The Head
The outline of the cheeks and chin look like a Bronze Age necklace open at the back and with two spirals as a clasp. The ears are large double spirals and placed near the hair-line. The hair is designed as very elongated triangles and continues round the head to the clasp that constitutes the chin. It makes the head look like a mask placed on top of the wings on the shoulders and the impression is strengthened by the hair, well combed and parted in the middle that is visible above the hair-band. This band is also decorated with a pattern inherited from the Bronze Age: running zetas.

The eyes are shaped like rhombs similar to the rhombs placed in a cross-like position to the left and right of the figure.

Two spirals at the end of a triangle make the nose and the mouth is oblong with rounded corners. The teeth are placed on the lips. Two small tusks are placed like two opposing crescents above the mouth with the tongue hanging from the lower lip.

This is not a primitive portrait, but a highly symbolic image (I use symbol/symbolic in the Jungian way: the best possible image of an abstract concept that is too large to be expressed in any other way but through analogues taken from our physical world).

To my knowledge, this is the earliest mask of the Lady Medusa and it seems probable that it has in some way served as a prototype. It is not the first image after the one found in Thebes, Boeotia, There exists another image in between. It comes from the sanctuary of Eleusis not far from Athens and shows Sthenno and Euryale leaving the head-less Medusa. They are not centaurs, neither do they carry masks. Marija Gimbutas thinks that they are bees, but they do look more like the bronze cauldrons in fashion at the time of the painting.

(I do agree: I would be terrified meeting a centaur or one of my pots transformed into the head of a non-human woman.)

The prominence of the spirals on the face and along the rim certainly was not lost on the ancient onlookers. The spiral is a road that leads in to the center and then out again. on this plate once placed in a tomb it leads the deceased person to the center that is death and from there back to the entrance/exit that is life .

In some way the spirals continue to belong to the Lady Medusa even much later as this image shows that was painted 150 years later.

The Eyes

Now we turn to the Lady’s eyes that according to the myth and tradition kill everybody she looks at.
We know that the Greeks believed in the evil eye and used amulets against it. Of course, we don’t believe in it. It is, however, interesting that in Star Wars the Emperor, George Lukas’ personification of evil, is an old man with red rimmed eyes. In the Iliad, the poet only mentions the Gorgon’s eyes once (8:349) when he describes Hector, the Trojan hero, whose eyes blaze like those of Medusa and the god of battle, Ares, “killer of men.”  However, we must not forget that Hector is a favorite of Homer, who describes him in a different and more positive way than any of the Greek warriors. His eyes blaze like those of the Immortals – like Athena’s when she makes her champion Achilles recognize her: “It is terrifying to see the light of your eyes.” (1:200)

Until modern science proved the contrary, people imagined that the eyes sent out beams of light thus both showing individual feelings and capturing the world. We still say that eyes shoot a look of anger, which is implied in Matt.6,22: “The eye is the lamp of the body.” During the Neolithic period all over the world, the most common way of representing eyes on female figures is the pictogram of the vulva.

One of the analogies is probably that as the child is born into the world through the vulva, so the goddess creates life through sending out the light from her eyes into the world. When the positive symbol was forgotten, Medusa’s killing eyes took its place.

The Tusks

Hebraism, Christianity, and Islam have transformed the pig that over the whole earth has lent its tusks to important deities, into such a dirty animal that it is difficult to understand how it once has been a suitable image of the goddess. However, this is not true in other cultures. In his autobiography the present Dalai Lama tells the legend about the goddess Vajravahari, “Adamantine Sow.” She manifests herself as a woman with the head of a wild sow. In the eighteenth century some Mongolian warriors entered by force into the Samding monastery where they found the monks in the assembly hall and a big wild pig sitting on the throne of the abbess. They fled.

Several seals with images of wild pigs were found in Minoan tombs.  Pottery pigs are common in tombs in Greece, South Italy and Etruria, and in Chinese tombs from the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE). In Rome the sacrifice at the death of a family member consisted of a pig, as even now in New Guinea. In classical Greece sows were sacrificed to Demeter, Athena and Hera; wild pigs to Artemis. During the Thesmophoria piglets – pigs-to-be – were given to the not-yet-fertile Earth.

We define ourselves in the world not only by integrating ourselves in it, but also by opposing ourselves to it.

I like how Stanley Walens  (Encyclopedia of Religions, vol. 1, 1987) expresses it:

[Animals] represent the antinomies of living, the existence of the sacred in the profane, the wild in the civilized . . . They enable us to create analogies. At their most simplistic, such analogies might state that animals are to humans as humans are to gods.

The wild pig is stronger and faster than a human being; its beauty is different from ours and it is as far from us as we are from the divine persons. The wild pig is dangerous and, when necessary, ready to kill. However, because its tusks are shaped as the moon’s crescents, it reminds us of the fact that the moon is born again and gives birth again after three black nights.

According to Robert Graves, the Orphics called the full moon “Gorgon’s head.” The name of Medusa’s human son is Chrysaor, “Sword of gold.” He is the  golden sickle, that is, the new moon – and the dying moon that kills.  All the indications point towards the Lady Medusa being a symbol of the moon.

The Moon

Living as we do with electric lamps lightening the nights, we forget the importance of the moon. In southern latitudes and in places without electricity its impact is enormous. I remember my first excavation on the island of Chios where we had no electricity. On nights of the full moon we all remained seated far into the night, hypnotized by the moon. We did not talk, we just sat staring into its face.

Alexander Marshack has shown that calculations of the moon’s growing and waning phases exist in the Upper Paleolithic Period. The old age of these observations may be why the moon is so ambiguous: it is feminine and masculine, it gives birth and it impregnates women. It is forever present and forever changing.

Although the moon in many places is regarded as male, it is feminine in the Mediterranean area. The new moon is born; in the second quarter it grows, and when it is full it represents a circle: the symbol of unity and fullness. Then it declines, grows old, and dies.  For three nights the black moon is dead, then it is born again month after month after month.

In analogy to the moon the lunar Goddess gives birth, sustains, and kills. Sri Ramakrishna, the great Indian saint, has given us an example of this. He saw in a vision Kālī, the Great Mother, (who is a Moon Goddess)  as a young woman coming up from the river Ganges. The woman gave birth to a child and laid it to her breast. She then killed the child, grew old and returned to the river. As Kālī, Athena and Artemis are lunar goddesses of birth and death and so, I think, is Medusa.

******

Illustrations:
The Great Goddess from Rhodos. Inside of a plate from a tomb in Kamiros, Rhodos, now in the British Museum Acc. 60.4-4-2.  After Hirmer 561.0248 , Photo Archive, Getty Library, Malibu. Drawing K.B.

The head of Sthenno or Euryale. Detail of amphora from Eleusis, ca. 670 BC. After E.G. Mylonas, O protoattikos amphoreus tes Eleusinos. 1957. Drawing K.B.

Head of the Gorgo. Centerpiece of Athena’s shield on a Red-Figured amphora by the Berlin Painter. 490-470 BC. Antikenmuseum Basel. Drawing K.B.

Wooden mask of Rangda, Bali. Private collection. Photo K.B.

The Goddess Kali, 1940s Poster art. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/kali

Around 690 BC a potter-artist from the island of Tenos delivers a big vase to somebody important in Thebes, Boeotia (the region north of Athens). On the neck the image shows how the young Perseus killes the Potnia Gorgo Medusa, the Lady, Mistress of the Horse. For the next three hundred years, the image of the killed Medusa will be the preferred one in the patriarchal Athenian society.

One or two generations later, another potter makes a plate on the island of Rhodos that is going to influence a larger part of the Greek society: those living in the cities on the Peloponnese, Crete, the west coast of Asia Minor (present Turkey) and the south coast of Italy. Here the Lady appears wearing a mask and with the attributes that belong to the goddess who reigns over life and death.

Rhodos is a big island in the south-east corner of the Greek archipelagos. According to the ancient tradition the Greek population there was very ancient. We don’t know if they spoke the Doric dialect fom the beginning or if these Greeks immigrated later. In any case there are no signs of a war-like invasion.

People speaking the Doric dialect thought and acted differently than the Athenians did especially in the case of the female population. While the Athenians were fiercly patriarchal in the Doric-speaking cities women and men had equal rights.

During the seventh and sixth centuries these cities had a flourishing cultural life that was barely beginning in the small and rural Athens.
The island of Rhodos had three important cities: Rhodos, Kamiros and Lindos. The goddess Lindia was the principal divinity. Later the inhabitants began calling her Athena, but only in the second part of the fourth century, under pressure from Athens, did they allow Zeus to sit beside her in her most important temples.

***

The plate on which the image of Medusa is painted is dated between 650-630 BC.

It comes from a tomb in Kamiros that was excavated in 1860 or 1863-64 by August Salzmann and Alfred Biliotti who sold it to the British Museum.

Medusa walks. She has one waterbird at each leg, but she is not holding them; her hands are held wide open in front of their heads. She dresses in a skirt that is open in front and shows one of her very muscular legs. The dress is held together by a broad belt.

The Lady is too big to fit into the circle mady by the plate: her feet pierce it. In later images she crouches; there is absolutely not enough space for her in the human realm. (Picasso, too uses this device when he draws goddesses seated in far too small rooms.) Surrounding her are pictograms meant to be read as symbols (images of concepts that are too large to be expressed but with the help of analogies taken from our physical world).

When we unite the rhombs (each consisting of four rhombs) to Medusa’s left and right and likewise the concentric circles with each other they create an invisual cross. This cross is furthermore strengthened by the swastika to the left of the figure that in its turn is reiterated on the birds’ wings and on the naked leg.

The three triangles, divided in three parts and with a spiral on top may allude not only to the Lady and her two sisters, but also to the unity of the goddesses who are both one and three, child, woman, and crone.

These same abstract pictograms are used on the rim of plates found in Knossos, Crete, and Al Mina in Syria. They are a generation younger, but clearly show the influence from this Rhodian plate.

In the late Bronze Age tombs, the deceased often wears a belt decorated with wild geese symbolizing a new birth.  For once, there is a myth backing up the image: In the Trojan war Hera fights for the Greeks against Zeus’ explicit command that the Olympic goddesses and gods be neutral. Once when she really needs to distract Zeus she asks Aphrodite to lend her the belt of sexual passion. Zeus is inflamed and they make love. Flowers grow up around them while the sky covers them with a glittering cloud of gold. (The Iliad 14: 214, 345 ff).

Love-making generates new life and the wild goose is the symbol of the goddess that brings the power to conceive to the future mother.  3.600 fibulas (security pins) decorated with geese were found in tombs on Rhodos.

Nine (five plus three) pomegranates hang from the wings down on the Lady’s arms. They are common on Rhodian gold jewelry being important symbols of fertility – new life – and in a special way characterize Aphrodite, Athena, Demeter and Persephone.

The symbolic images surrounding the Lady and painted on her body already make it clear the the artist has meant to paint an image of the importance of the goddess. Medusa, the Lady, is too big to be enclosed: She is the cross and the center not only of the cross, but also of the circles; She is the unity of number three in the triangles. She is the Mistress of physical love empowering women to conceive new life.

In the next blog I’ll discuss the mask and the eyes, the wings and the water-birds that enlarge and concentrate the symbol that is the Lady even more.

***

Illustrations:

Perseus killing the Gorgo Medusa. Detail of an amphora from Tenos found in Thebes in Boeotia, c. 700 – 660 BC. In the Louvre CA 795. Drawing K.B.

The Great Goddess from Rhodos.  Inside of a plate from a tomb in Kamiros, Rhodos, now in the British Museum Acc. 60.4-4-2.  After Hirmer 561.0248 , Photo Archive, Getty Library, Malibu. Drawing K.B.

Rim- fragment of plate from Knossos, Crete. After H. Payne. “Early Greek Vases from Knossos,”  BSA 29, 1929, Pl. 10, 7. Drawing K.B.

Similar fragment from Al Mina, Syria. After M. Robertson. “The excavations Al Mina, ” JHS 60, 1040 fig 5 g. Drawing K.B.

Details of belt with goose and elaborate circle. From tomb EE 12, Quattro Fontanile, Veio. Excavations of the British School in Rome. Drawing K. Berggren.

Who is Medusa? Ancient and modern writers, all prominent men and women, tell us that she was a monster, but was she really?

Luisa Banti once pointed out that the ancient Greeks had such a high opinion of human dignity that they imagined their gods exactly as themselves. They still influence us. We cannot imagine that an artist wants to represent a divinity as a mixture of an animal and a human being, forgetting that what we think of as evil (the snakes, for example) others may  experience in a different manner.  We regard Medusa through cultural lenses. Let me give you some examples.

Giuliana Riccioni discussing the scene on the vase from Tenos shown above writes that  “Medusa’s human face wears an extremely rigid expression . . . eyes wide open with dilated pupils . . .  The long thin arms hang lifeless long the body, the hands being nearly fleshless, the fingers extremely long show the thin bony claws . . .”

Another archaeologist, Thalia P. Howe cites Pindar’s twelfth Pythian Ode where he says that the sound of the flute “imitates the cry exceedingly shrill that bursts from the hungry jaws of Euryale.” She proposes that in order to convey the idea of a terrifying noise Medusa appears with a great distended mouth.

The French historian and anthropologist Jean-Pierre Vernant follows Howe saying that the Gorgon is more animal than human; her face is more a grimace than a face.

For the psychologist Erich Neumann she incarnates the negative elementary character: “the Gorgon is the counterpart of the life womb . . . she is the womb of death or the night sun”.

Edward Edinger, another well-known psychologist, writes that “the classical example of the benumbing, paralyzing aspect of the negative feminine principle is the myth of the Gorgon Medusa”.

Another psychologist, Edward Whitmont although recognizing that destruction gives birth to change and re-creation sees Medusa as the angry or insulted Feminine. Discussing new models of orientation he writes: “They all aim at transforming the chaotic power of the abysmal Yin, the Medusa, into the play of life. They mediate the terrifying face of the Gorgon into the helpful one of Athena”. Even Marija Gimbutas uses the same lenses. Although she acknowledges that Medusa once was a potent goddess, she sees “a grinning mask with glaring eyes … lolling tongue, projecting teeth, and writhing snakes for hair” and understands her as the dangerous, dark side of Artemis.

Judging from the paintings of Medusa’s severed head painted by Caravaggio and Rubens five hundred years ago, I wonder if it wasn’t then that Medusa became the image of all evil incarnated by and projected on the archetypal Woman.  These  images and the modern ones easily found  in Google agree with Edinger and Whitmont.   They are so filled with emotions that only with great difficulty can we liberate ourselves from regarding Medusa as  the personification of evil – but it is possible.

The first step is to consider that her names – Medousa, Queen, Lady, Mistress; Sthenno, the Strong, Mighty One; Euryale, the Wanderer; and Gorgo, the lively Horse, the divine Centaur –  point to her being a goddess.

The second step is to remember that prehistoric artists were not interested in portraits; they were frantically trying to make the invisible Holy visible. When we content ourselves with glancing at them we loose sight of how the artists tried to solve the impossible task they have set themselves.

The questions I intend to ask and perhaps find an answer to are why the Lady — the Mighty Wanderer, the Spirited Horse — consented to be killed by Perseus, an adolescent, not yet a grown man?  Isn’t it the sin of hubris,  insolent pride against the gods to imagine that a mere mortal can kill an immortal being?

What happens to a people, a state, a culture that permits such a killing? This is my second question.

In order to find answers  we first must understand who Medusa is. Her names indicate that she is a goddess. As no goddess by this name exists in the Greek pantheon, which of the  goddesses is she? Athena? Hera? Artemis? Demeter? Hekate? Persephone?

The answer is hidden in the archaic images in which Medusa is represented alone, without Perseus. There are very many of them, many more that those showing her dead body. I have chosen four of them:

A pottery plate from the Greek island of Rhodes,

two bronze plaques found in Olympia in the Western Peloponnese,

the West pediment of Artemis’ temple on the island of Corfu,

and the bronze statue that once crowned the oldest Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens.

The detailed descriptions will be tedious, but as it is the only way for us to really see the details – and they are as important as the whole picture – I do ask for your understanding and patience.

***

Illustrations:

Perseus killing the Gorgo Medusa. Detail of an amphora from Tenos found in Thebes in Boeotia, c. 700 – 660 BC. In the Louvre CA 795. Drawing K.B.

Medusa by Caravaggio (1571 – 1610) in Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Medusa_by_Carvaggio.jpg

Medusa by Rubens (1577 – 1640).  Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rubens_Medusa.jpeg

In the early seventh century BC, when Thebes, Corinth, Sparta and some of the Greek islands were culturally more advanced than Athens, there was a woman potter on the island of Tenos who began retelling myths in her art. She must have been a quite famous artist at the time, because some of her large vases were exported as far as Thebes in Boeotia and the island of Mykonos.

Two of her amphoras in Thebes survived the centuries buried in a tomb, and one of them is now preserved in the Louvre. The beautiful stylized image on the vase depicts the killing of Medusa by Perseus, and we easily recognize the myth because the picture of Perseus follows closely the description in the Shield of Herakles, supposedly written by the great poet Hesiod. The interesting fact is that, although the Shield of Herakles was written in the eighth century, the description of Perseus was added at least one hundred years later. Here we have an instance when the image influenced a poet.

As in the description, Perseus is depicted as a beardless adolescent wearing a short tunic , the “invisibility” hat, a “sword with black sheath across his shoulders” and a “silver bag” hanging from his neck. He is rendered in profile turning his head away from Medusa, while gripping her hair with his left hand so hard that her lips are drawn back because of the strain, and holding the sword to her throat with his right hand.

Medusa’s human figure stands in the same position as the earliest cult statues, the xoana, made of wood. She is a goddess who has taken human shape and she is also a centaur.

Her horse legs are posed in the same warrior stance that Perseus keeps (in yoga called Virabhadrasana), implying readiness for battle.  If it had been her wish she could easily have overpowered the boy. She is not directing her gaze at him. He is in no danger.

Centaurs
Medusa is the only Greek female centaur;  the others are all men/stallions. The image came to Greece from the Near East where centaurs were close to the gods.  The  seal cylinder with a centaur from the Babylonian Nippur below is a good example. It is dated in the middle of the fourteenth century BC, that is, contemporaneously with the Mycenaean civilization in Greece.

The centaur has small wings; is dressed in a shirt with tassels on the sleeves and has a spotted skin knotted round the waist and draped over the horse’s back. A quiver hangs on his back and he is galloping so fast that the tail is blowing with the wind and at the same time he shoots an unfeathered arrow from his bow. Flowers are growing below him and a flowering tree stands in front of him. Strength, power and beauty flows from the image.

To understand a little of the emotions that inspired the archaic feelings about centaurs let us look at the horse. Aniela Jaffé points out that when animals appear in myths, sagas and dreams they seem to be our dormant instincts trying to return to consciousness and recreate a lost wholeness. This may be the reason why children project much of their emotions of fear, awe and love on the horse.

I remember my own exhilarating feelings when one summer I played at being horse and rider. I was contemporaneously the strong, swift horse and the rider using her intelligence, will and emphathy to make the horse obey. Growing up continuously stumbling and falling over my own feet, continuously being told to be quiet and stop making faces I didn’t know I was making, the freedom and strenght I felt being the horse and its rider was indescribable. Growing older I lost this feeling, but I recognize it in the description that Xenophon makes, in the fourth century BC:

Now the creature that I have envied most is, I think, the Centaur (if any such being ever existed), able to reason with a man’s intelligence and to manufacture with his hands what he needed, while he possessed the fleetness and strength of a horse so as to overtake whatever ran before him and to knock down whatever stood in his way. Well, all his advantages I combine in myself as a horseman.

Horses are among the few animals that allow us to enter in symbiosis with them. In fact, it is only when this symbiosis exists that the rider not only is carried by the horse, but truly rides it and the horse not only pulls the chariot, but the charioteer and horse work together, the horse sacrificing to the human part some of its own power and freedom. Perhaps this is the reason why, as Ludolf Malten points out, the accent in Greek literature always lies on the horse and not on the rider, not even on the god that takes its shape.

The horse seems to have been tamed in Greece during the early Mycenaean period, around 1900 BC. During more than one thousand years it is only represented as pulling the chariot although in order to control a herd of horses one must be on horseback.

Perhaps the chariots were so full of prestige and legend that the public concentrated on them and not on the simple rider. Light chariots had been introduced in the early second millennium BC first in Egypt and the Middle East, then in Crete by the Mycenaean Greeks. It was no problem for Pharaoh to drive a chariot  in Egypt, but in Bronze Age Europe it was virtually impossible.  Some Mycenaean roads have been found, but Homer’s description how Telemachus drives from Pylos to Sparta  shows how traveling in a chariot had become a fantasy in Greece telling the story as if the high mountain Taygetos had not existed.  Until less than thirty years ago, when the road from the West was united to the road coming East from Sparta it was impossible to cross the mountain with a vehicle.  If Telemachus had indeed crossed it and not taken the long way round, he would have been forced to carry the chariot!

The fact that Medusa is centaur explains her name, Gorgo;  that her two sisters are called Gorgons; that the head is a Gorgoneion.

After the archaic period Gorgo began to signify the horrible monster that killed by the look of her eyes, but used about a horse it continued to mean “hot, spirited.” We also must not forget that the most famous woman in Greek history was called Gorgo.  She was the daughter of king Cleomenes of Sparta and later married the famous Spartan general Leonidas. Herodotos admiringly mentions her twize for her great intelligence. She certainly was not named after a monster, but after a spirited, beautiful horse.

I therefore propose that in archaic times Medusa in her animal shape of a wild horse was called gorgós – “hot, spirited, fierce” –  because that is what a wild, beautiful horse is. The viewer thus sees the divinity of Medusa in the beautiful and fierce, wild horse and in the dual image of cult statue and horse. She is non-human femininity, a being totally different from us, but whom with the help of analogies we are able to emotionally bond with.

***

Illustrations:

Perseus killing the Gorgo Medusa. Detail of an amphora from Tenos found in Thebes in Boeotia, c. 700 – 660 BC. In the Louvre CA 795. Photo Jastrow for Wikimedia Common.  http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Perseus_Medusa_Louvre_CA795.jpg

Centaur. Ca. 1350 BC from a cylinder seal from Nippur, Babylonia. After Paul Baur, Centaurs in ancient art. 1912, fig. 2. Drawing K.B.

]]> http://krpfll.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/medusa-the-earliest-image/feed/ 2 krpfll Perseus_Medusa_Louvre_CA795 centaur Nippur http://krpfll.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/medusa-homer-and-hesiod/ http://krpfll.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/medusa-homer-and-hesiod/#comments Sat, 22 May 2010 06:35:54 +0000 krpfll http://krpfll.wordpress.com/?p=540 ]]> Surprisingly few ancient authors mention Medusa and Perseus although the story seems to have circulated from at least the beginning of seventh century BC. The most ancient poets, Homer and Hesiod, don’t tell the story in its wholeness but from their poems it is clear that they they knew something about it.

In the fourteenth song of the Iliad – orally composed by Homer, on the East coast of what nowadays is Turkey, sometime between the eleventh and ninth centuries BC  and perhaps written down in the late sixth century Athens – Perseus is presented to the listeners as if he was already well known by them. In 4:319, Homer lets Zeus present him, “the most famous of all men” as his son with Danae. Perhaps G. Mylonas is right and a tale about Perseus, king of Mycenae around 1350 BC, was sung already in the Mycenaean palaces.

Medusa, the dreadful monster, is mentioned three times. However, both Adolf Furtwängler and Ulrich von Milamowitz-Moellendorff considered them as later additions and as far as I know nobody has tried to falsify their proposal.

The line in the fifth song is the most evident one. Here we read that Athena puts the aegis (a buff-coat or protective corset) over her head and on this corset she wears the “horrible monster’s, Gorgo’s head”, but the vase-paintings show that this happened only in the last quarter of the sixth century BC, that is, several hundred years after Homer. Thus, the Iliad only tells us that a story about Perseus, son of Zeus and Danae, was known early on.

The second early Greek poet was Hesiod from Boeotia, who perhaps lived in the eighth century BC. He composed a poem, the Theogony, about the creation of the world and the Greek gods, only one generation before an artist from the island of Tenos made the earliest image of Perseus killing Medusa. Unfortunately for us, Hesiod is more interested in Pegasos than in that story, but he does tell us that the monsters were three and not one: the mortal Médousa, whose name comes from the old verb médô that means “I rule,” and her two immortal sisters, Sthenno that means “the strong one” and Euryále “the one that wanders widely.” He also tells us that Poseidon, the “Dark-haired One,”  whom Zeus had made the ruler over the Mediterranean Sea, made love to Medusa “in a soft, grassy  meadow among the flowers,” and that “when Perseus cut off her head, Chrysaor the Great and Pegasos the Horse leaped out” (verses 274-86).

However, we don’t find any description of the “monster” with lolling tongue and big teeth until in the fifth century in Pherekydes and Euripedes and the snakes are not mentioned at all until Ovid writes about them. Luckily we have the images and they tell us a more complicated story.

Time to begin a new theme, this time about the goddess herself, that is, one of the images that the ancient Greek women made of her. No, not an image, an icon through which they dimly perceived Her. An image that in the patriarchal West has become the synonym of horror, the image of the murderous woman: Medusa. Not only is her hair made of hissing vipers, but she kills by the look of her eyes. Fortunately Perseus beheaded her.

How can anybody doubt that this head, the Gorgoneion, is not Medusa’s head. However, we should note that with very few exceptions it is portrayed with a big mustache and often with a beard as well. According to Sir John Beazley, this is because “the beard makes the female face more horrid” (The Development of Attic Black-Figure, 1986, p. 13).

Most scholars accept it as a mask, but in his book Medusa, 2000, p. 186-191, Stephen R. Wilks proposes that it represents the swollen features of a drowned person, whose body was lost at sea and the head stranded on the beach.

This may not be exactly what the ancient Greeks believed, but how do we evade being caught in the net of our own projections and emotions?

Thirty years ago I discovered how exhilarating it is to work with symbols, but also how difficult it is. According to C.G. Jung, the symbols are not signs or allegories, but the best possible explanations of facts that are so vast and so deeply felt that they can only be described through analogies with our physical world.

Words like life and death, humanity and divinity, good and evil, masculinity and femininity, cannot be explained in a straightforward way. It is frustrating to work with symbols. You must look at objects and actions from their hidden side; you must walk round them and try to get a glimpse of their backside. Then perhaps, they’ll open up and allow something to emerge; something very different from what we first saw.

This is certainly the case of Medusa.

The Story as we know it from the written accounts:

Perseus is the grandson of Acrisius, king of Argos, an important Mycenaean city.  Acrisius had been told by an oracle that he will not father any sons and that his grandson will kill him. He therefore locks his daughter in a tower and sets ferocious watchdogs to guard it, but he cannot prevent Zeus, the head of the Greek pantheon, to penetrate the tower as a rain of gold and thus fecundate Danae. Discovering that his daughter has given birth to a boy, Acrisius shuts Danae and her son, Perseus, into a wooden chest that is thrown into the Mediterranean Sea. On the island of Serifos, a fisherman salvages the chest and finding the mother and baby still alive brings them to Polydeuktes, his brother, who is king of the island. Polydeuktes  takes them in and Perseus grows up at his court.

When as a teenager – not yet having grown a beard – Perseus discovers that Polydeuktes wants to marry his mother, he opposes it so violently that Polydeuktes backs down, but provokes Perseus into boasting that he will bring Medusa’s head as a proper marriage gift for any bride but his mother. Without hesitation Polydeuktes accepts the boast and Perseus must leave for the kill.

Of course, he would never have succeeded without divine intervention, but the goddess Athena because of her hostility to Medusa comes to his help. She makes Hades, god of the underworld, lend him the invisibility hat and Hermes his winged shoes so that Perseus can fly like the invisible wind. She even lends him her own shield that is polished like a mirror, so that he is able to behead the sleeping Medusa without being seen.

Invisible and flying on the wings of his shoes, Perseus saves himself from Medusa’s two sisters and after many adventures, during which he petrifies his enemies by showing them Medusa’s head, he arrives in Ethiopia. Here he finds the beautiful maiden, Andromeda, chained to a cliff waiting for a horrible monster to come from the sea and eat her. With Medusa’s head, Perseus kills the monster, saves Andromeda and returns with her as his wife to Seryfos where he promptly gives Medusa’s head to Polydeuktes, who immediately dies. After this deed he returns the shoes to Hermes and gives Athena the head to fasten on her breast. In the end the oracle also is fullfilled when Perseus ignoring that Acrisius is his grandfather kills him with a discus at the sport games in Tiryns.

This is the story. However it was not told in this way in the beginning, but was developed over many hundred years. In the next installment I’ll discuss it.

There is also the problem that the earliest image of Perseus killing Medusa does not adhere to the written story and that is not the only problem we need to look at. It is my hope that in the end we may begin to understand the image,  nay the icon, in a different light.

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Illustrations:

Medusa by Caravaggio in Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Medusa_by_Carvaggio.jpg

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Gorgoneion (Medusa’s head). Detail from a cup in Melbourne University. After P. Connor,” Spotted Snakes with double tongue”, Arch.Anz. 1983, fig.3. Drawing by K.B.

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Gorgoneion. Detail from an Etruscan amphora from Vulci, Italy, after 550BC.The British Museum. Photo Jastrow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hydria_gorgon_BM_B58.jpg

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Medusa by Rubens. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rubens_Medusa.jpeg

The sign of a true symbol is that it includes the dark side: the pain, the sorrow, the suffering. Symbols incorporate not only our hope and our love, not only the beauty, but also our worst nightmares. In the same way as nettles and flax are drowned, one of the most common tortures is water-boarding. In the same way as the nettles and flax are broken into pieces, people have been dismembered and quartered,  and  the Codex Justinianus mentions iron combs as instruments of torture.  Our ancestors knew the pain of the nettles and the flax.

When in the Iliad, the divine smith Hephaestus fashions a new shield for Achilles, he decorates it with a scene showing a group of young people on their way to the grape harvest. They dance and sing.  The song, however, not about the grape harvest but about the suffering we put the flax through in order to transform it into a cloth.

Robert Eisler published the history of this song in Folk-Lore 1951, revising it on his death-bed.  It seems to have spread from the Far East in the Neolithic period first to the Near East, then to Egypt and from there (around 2400BC) to the Mycenaean Greeks. Miraculously it still survived in the 20th century among the British and Irish flax-combers, spinners and weavers.

Unfortunately Eisler was so taken in by the Suffering of the Flax and later of the Rye (and probably of the spelt and the wheat), that he never answers the question why the harvesters of the grapes sing about the pain of the flax. Perhaps this is a better  place and time.

The group of young people sing the Lament of the Flax (the Linos Dirge) during the harvest of the grapes because of the close analogy between the god Dionysus, who transforms the grapes into wine, and the Goddess that transforms her flaxen hair of nettles into cloth.

In the same way as the hair of the Goddess is not only her hair but herself, Dionysus is not only the god of wine, but the wine itself.  She is the flax that is picked and tortured to death. He is every grape that is harvested and pressed. When his body has been crushed and his blood, the must, has “slept,” seemingly dead, in the darkness of the wine caskets, he resurrects, transformed into the new, intoxicating wine.

The Christian churches celebrate the same symbol. The wine is Christ’s blood, the bread is Christ’s body.  In the same way  Dionysus is crushed in the wine-press  and the wheat is cut, then threshed, that is, the grains are torn from the axes in the same way as the grapes are torn from the vine. The grains are then scorched by the fire, crushed by the millstones, mixed with water and placed in a hot oven to be transformed into bread. Every transformation is painful; to be transformed means to die, but in the same way as the moon always is reborn after the three black nights, the sleeping must transforms into wine, the grains into bread and the flax into a cloth.

Hans Christian Andersen understood this pain very well.  He gives one version of it in “The Ugly Duckling” and another one in “The Flax:”

The flax raised its small blue flowers toward the sun feeling very happy. It was growing so high and it knew that the long fibers would give the best linen. One day the harvesters came and pulled it up by the roots. It hurt. Then they began the torture. It was drowned in water, dried before the hot fire, broken, and combed. The flax thought of the sun in the field and its former happiness, but only when it had been spun and woven, it found time to be proud. It had become such a fine, lovely cloth. People then came with big scissors and cruelly cut it and pierced it with sharp needles and sew it into underclothes. “Now I am really useful,” thought the flax, “how happy I am.” After long wear the garments were too tattered to be mended and so another torture took place. The linen was torn to pieces, that again were laid in water and then passed through the mill and made into the finest whitest paper one can imagine. Beautiful poetry and fairy-tales were written on it and this really was the apex of happiness in the life of the flax. Many hundred books were printed and sold and the rest of the paper was laid on a shelf. “Now, ” thought the flax, “I am allowed to rest for a while. I wonder what will happen next. My fate is always to proceed to something better.”  However, the fate of the paper was to die in the fire. Now the flax shone and glittered more brilliantly than ever its flowers or the fine linen cloth had done. The smoke rose higher and higher and the flax thought with the greatest joy: “I am going straight up to the sun.”

It has always surprised me that Hans Christian Andersen, who in my opinion usually writes very sorrowful stories, perceiving the pain of the flax continues to describe its happiness. Every time it is tortured, the pain transforms it into something it could never have imagine. A white thin cloth of the best quality – what more could it wish for. To be sewn into undergarments, to be worn closest to the human body was even better. To be crushed in the mill and made into paper for a poet to use for his poems and tales was something it never had dared to dream about. To have words printed on it and then be sold to thousands of people was even better, but the apex was its end. It did not end in the fire; it was transformed into the light of the sun.

In The Spirit Mercurius,  C. G. Jung points out that “every spiritual truth gradually turns into something material, becoming no more than a tool in the hand of man”. The comb was both a symbol and a tool for more than thirty thousand years. When it stopped being a symbol, it turned into its opposite and became a sign of luxuria, “luxery,” one of the seven mortal sins. In art it became the attribute of prostitutes and of the mermaids who lured the sailors to an early death. I still feel the shock when I learned that the comb was used as an instrument of torture as late as four hundred years ago.

In our materialistic culture we need to be more aware than ever that we are not  the masters, but that the symbols influence our decisions as much as they have ever done.

Once in my young years I fell in a low ditch filled with stinging nettles with the bicycle on top of me.  I still remember  how helpless I was. There was nobody around and to move meant to be more burnt. In the evening I lay in my bed burning from fever inside and outside from the nettles. Like the Goddess that Combs her Flaxen Hair of Nettles, they are not cuddly, nice plants. We must treat them with respect and know how to touch them to avoid being hurt.

For the last one thousand years the combs have been a sign of sexual sinfulness, but in the Middle Ages and further back in time they were symbols of transformation. The Goddess, the anthropomorphic personification of the symbol, raising out of the unconscious depths asks for our respect.

End of the Goddess Combs Her Flaxen Hair of Nettles.

Notes:

Dionysus as the grape and the wine: Walter Burkert, Homo Necans. The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth. 1983, p. 213-20.

C.G. Jung, The Spirit Mercurius in Alchemical Studies, Collected Works volume 13.

Illustrations:

Dionysus from Wikimedia Commons. Detail of an Attic plate from Vulci, Italy, ca. 500 BC.  The British Museum. Photo Jastrow  (2006).

Bronze comb from France.  Woman with goose-heads for hands. The teeth of the comb make up her skirt, ca. 700 BC. Drawing K.B.

Header by Nicole Fabbrini.

The bronze comb from a tomb in Denmark surrounded by two wild geese.

Once upon a time, King Aegeus of Athens asks Jason’s wife Medea, known for her knowledge in witchcraft, to help him engender a son. She tells him to sleep with a woman in Troizen. He does and orders the woman, that if the child is a boy to send him to Athens, but not before he is strong enough to lift the stone, below which Aegeus has hidden his sandals and a sword.The baby is named Theseus and one day he lifts the stone and goes to his father.

In Athens people are upset. They expect the ship from Crete that arrives every nine years to take seven girls and seven boys as sacrifice to the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Theseus convinces his father to let him be one of the boys. In Crete the king’s daughter Ariadne falls in love with him and decides to help him. She gives him a ball of flax and a sword and as the first victim he enters the labyrinth, kills the feared bull-man and returns with the help of the thread.

Ariadne gives Theseus the ball of flax

Now they must all flee.  The fourteen young people and Ariadne take the Athenian ship and set off to the island of Naxos, where Theseus “forgets” to wake up Ariadne and she is left on the island. In Delos they dance the Crane in front of Apollo’s altar and then leaving for Athens, Theseus “forgets” his promise to change the black sails for white ones. Aegeus seeing the black sails and sure that his son is dead, in desperation and sorrow throws himself down the cliffs. Thus Theseus becomes the new king.

Why on earth do I tell this story and where is the link between Theseus and the new symbolic image of the male fertility?  What has this story to do with the fire that transforms stones into shining metal?

Well, this is how symbols do. They hide the important fact, in this case the Crane Dance. During the Bronze Age, the crane became the symbol of male fertility slowly replacing the old female fertility symbol, the wild goose. Thus, in order to understand the role of the crane we must begin with the symbolism of the wild goose.

The earliest image of a wild goose

The earliest, absolutely certain figurine of a goose has been found in Vinça and is dated in the fifth millennium. However,  I am convinced that the ten thousand years older figurines from Mezin in Ukraine and the much older, similar miniatures that are very common all over Europe, already represent the wild geese.

The ethologist Konrad Lorenz having observed geese for most of his life, considered  the wild gray goose the most intelligent of all birds and with most affinities towards humans. They are rather small with legs longer than those of swans, their necks taller than those of the ducks.  They are easy to recognize even as abstract images on their horizontal, plumb bodies, big circular eyes and flattened beaks. Living as much on land as in the water they symbolize earth, water and air.

To this we must add that being migratory birds, they also constitute analogies to the moon.  Like the moon that arrives and leaves every month, they fly between the Polar circle and Africa every year. They come to Europe in the spring when everything wakes up and turn south in the autumn before the long sleep of the winter sets in. They always return, and they always leave – like the moon.

Woman with a bird mask

We have now wings; we cannot fly.  However,among some people, for example the Kwakiutl (British Columbia, Canada), certain important persons, are permitted to wear bird masks at certain celebrations in the same way as the figurines in Vinça wear masks of wild geese. The masks are abstract images; they are symbols and not portraits. The goddess and the dancers that represent her for a short time take the shape of a wild goose. The bird is a symbol through which we catch a glimpse of the divine.

Around the year 1000 BC, abstract images of geese appeared in nearly all the European tombs. They are made in pottery and bronze, painted on vases and incised on bronze objects. Perhaps they are symbols of pregnancy as the gift from the goddess through her symbolic image, the wild goose – indicating that the tomb was the womb of the Earth pregnant with the dead.

Images of the crane appear a thousand years later than the images of the geese in Vinça.  We find it in Susa in the late fourth millennium, then a thousand years later in Crete.  In the beginning of the first millennium BC, the crane appears on the rocks in north Italy, where it proudly stands above six labyrinths–but the only written testimony that has come down to us in which both the crane and the labyrinth appear, is the Greek story about Theseus.

The male cranes make a limping, complicated “dance” to attract the females at the time of mating and the ancient crane dancers of course represented the birds. The problem is that it is inconceivable that Theseus, the young hero, could be the Crane.  He is kalós k’agathos (“beautiful in mind and body”),  the opposite of kalós being aischrós, “ugly, shameful,” which in the Iliad is used in superlative about Thersites, who not only limps, but dares oppose the leaders. Theseus does not limp. He can only lead the dance as a representative. The dance itself was much older and was lead by the divine Crane. Who was he?

Hephaestus in his crane automobile

The only god in Greek mythology who limps is the divine smith, Hephaestus. Long before the story about Theseus and the labyrinth was born, the divine smith being stepmother and midwife of the metals performed the male fertility dance in the very center of the sea; in the place where the Cyclades make a “circle” (kúklos) around Delos.

Hephaestus is the Crane. He is the midwife of Zeus, opening the god’s skull so that Athena, dressed in glittering armor that reflects the light, can be born. He performs the operation with the Minoan double-axe (lábrus, “double-axe,” and labúrinthos, “labyrinth,” are both foreign words in the Greek language).

The old labyrinth is a complicated spiral, but still a spiral, and it is impossible to lose one’s way in it. In the center we find ourselves–the half human, half animal Minotaur. The story tells us that to meet oneself without embellishment is an experience as frightening as death.

Reading the Iliad one gets the feeling that Hephaestus is the god that Homer prefers above all the other Olympians, not out of pity with the deformed limping god, but of wholly different reasons. He dedicates most of the chapter eighteen to the god. No other god or goddess is given that much space.

Hephaestus is not only intelligent, but the empathic god that tries to calm the quarrels between the Olympian gods and goddesses. He is not only a smith, but an architect, who has built all the houses on the Olympus including his own “full of stars” and made of glittering bronze. He has invented three kinds of robots: big tripods on wheels that go to the assemblies of the goddesses and gods at his order, two female servants of gold that support him when he walks, and bellows that begin working at his command. He was at least three thousand years before his time. Two images painted on vases around 500 BC, show Hephaestus in his “automobile” fashioned from different parts of cranes.

He is the smith, the god of fertility, the Crane.  It is logical that he is married to Aphrodite – not at all the ugliest god to the most beautiful of all goddesses – but the god who creates life with the goddess of sexual passion. Together they fuse the egg with the spermatozoon.

Homer may not have written the Iliad in the way we intend with being an author, but he brought the different oral poems together into a whole, imprinted by his personality. The oral poems are earlier than the Iliad and many of them may even go back to the Mycenaean period or not long after its downfall. This is also the period when a new symbol appears in the tombs in Italy and Switzerland where all of a sudden the pottery vases are decorated with metal strips.

I think this is the same symbol that is shown in the story about the marriage between Hephaestus and Aphrodite. The feminine pottery, a symbol of the goddess embracing the god, is separated from the metal, the child of the smith, a symbol of masculinity, but at the same time united with it. The One diminishes when the Two have been born; the feeling of being an individual has come into the world. This is the last time the androgyny is represented in Europe, then the image goes to sleep and even the alchemists are not able to revive it.

Cranes below the bier

The discovery that the fire could change certain stones into copper revolutionized our world. It changed our thinking – our analogies, the symbols living in us. With the heating of the stones, with the hammering of the copper, humanity entered into its heredity. Earlier we did what the goddess had taught us, now we were able to create by ourselves – and what a discovery that was. We could create light out of stones. This was the discovery that enabled Neil A. Armstrong to place his foot on the Moon, that memorable day of July 20, 1969.

Bronze combs with geese

The combs of bronze reflect all this. In the darkness of the tomb there now is light. In these combs, the goddess who combs her flaxen hair of nettles unites with the god who creates light, but the symbolism is new. The smith has arrived.

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Illustrations:

Ariadne gives Theseus the ball of flax. Detail from the “Tragliatella pitcher”, ca 600 BC, from Caere, Italy.  Drawing K.B.

The earliest image of a goose. Bird Goddess’ mask from Vinca, ca 4 000 BC. After M. Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 1982, pl. 123. Drawing K.B.

Bird woman from Vinca. After M. Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, 1989, fig. 39.

Cranes. Photo J. Lindström

Hephaestus in his crane automobile. Detail of e red-figured vase from Saturnia, Italy. ca. 500 BC. Drawing K.B.

The cranes blow the bier. Detail of a Geometric Amphora from Athens, ca 700 BC.

Bronze comb with geese from Denmark, ca 1 000 BC. Drawing K.B.

]]> http://krpfll.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/the-smith-god-of-male-fertility/feed/ 0 krpfll Nicole header_redigerad Theseus GOOSE1 vinca Hephaesos in his crane automobile crane_geom_redigerad Denmark_birds http://krpfll.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/combs-of-bronze-or-the-fascination-with-metal/ http://krpfll.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/combs-of-bronze-or-the-fascination-with-metal/#comments Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:54:09 +0000 krpfll http://krpfll.wordpress.com/?p=445 ]]>

Look around your room  and mentally take away everything made of metal or joined with metal screws. Only the books are left. The pictures are hanging on nails. Without metal there would be no cars, no bicycles, no airplanes, no satellites. The electricity needs copper wires, the telephone and computer, too.

We live among things made of metal and they make us forget the miracle that certain reddish, bluish, greenish or grayish stones being smelted at a temperature of 3300 degrees Fahrenheit (1200 degrees Celsius) begin to ooze a fiery substance that, once cooled, can be formed into objects. This discovery must have been as overpowering as when the blond fibers appeared inside the dead nettles and when the fragile clay became hard pottery.

Bronze comb from Veji, Italy. 700 BC.

No wonder that the earliest alchemical treaties written in Egypt and China, and the Medieval ones written in Europe a thousand years later, are full of  the miraculous and with the  symbolic logic, that — as fibers can be changed  into flaxen hair and  stones into a golden liquid –  we ought to be able to do the opposite transformation of liquids into gold.

However it would be wrong to believe that the alchemists only wanted to make gold. Their work went much deeper. In the Medieval world governed by a religious dictatorship, they hid their thoughts that would have been regarded as heresy in incomprehensible alchemical words. C. G. Jung became fascinated by their writings and began using the terminology as analogies to certain psychological situations:  Lapis, the foundation stone, the core; soror mistica, the hidden sister, that is, the feminine inside each man, his psychological inner sister; coniunctio oppositorum, the impossible unity of two contradictions, are alchemical names given to problems that already prehistoric men and women faced. Alchemy is as poignant today as it was then.

Modern silver spoon with comb on handle

My question, however, goes even further because I began asking myself where our fascination with gold, silver and copper comes from. A stone hatchet is much more practical when you need to fell a tree than one made of copper or even of bronze. Amulets made of stone have been used for hundred thousands of years.

Why do we like to adorn ourselves with gold, silver or copper jewelry?  The answer that they make us look beautiful,  is not sufficient. Do we wear them to show our social position? Certainly, but it is not enough. As amulets and talismans to protect the head that is the seat of our thoughts, intelligence, and feelings? To protect the neck that is the go-between of the head and the body? To protect the arms? Certainly, but why? Because polished copper mirrors the light where it is very dark at night.

Bronce comb, France, ca 700 BC

Copper jewelry and copper axes reflect the light and carry deep inside themselves a memory of that inner light that visionaries, artists, and shamans see. We need the sun’s light to see the true colors in nature. We need light to become enlightened. All of a sudden human beings were able to create light.

The copper smelting is a relatively young science compared to that of the pottery and the textile work. From the date of the pottery found inside the shafts in the mine of Rudna Glava near Majdanpek in Serbia, we know that this was in use around 7 000 ago.  According to the excavator Borislav Jovanović, at this time the copper fabrication had become common knowledge: The earliest copper finds date back to 9 000 years ago and come from Cayönü where a rare source of pure copper is found that can be hammered and does not need the smelting process. Around 8 000 years ago the goddess from Porodin, Macedonia had been adorned with a necklace of big round beads, and in the Near East the goddess figurines also begin to wear necklaces. This may be the time when the smelting of copper began.

The fascination with the copper was symbolic; it was the fascination not only of the fiery substance that oozed from the stones and of the light the new material emanated, but also of entering the womb of the Earth where the ore slowly matured with the terrestrial rhythm of the mother. When they were ready to be born, she gave them birth. As the Earth gives birth to plants, she can also give birth to plants of metal. This image is not as strange as it may seem: The cosmos is compared to a tree of gold in alchemy and we accept, without question, metal candle-holders with flowers on them and silver and golden Christmas trees.

The men and women who crawled into the narrow corridors extracted the immature, yet-to-be-born ore from the mines, the womb of the Earth. It then became the task of the smith to give birth to the metal in the artificial womb of the furnace. Thus, the smith replaced the mother giving birth to her children, who became his objects and the god separated himself from the goddess. In the third verse of Genesis, Elohim creates the light. He creates it before he creates anything else. The Father who creates light now enters into the center relegating the mother to the periphery. She doesn’t create; she only transforms the embryo into a child.  However, although the discovery may have been instant, it took several thousand years before the new symbols had been accepted.

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I published the material in this and the following chapter in 2004 in Transoxiania as Homo Faber and Homo Symbolicus. The fascination with copper in the sixth millennium.

Illustrations:

Bronze comb from the pre-Etruscan cemetery in Veji, Quattro Fontanili. Ca 700-650 BC.

Silver spoon with comb on handle. Modern. Los Angeles, perhaps central America. Photo K.B.

Bronze comb from France. Ca 700 BC. Drawing K.B.

Abstract drawing of a tree. Freiburg im Breisgau. Early 20th century. Photo K.B.

bread oven

Vesta was the center of the quaternal Rome, Roma quadrata, the circle divided by a cross. As a reminder,  the bread was usually made into round buns with a cross on top. Every time anybody held such a bread in her hand, it reminded her that it had been baked in the womb of the oven that was heated by the fire, and from flour crushed in the mill that moves in a circle round the center.

Also, every time the  Romans went to the circus to watch the chariot-races, the turning points – also called meta (the center) – reminded them that they lived in the center of the empire, the hub of the world. Life in Rome circled around the goddess Vesta. Her fire must always burn. It must not die, because then Rome would also die.

Ovid points out that Vesta was a living flame – viva flamma – and as such could not have any association with death.  This was the reason why the girls that were chosen to become vestals, that is, Vesta’s priestesses, must have both parents alive. Even more significant is the fact that when a criminal condemned to death met a vestal on the way to execution, he was automatically freed.

This also meant that a vestal could not be killed. If she was condemned to death, which happened if she broke her celibacy, only Vesta could kill her. The priestess was walled alive in a cell with a lamp, some water  and some bread to wait for the goddess she had offended.

The Phallus of Fire

The name Vesta is feminine and the vestals were women that were treated as men. This has intrigued many researchers, but the answer is not far away. It is enough to read what Plutarch has to say in the following old story:

King Tarchetius was the cruel king of Alba Longa. One day a phallus appeared on the hearth in his palace and remained there several days. Frightened he asked an oracle and was told to let a girl unite herself with the flaming phallus. Out of the union a hero would be born, who would surpass everybody in courage and wisdom. Thus the king commanded one of his daughters to go to the phallus, but she out of fright made one of her slave women perform the act. The king furious about his daughter’s disobedience threw them both in prison where the slave gave birth to the twins Romulus and Remus. They were taken out to die in the forest, but a wolf heard their hungry cries and fed them her milk and when a shepherd saw this miracle he adopted them. Grown up they assembled an army, conquered Tarchetius, and built Rome.

This legend not only explains why the vestals, symbols of the goddess who also is a god, were treated as men with all the male privileges, but also why they always dressed like brides. They were always wed to the god, the phallus of fire.

The Androgynous Deities

Nowadays we cannot imagine an androgynous divinity, the god that contemporary is the goddess, but it is not  like that  everywhere.

On the island Jeju between South Korea and Japan, there are hundreds of statues representing Harabochi, “Grand-Father,” the Eldest, the Great Father. In creation tales and prayers, the same divinity is called Halmang, “Grand-Mother,” the Eldest, the Great Mother. It is the same divinity: She has created the island and listens to her children while, he watches. They are not one god and one goddess, but the god is the goddess, the goddess is the god.

Behind the symbol lies the logic that when we anthropomorphize a divinity,that is, give a deity a human shape, we ought to represent the human species, not a man or a woman, not just the female half or the male half, but the whole.

Our European ancestors took the same view. At least fifty percent of all the prehistoric figurines are female-male. Their bodies are female, their necks are phallic. The tradition continues in the pottery containers. The water jars that contain the cremated bones have a wide body sometimes  with breasts, and phallic necks. (We still use vases with this shape in pottery, glass or metal.) The symbolic image represents the species and not  its division in femininity and masculinity.

Vesta is one of these androgynous divinities.

Let me give you another example from our present time.

In India, one finds at least one statue of the god Shiva and the goddess Devi-Shakti in every village. The statue is in the form of lingam and yoni, that is, phallus and vulva. According to one legend, Shiva once cut off his lingam and it began to roam the earth, spreading death all around. Only when Devi-Shakti opened her vulva to it,  the destruction ended. Shiva’s lingam is imagined as a pillar of fire, but is unthinkable without Shakti’s yoni.  She is the life without which he is merely a corpse. The goddess and the god are so deeply united that they are One.

It is as gross an error to understand lingam and yoni as only an image of the sexual intercourse as to understand the small Paleolithic figures of naked women as obscene or– as somebody has proposed– as pornography.

We  must use images taken from our own bodies or from our surroundings to explain the unexplainable. The difference between the male and female genitals is the most unmistakable way to represent Male and Female, Masculinity and Femininity. This is how we are created; it is the most important visual difference between female and male.

Androgyny is the Two in One, the alchemical King united with the Queen into one person, the Unity that we long for and cannot reach but for a short while. It is a symbol of divinity.

The vestals had to remain virgins until they had served for thirty years. The Roman law and society treated them as men because they represented the goddess who was the god.  Contrary to all other Roman women, they had no male guardians; they took care of their own fortunes and testaments; they testified in the law courts. A lictor even accompanied them in the city, a honor granted to the most important officials and Jupiter’s high priest. They were treated as women who were men, as the goddess-god they served.

This was also the reason why a vestal who had intercourse with a man must die, not because the intercourse in itself, but because of its symbolism. The Romans believed that everybody at birth was both masculine and feminine. Only the intercourse separated the genders and therefore, the vestal that was both, lost her masculinity in the intercourse, and as a consequence did not represent the goddess/god any longer. She must die. This even when her lover was a god:

The god Mars once fell in love with the vestal Rhea Silvia, who became mother of the twins Romulus and Remus, Rome’s mythical founders. Rhea Silvia was walled in to die, but Mars being a conscientious father found good fostering parents to his sons.

The stories of the life-giving fire – Vesta who was both the heart of Rome and the fire in every kitchen – have been long forgotten. A hotter, more dramatic fire replaced the old symbols. The change started between six and seven thousand years ago and as that revolutionary happening directly involves the combs, it will be the subject of the next chapter.

However, let me first mention the interesting link between Vesta and the comb belonging to flaminica dialis, the important wife of the highest priest in Rome. Every year on May 14, the Romans celebrated a ritual, Sacra Argeorum, the Argei being images kept in twenty-seven shrines throughout Rome. Once the ceremony may have entailed human sacrifices, but during historical times puppets made of straw were thrown into the river Tiber. The vestals – although the ritual coincided with their yearly cleaning of Vesta’s house – were present together with the flaminica. She was dressed in mourning  and was forbidden to touch her comb on this day. Once it may have been a fearful day, a day like the Christian Good Friday, a day when everybody waited for the transformation, that would come, but had not yet arrived. Not a day for combing one’s hair remembering the Goddess who combs Her Flaxen Hair of Nettles.

Images

Bread oven.  Los Angeles. Photo A. Carpenter

Marble statue from the Cycladic Islands, Greece. 3rd millennium. Drawing K. Berggren

Prehistoric androgynous figure from Savignano, Italy. Museo delle Origini dellÚomo, Torino. Perhaps as early as 50,000 BC. Drawing K. Berggren

The King and Queen united. Alchemical symbolic image. Public image from karenswhimsy.com/alchemy-symbols.shtm

Comb of bronze from a tomb in Alto Adige, Italy. ca. 600 BC.  Drawing, K. Berggren