exist on a nebulous spectrum across all of the four pelvic types. There’s no point in trying to sort women’s pelvic bones into ‘male’ and ‘female’ categories, these researchers say – women’s pelves are unique and unknowable, combining features from all of the known types in an “amorphous, cloudy continuum of shape variation.” OH GOOD. THAT’S GOOD. THAT’S A DIRECT QUOTE FROM THE ABSTRACT. I’M SO GLAD THAT WE ARE IN COMPLETE CONTROL AND KNOW EXACTLY WHAT IS GOING ON
Anyway. It isn’t super easy to sex skeletons by their pelvic bones. It’s a best guess sort of thing.
Maybe the only way you can identify a skeleton as female with 100% certainty is if its pelvic area is not a textbook ‘female’ shape but a NEBULOUS FUCKING CLOUD.
So if you would like to re-write this headline to accurate reflect the findings of the paper, it should read
“Some Norse colonists in England had pelvic bones, and the rest had nebulous clouds. Nobody is driving this fucking bus and we should all be TERRIFIED”
* I can relax – I have Official Childbearing Hips, and my midwife agrees! ** Anthropologists will enjoy my skeleton, but the makers of jeans believe I don’t exist. Isn’t that weird that forensics people and historians are convinced that 100% of women have splendidly gynecoid hips, while jeans manufacturers think that 0% of women do?
** EDITED TO ADD: I shouldn’t have said this so flippantly. If you don’t have wide gynecoid hip bones, and you plan to birth your own children, DON’T WORRY!!! This is FINE!!! Hipbones are meant to loosen and separate during labor, so people with ANY variation of hips are usually equipped to deliver a child through the vaginal canal. You can birth a baby with ‘male’ hips – we know this because childbearers with ‘male’ hips aren’t extinct and people of all races manage to reproduce despite the variation in bone structure and you will be FINE. We have modern nutrition now, and bigger stronger bones, and better healthcare – so it isn’t as much of a problem as it was in the past, and ANYWAY, YOU WILL BE FINE. I’m sorry, I should have said. YOU ARE FINE, YOUR SHAPE IS FINE, AND IF YOU CHOOSE TO BIRTH A BABY, YOU WILL BE FINE.
Archaeologists in Denmark have found evidence of a 3,000 year-old cooking mistake that casts some light into the everyday life of Scandinavian Bronze Age people.
Clear evidence for one of the most common mistakes in the kitchen – burning food – lay in a clay pot that was excavated in central Jutland, Denmark.
The clay vessel was found, upturned and in near mint condition, at the bottom of what was once a waste pit.
“The pot is typical for cooking vessels in this region of Denmark. It was accompanied by several other objects fitting the dating,” archaeologist Kaj F. Rasmussen from Museum Silkeborg, Denmark, told Discovery News. Read more.
[fucks up dinner and just straight-up buries the evidence] We’re Getting Ancient Pizza Tonight, Girls
The Panthers used to ride around and follow the police.
So the cops would pull over some sorry black person, and get ready to rough him up, but then there were the Panthers right behind them. Watching, armed to the teeth, and citing legal statutes. It’s inspirational.
Bring it back.
Bring this back.
For real.
That’s why the FBI broke them up, isn’t it ?
That among other community initiatives. They had weapons training, self defense, their free breakfast program and ran a newspaper. They raised money to pay for bail and legal funding for people. And they used to notify the community of their rights and encourage people to know the laws and protest the one which were unjust. That type of shit irked the local police and damned sure struck a nerve with the FBI. They were taking back the streets and providing the protection the police were never interested in bringing to their neighborhoods from the very start. So it’s always fuck the FBI for me.
Also let’s be starkly clear about this: under COINTELPRO the FBI raided the homes of Black Panthers and outright murdered them. They conspired with local police forces to harass, assault, and concoct false evidence against anybody affiliated with the BPP. And they didn’t keep their operations confined to the black community directly. When a white woman working in civil rights was killed by the KKK (they were aiming at her black passenger) the FBI excused the KKK by claiming that she was a communist and slept with black men. They refused to accept the reports of white agents who said that the BPP were no threat and demanded that the agents falsify information to paint the BPP as violent domestic terrorists. The FBI was determined to quash revolutionary black movements that were chiefly devoted to community protection and development and they stopped at nothing in their attempts to reach this goal.
One thing we don’t talk about even in our own retellings and reclaimings of BPP history is that a large part of the reason the government worked to break them up wasn’t because of armed action, but because they provided so many necessary social services and programs: free breakfast for children, walking the elderly to and from banks safely to cash their social security checks, free medical centers, door-to-door sickle cell testing, blood drives, raising money for bail, clothing donations, legal aide, busing people to and from prisons to visit, commissary for prisoners. Not only did they fight back against state violence in their confrontations with police, but also by resisting the forced conditions of poverty, criminality and scarcity created by the state to further destroy their communities. J. Edgar Hoover genuinely wrote in an FBI memo that:
“The Breakfast for Children Program B represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities B to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.”
When I need a good example of the antiblackness that is fundamental to this country’s history and how it persists even now, I remember that the BPP were viewed as a threat to national security, not because they were armed, but because they wouldn’t allow black children to die from starvation and malnutrition.
Desperate, hungry people are easier to control and keep subjugated.
Desperate, hungry people are more likely, in their desperation and hunger, to lash out at those closest to themselves rather than the more distant, often unseen causes of their misery.
Desperate, hungry people are easier to keep turned against each other.
leonardo da vinci was a year younger than christopher columbus.
stalin, freud, Ttto, trotsky and hitler walk into a bar……no really, it’s possible since they all lived in vienna in 1913.
aristotle tutored alexander the great.
abraham lincoln was twelve when napoleon bonaparte died.
an unusually well-traveled person in 5th century BC could have conceivably met confucius, lao tze, the buddha and socrates over the course of a seventy year life.
pharaohs and mammoths existed at the same time.
pocahontas and william shakespeare died, in the same country, less than a year apart from each other.
In honor of Lord Byron’s birthday I would like to remind you all of the time that Shelley and Keats, having not heard from him for some time, became concerned for his safety and it was determined that Shelley would go looking for him. Keats received a letter some time later that Shelley had found him in Venice, where he’d been having so much sex that he’d nearly died from malnourishment and dehydration. Keats’ entire response amounted to essentially, “You should probably have let him.”
“I found him, he’s in a gutter.” “Well go put him back”
So this ask is perfect because I’ve been having Regrets about not expanding on some stuff in my original post, but it’d been reblogged a few times and I didn’t want to edit, nah mean.
other elements were introduced to the myth as time went on
You’re totally right: myths and beliefs evolved constantly. Bronze Age beliefs were different than Archaic beliefs were different than Classical beliefs. Plus every time, say, some small Greek tribe bumped up against some small near Eastern tribe, they interacted and were influenced and you had all these little mystery cults popping up all over the place. I wrote Greek religion’s “complicated” in my original post to awkwardly paper over that, but you were totally right to smack the piñata. There’s no one unified Greek “canon” mythology, just some versions of stories that stuck around and were more popular than others, which is something we all gotta keep in mind.
For the second part: I mean, I wanna disclaim by saying that this really is more yelling into the void than anything else. In the grand scheme of things to be yellin into the void about, there are totally more important things. I’m not hitting speed dial for Barack. But everyone has stuff they’re passionate about and seriously, I hear the Kill Bill sirens every time I see that post on my dash.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: the post on “pre-patriarchal Persephone” is not based in widespread academic consensus in Classics, and its sources are not legitimate. Acceptable sources are peer-reviewed and written by Classics PhDs. The sources for this post are literally a book on trends in 19th century mythography by an English PhD (which looks super interesting, by the way, but was clearly not at all intended to support this kind of thing); a book written by an author with an MA in English and American Literature which a reviewer describes as an “illustrated retelling … that will be enjoyed whenever women come together for ritual”; a book which is encouraging me to “Ask yourself the following seasonal question: ‘What wisdom am I bringing with me from the dark of winter?’”; and some internet person named Jan with an unsourced “case text” and her own unsupported analysis. And motherearthpages.com.
These sources aren’t convincing to me. The whole post seems to be an attempt to mold incomplete ancient data to suit modern social justice sensibilities. It’s one thing to use ancient deities to inform your spiritual beliefs or to empower modern feminism—not my thing, but if it’s anyone else’s, more power to you. It’s entirely another to present your findings as something historically plausible, something that deserves cachet like it’s actual academic research.
Like, it’s not just the misinformation. It’s the authoritative, almost dismissive tone of the post. It’s not just that it’s likely wrong—it’s that it’s so tailor-made for the tastes of the Tumblr community, so attractively wrong, that over 5,000 people have been duped and are innocently spreading its wrongness. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the source for original anon ask was informed by this post. It’s the first thing I thought of and I felt mad on anon’s behalf, that they were sent on a wild academic goose chase for something that has no basis in actual scholarship. There’s a lot of interesting stuff being said about Persephone and her origins, but the people we should trust to say it have PhDs in Classics. And maybe more importantly, other classicists who agree with their findings too.
Anyways, I hope I didn’t totally blow my lid here, that pressure cooker’s been rattling on the table for a while now. (I’m not actually Mad in any meaningful way, obviously, haha. This is the internet and I love everyone who’s into classics. Just, you know. Let me explain my passions.) And if I’ve said something wrong, or if any of my classics bros do have good sources for that stuff, please let me know and I’ll post ASAP.
All that aside, there’s so much cool and interesting women’s studies stuff in antiquity that is legit. Like check out the Thesmorphoria. There’s jealously guarded secrets and sacred feminine spaces and reaffirmation of the mother-daughter bond and tossin pigs into pits and beating men for intruding and all this other stuff we barely know about because that’s how well-guarded the secrets were. The mystery cults are full of this kind of stuff for the Fix—we don’t need to rewrite history to find ancient women doing awesome stuff, even in the swampy patriarchal marsh that was classical antiquity.
I am so happy to see this post!
While I like the concept of the whole “pre-patriarchal Persephone” idea, the author of this is correct. Completely. And here’s why…
*warning: I don’t have a PhD in Classics, but I’ve been intensely studying Persephone and her mythology for almost two years, and have been reading the original myths at their source for the majority of my life. I also interpret the myth from the perspective of a feminist. and one who has a very deep respect for the Chthonic Gods.*
First and foremost, I cannot overstate the importance of CONTEXT.
I’ve talked about this before, and still maintain that unless you are viewing this hieros logos (sacred story) through the eyes of its Bronze Age audience, then you’re not really seeing anything at all. So before we continue, let’s just get the rudimentary stuff out of the way first: Persephone was not raped. She was carried away in the traditional manner to be married. That said, let’s get going…
The Minoans were the only “pre-patriarchal” Aegean civilization that we know of.
There is strong evidence that the Etruscans were a little more even keel with gender relations than the Greeks, but they were contemporaries of the Greeks, not the Archaic “pre-patriarchal” that I am going to talk about here. Also, we cannot decode any Etruscan writing, either. I’ll get to that point in a minute.
I believed, as many who spent their teen years studying paganism once believed, that the whole world was once this magical utopia where women and men were equal and women were the holders and protectors of civilization united under the Mother Earth Goddess until those evil Christians/Hebrews/Romans/Greeks/Assyrians/Indo European invaders came in with their Sky Gods and fucked everything up and turned all of civilization and everything they conquered into a patriarchal witch-burning slave camp.
But before the Greeks were the Mycenaeans who were no less a patriarchal civilization than their eventual Classical era descendants. The gods we would most closely recognize as Persephone, Demeter, and Hades were conceived of during their civilization.
Going back another 700 years before that, we had the Minoans who were a matriarchal, likely matrilineal, culture. Unfortunately, the Minoan civilization on Crete was so disconnected from the later civilizations by virtue of space and time and quite possibly natural disaster, that their language is indecipherable. It looks beautiful. Lots of heiroglyphics in the shape of fruits and flowers and fishhooks and shields. Sadly, we cannot read Minoan, we cannot decipher their language and we lack a Rosetta Stone by which to translate their writings. (How I wish we could!) All we know about the Minoan civilization we have discovered through archeology. Beyond that, all we have are suppositions and conjecture.
Note: I am using the Minoans and the Minoans ONLY as they are the civilization for whose existence we have indelible, incontestable proof. We have little to no information about Neolithic Aegean cultures, and anyone supposing that they would automatically be female dominated or oriented is pulling information out of their ass to suit their own needs and desires, however noble or ignoble they may be.
We have lots of pictures. They are on all the pottery, they are on the wall murals and they exist as colorful statues and idols. There is a goddess who bears snakes that we think is the lady of the labyrinth and the underworld, who would be an amalgamation of Ariadne and Persephone. There is a harvest goddess that seems to resemble Rhea and Demeter. But there are unfamiliar goddesses like a bee goddess and harvest goddesses riding together on a chariot, and a mistress of animals. Octopuses are also a pervasive motif on Minoan pottery, and we don’t truly know the meaning of them either.
We also have piles of skulls. Before we start getting all warm and fuzzy about the goddess worshiping Minoans, please also note that the ancient Minoans, as far as we can tell, performed human sacrifice. At least three separate sites have been found that support this as well as some evidence of ritual cannibalism.
If there were clear cut evidence that Persephone was a goddess from the pre-patriarchal civilization predating the Greeks, I would be on it like white on rice. I LOVE the imagined idea that Persephone was an all-powerful figure independent of Hades and Demeter. There is some evidence, conjectural and archaeological from explication of the Homeric Hymn that was an independent underworld goddess before the Eleusinian Mysteries. Heck… I write Persephone as a powerful goddess in RoM, and with good reason.
And here’s why: even without pre-patriarchal imaginings and grandiose leaps of logic, Persephone was extraordinarily powerful. I would go so far as to say that placing her in a pre-patriarchal context, devoid of her greatest challenges and triumphs REDUCES her agency as a goddess and a feminist figure.
In Persephone’s time, women did five things. They were born, they were married, they loomed, they had children, and they died. All were done in their father’s or their husband’s house, which they did not leave for the duration of their lives (unless for very specific festivals, usually those of Dionysos).
But Persephone was a woman who, after being sold to her husband like livestock by her father, made Hades plead with her to stay in the Underworld with him and would give her the title not of consort, but Queen (Homeric Hymn to Demeter, ln. 360-9). Persephone only accepted his offer of marriage (by accepting the stealthily offered pomegranate seeds) after Hades gave her full timai (honor) and a place as ruler of the Underworld (HHtD, ln. 370-4).
Persephone ruled the Underworld visibly as Queen, sought out by heroes throughout the Greek mythos. She was dread Persephone (Iliad, IX, ln. 547, ln. 569; Iliad, X, ln. 473), august Persephone (Odyssey, XXI, ln. 635) and the Iron Queen (Odyssey, book XXI, ln. 241). She was Praxidike, the Exacter of Justice (Orphic Hymn 29, ln. 5). In other words, even though Persephone was a goddess in a man’s world, worshiped in a patriarchal culture, she was EXTREMELY FUCKING POWERFUL.
So to put her in an imaginary pre-patriarchal religion, surrounded by all number of other goddesses is to reduce her power in that context. To frame her in this context reduces her individual power just as much as saying that she was the damsel in distress raped child-bride of Hades. It lacks context, it lacks any sort of further study, and it lacks imagination. It lacks story and it lacks the immensity of her triumphs over the daily struggle of a woman living in the Bronze Age.
It honestly baffles me that the Tumblr community would want to take away her real story. All the great feminists throughout history, every woman who ever struggled, who fought, who suffered and died to be recognized as a person with every bit as much rights as a man… they were not born into idyllic circumstances. They were born into the fire, they were forged by fire and they learned how to rise above and control the fire.
Likewise, if we take away all context from an important archetypal figure like Persephone, then we remove the thing that makes her rise to power and equality with her husband that much more enthralling. We take away Persephone, herself.
A Middleground 