Feminisms and ancient Greece

How to re-write the Herstory of ancient Greece within the mystery religions

I consign her wretched walk, her words, deeds, and evil talk: Erotic magic and women in the ancient Greco-Roman world

Scheiding, Kathryn Jean. University of Missouri - Kansas City, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013. 

p 5 Female authored erotic magic- ancient women expressed agency    not only voices, but also authentic expressions of emotional and sexual desires through erotic magic.Thousands of spells curses and magic have been ignored until recent scholarship, now we understand that they give insight into the ancient world.

Most scholars who have recently begun to focus on magical sources still retain traditional methods of thinking about the ancient Greeks and Romans as purely rational, which hinders their interpretations of the at times irrational and always emotional sources at hand.. By using modern theories of feminism, mentalities, and anthropology from outside of the usual conservative framework, magical sources can be utilized to reveal a more complex relationship between mortals and their gods, and mainly between men and women.

p 2 “The truth is that it made little difference who you were – man or woman; Greek, Roman, Jew, or Christian; commoner or aristocrat; unlettered peasant or wise philosopher. In matters of the heart, as in many other affairs of daily life, anyone could play the role of client or target.
 The inclusion of women in almost every instance of erotic magic reveals another benefit of studying magic. Magical sources allow scholars to obtain information about women, gender, and sexuality in the ancient world.

p 3 . Of the roughly eighty known erotic curse tablets, seventy were male-authored.4 Only nine curse tablets and spells have been found where the roles were reversed and a woman created a tablet to use against a man or another woman in matters of love and relationships. Although the exceptions to the norm are very interesting, they do not represent the majority of erotic magic like classical literature implies. Female-authored erotic magic can be used to further the argument that ancient women expressed agency.

p 22 One of the main problems that arise when dealing with ancient women and magic, especially when erotic magic is involved, is that historians traditionally emphasize ancient Greek and Roman rationality: Plato, Socrates, Cicero, and Seneca are all praised as shining examples of a rational society. The concept of magic does not fit into this cultural model; if scholars accept that magic was an integral part of ancient life -- that everyone used magic and believed in the potential power obtained from magical practices -- then the modern assumption of Greco-Roman rationality must be abandoned, at least with respect to the greater population.
 

p 31 Magic was rationalized within ancient Greco-Roman cultures and deemed a necessary tool used for practical reasons. Emotions were of course involved in the decision to use certain magical tactics, but magic itself was completely accepted. By adopting this position, I will be able to view erotic magic as necessary in the minds of the agents. The thousands of men and women who resorted to using erotic curse tablets and spells saw a need in their lives and chose to use magic in order to fulfill their desires.

p 43 There are typically three possible components to any recipe for a spell found in these important resources: ritual, spoken word, and written curse.

p 44 Along with a ritual, a spoken spell might have been needed to call upon the gods in a specific way. The love spell ritual mentioned above was followed by a spoken spell of about forty lines. Specific wording, evocation and praising of Aphrodite (referred to here as Kythere), and magical words that appear as gibberish all need to be paired with the ritual.

p 45 The gods’ secret names were often seemingly random strands of mainly vowels that no one other than the professionals would know how to replicate exactly.

One of the most frequent types of curses Audollent unearthed was a binding curse, which was created so the client of the curse could force another person to do his or her will; the actions and thoughts of the victim would be bound, hence a “binding” curse. Audollent concluded that there were five different categories in which the nature of binding curses fell: judicial, erotic, agnostic, curses against thieves and slanderers, and curses against economic competitors.79 Of the five categories, erotic spells and curses were common. In Audollent’s interpretation, all of these spells involved the elimination of competition.0 Of the nearly two thousand curse tablets that scholars have unearthed, translated, and analyzed so far, a large number deal with romantic or sexual issues between men and women

p 48The curse continues, “Drag her by the hair and her heart until she no longer stands aloof from me … and I hold Ptolemais herself … obedient for all the time of my life, filled with love for me, desiring me, speaking to me the things she has on her mind. If you accomplish this for me, I will set you free.”86 Here the client demands the spirit of the deceased man to forcefully drag the woman to him.
 

p 51 Binding curses typically evoke gods as a means to enhance the effectiveness of the spell. In the curse mentioned above, Sarapammon evokes Pluton, Kore Persephone, Ereschigal, Adonis, Hermes, Thooth, and Anoubis. The gods mentioned vary depending on the region in which the curse was created, but the most common gods called upon to help the creator of the curse are Hermes, Hecate, Kore/Persephone, and Hades.9

The myth behind changing seasons and the harvest of wheat deals with Persephone, daughter of Demeter and Zeus, and her annual captivity in the underworld with Hades, god of the dead, brother of Zeus, and ruler of the underworld. These gods were associated with the underworld, and resurrection from death, which ties in with the darker nature of some of the violent curses and shows a connection with powerful gods who were believed to possess more knowledge and experience in dealing with the deaths of mortals.

p 63 An example of a woman using a more feminine form of a curse comes from Attica, Greece dating from the fourth century BCE. A woman is thought to have created the curse tablet in order to prevent her husband, or fiancé, from having relations with any other woman. It reads, “(I bind) Aristokudes and the women who will be seen with him. May he not marry any other woman or young maiden.”102 The woman wants a romantic relationship with her husband, and is jealous of other women with whom he might be having
 sexual relations.103 The woman who made this curse tablet did not include the evocation of gods, aggressive or violent language, or physical demands against the man, which are common in male-authored curse tablets directed against women.
p67 Both Dickie and Montserrat agree that women in Greco-Roman Egypt experienced a fair amount of freedom to publicly interact with men.110 Almost any woman in Egypt would have been freed from the cultural and social restraints inflicted upon her because of the patriarchal bargain. A woman would have been able to access a male professional scribe in public in order to procure an erotic curse or spell to use against a male victim without fear of discovery by male relative. Women would have had different legal statuses depending on time and place.
p86 A definite possibility behind the discrepancy could have been a fear of female agency in ancient Greek and Roman societies. The powers of magic described above would have been accepted knowledge in the ancient world. Everyone believed in the potential of magic to alter specific aspects of their lives. Women living within such overtly patriarchal cultures were bound to desire greater agency and control over components of their lives that were closely controlled. The few number of erotic curse tablets and spells that women purchased is a sign that at least some women defied the social constructs that restricted them to specific types of magical practices. An even greater accomplishment is that the women reacted against their passive roles in society. Their decisions to purchase erotic magic from a male professional and leave tangible evidence of such defiance show their agency.

Ideology and "The Status of Women" in Ancient Greece

Katz, Marilyn Katz, Marilyn (correspondence author)

History and Theory, December 1992, Vol.31(4), pp.70-97

p
This essay investigates the constitution of the principal research question on women in ancient Greece, namely, the status of women in ancient Athens, and attempts to formulate a historiography for it under three headings. "Patriarchy and Misogyny" reviews the history of the question, from the time of its canonical formulation by A. W. Gomme in 1925, back to its initial constitution as a scholarly question by K. A. Bottiger in 1775, and up to its conceptualization in contemporary and feminist scholarship. This section concludes with a statement on the historiographical inadequacy of this research question, and suggests that a historiographically appropriate formulation must be based on a reconsideration of the ideology which informed the initial constitution of the research issue.

Pomeroy divided her treatment of women in ancient Greece into a discussion of the female divinities of the Olympian pantheon, followed by chapters on women in the Homeric period, in the Archaic Age (800-500 b.c.e.), and a section of women in ancient Athens, divided into chapters on women in Greek law, private life, and images of women in literature. As the chapter headings indicate, Pomeroy did not call into question the historiographic validity of the category "woman," nor did other scholars in the field who took up research on this subject. In the discipline of history, by contrast, Natalie Zemon Davis had suggested already in 1976 that "we should be interested in the history of both women and men, [anal we should not be working only on the subjected sex any more than an historian of class can focus exclusively on peasants."(n24) But in classics, surveys conceptualized similarly to that of Pomeroy have continued to appear and now exist in the major European languages.(n25)

Pomeroy did, however, raise a number of important questions about how to conceptualize the study of women, and some of these have continued to dominate the discussions of theory and methodology in classics. First, she noted the presence of male bias or of the masculine point of view in many of the sources, both primary and secondary. This indisputable fact about ancient sources--of material authored by women we have only the fragments of a few women poets--has even led recently to the recommendation that the study of women in antiquity be refocused away from literature to culture more generally, on the grounds that "the study of women in ancient literature is the study of men's views of women and cannot become anything else."(n26)
To cite just two examples from current literature: Eva Keuls, in The Reign of the Phallus, assembles a formidable array of evidence to demonstrate that: "In the case of a society dominated by men who sequester their wives and daughters, denigrate the female role in reproduction, erect monuments to male genitalia, have sex with the sons of their peers, sponsor public whorehouses, create a mythology of rape, and engage in rampant saber-rattling, it is not inappropriate to refer to a reign of the phallus. Classical Athens was such a society."(n33) Mary Lefkowitz, by contrast, finds that "[Greek] myth portrays marriage and motherhood, with all the difficulties they involve, as the best conditions most women desire, and in which women can be best respected by society and happiest in themselves," and goes on to suggest that "Greek men may not have been so concerned with repressing women as protecting them."(n34)