The Cult of Divine Birth in Ancient Greece

280 Pages·2009·3.469 MB·English

by  Marguerite Rigoglioso (auth.)

The Cult of Divine Birth
in Ancient Greece
The Cult of Divine Birth
in Ancient Greece
Marguerite Rigoglioso
THE CULT OF DIVINE BIRTH IN ANCIENT GREECE
Copyright © Marguerite Rigoglioso, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61477-2
Excerpt of Alkman’s maiden song by Guy Davenport, Archilochos,
Sappho, Alkman, translated by Guy Davenport. © 1980 by Guy
Davenport. Used by permission of Bonnie Jean Cox.
Excerpts of Homer’s Odyssey by R. Lamberton, Porphyry: On the Cave
of the Nymphs, translated by Robert Lamberton. © 1983 by Robert
Lamberton. Used by permission of Robert Lamberton.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009
Cover artwork: Teague Owings
Author’s photo: Joe Burull
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the
United States — a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of
the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan
Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998,
of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above
companies and has companies and representatives throughout the
world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the
United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-37848-7 ISBN 978-0-230-62091-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230620919
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rigoglioso, Marguerite.
The cult of divine birth in ancient Greece/Marguerite Rigoglioso.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Greece—Religion. 2. Women priests—Greece. 3. Virgin
birth (Mythology) 4. Goddesses, Greek. 5. Women and religion—
Greece. I. Title.
BL795.P7R54 2009
292.2’114—dc22 2008043015
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions
First edition: May 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Robert, with profound gratitude
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Note about Citation Style xi
Introduction 1
1 A Taxonomy of Divine Birth Priestesshoods 13
2 Divinity, Birth, and Virginity: The Greek Worldview 29
3 Athena’s Divine Birth Priestesshood 51
4 Artemis’s Divine Birth Priestesshood 83
5 Hera’s Divine Birth Priestesshood 117
6 The Divine Birth Priestesshood at Dodona 139
7 The Divine Birth Priestesshood at Delphi 171
8 Is Virgin Birth Possible? And Other Outrageous Questions 205
Notes 211
References 247
Index 263
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank many people for their support in association
with this book. First, my dissertation committee members, who
read earlier versions of this manuscript as it was birthed into my
doctoral dissertation at the California Institute of Integral Studies
(CIIS): my chairperson, Associate Professor Jorge Ferrer, Professor
Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, and Marvin Meyer, Griset Professor of
Bible and Christian Studies at Chapman University, for their open-
ness and wise guidance, and Dr. Birnbaum, especially, for her loving
mentorship during the eight years of my graduate studies; Professor
Janis Phelps, my doctoral advisor, for her encouragement of my
research topic; Professor Charlene Spretnak, for her helpful feedback
on an earlier draft and her visionary guidance in the fi eld of feminist
studies in religion; Mara Keller and Arisika Razak, former and cur-
rent (respectively) directors of the Women’s Spirituality Program at
CIIS, for, along with the institute’s other faculty and staff, providing
a wonderful program and graduate school in which nontraditional
ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies may be explored with
seriousness, rigor, and c reativity; Deborah Grenn, Dianne Jennet,
and Judy Grahn, codirectors of the Women’s Spirituality Program at
the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, as well as faculty member
Vicki Noble, for their inspirational research and encouragement of
my own; Pamela Eakins, for her enthusiastic feedback on a pre-
liminary paper that led to this book; Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Brigitte
Shull, and Christopher C happell at Palgrave Macmillan, for their
professional editorial support and guidance; Angeleen Campra, Tom
Hassett, and the staff of M acmillan Publishing Solutions for editing
and proofreading; Suzanne Sherman Aboulfadl for her indexing skills;
librarians Fawzia C ampana and Cindy Mattison (CIIS), and Lisa
Wendell, Adolfo (“AJ”) Real, Jr., Kenneth Fish, and Shaun Barger
(Dominican U niversity of C alifornia), for their patient assistance with
my r elentless interlibrary loan requests; Jerry L. Hall, for assistance
and clarifi cation r egarding the scientifi c aspects of parthenogenesis
in humans and animals; astronomer Conrad Jung at the Chabot
x Acknowledgments
Space and Science Center in Oakland, CA, for his generous time
showing me computer s imulations of the trajectory of the Pleiades
in the heavens; Walter Tanner, for his spirited help with Greek tutor-
ing and t ranslations and his support in making my work available to
others; Joan M arler, for assistance with pesky details regarding cita-
tions; Miriam R obbins Dexter, for guidance on linguistic queries;
MaShiAat Oloya Tyehimba, for meaningful background informa-
tion; the Venerable Dyhani Ywahoo for helpful correspondence; Joe
Burull, for his excellent photography and d edicated help with the
cover image; friends and family members, for their listening ears and
helpful insights as I shared the unfolding of my research with them;
Teague Owings, for her excitement and appreciation for this topic,
and her provocative drawing gracing the cover; and, above all, Robert
Owings, for unconditional support, scholarly references, abundant
insights, and teachings that have been critical to this process.
Note about Citation Style
For this book, The Chicago Manual of Style’s author-date system of
documentation has been used so that the reader may discern the
sources being referenced without having to fl ip back constantly to the
endnotes. This should be particularly helpful for the classical c itations.
Where citations contain more than two sources, are otherwise v isually
cumbersome, or require further commentary, however, they have
been reverted to endnotes.
4
Introduction
Now is come the last age of the Cumaean prophecy:
The great cycle of periods is born anew.
Now returns the [Virgin] . . .
Now from high heaven a new generation comes down.
––Virgil Fourth Eclogue (4–7)1
“T
he daughter becomes identical with the mother.” This s tatement
of Erich Neumann (1963, 309), providing what may well be the key
to the mystery of the cult to Demeter and Persephone in antiquity,
haunted me for months as I wrote my master’s thesis on these two
goddesses in central Sicily. There was a depth to it, fascinating and
unplumbable, that kept me traveling ever further inward.
I remember standing in my brother’s apartment in Brooklyn,
New York, in January 2001 when I had the insight that was the
starting point of this book. I had been reading Sicilian scholar Anna
Maria Corradini’s book Meteres: Il Mito del Matriarchato in Sicilia
(Mothers: The Myth of Matriarchy in Sicily). Corradini stated for me
what seemed a sudden and profound truth: the Demeter/Persephone
mystery was, at core, a female-only mystery. Stripping off the layers
that the Greeks had added on through the violent intrusion of Hades
and other male gods into the story, she suggested that Demeter was
a pre-Hellenic parthenogenetic goddess who produced the natural
world—and her daughter, Persephone—spontaneously out of her
own body (1997, 12–4; 81–3).
Parthenogenesis. Self-conception. Virgin birth. Mothers and
identical daughters. As I stood in my brother’s small offi ce, I had
the strange sensation of a foreign thought suddenly illuminating