A Woman's Other Weapon

Jupiter and Io, Antonio da Correggio

The sexploits of most gods are quite literally legendary. Sometimes a god is remarkable for being the only one in a pantheon to get much action; sometimes you just can't join the club until you drop your pants and chase every nymph in sight. What doesn't get talked about nearly as much, if at all, are the comparative lusts of goddesses.

(Yes, I just saw Magic Mike, and my mind's on double standards. Can you tell?)

Take the Greek gods. Hera's seduction of Zeus in the Iliad is possibly the only time in the entire mythos when we see its central couple engaging in mutually consensual sex, and this is well after she's given birth to at least two kids. (She's also the mother of the goddesses of youth, childbirth and discord; analyze that, Dr. Freud!) Aphrodite has a very famous roving eye, and what does it get her? Trussed up in a net by her husband, as well as being bad-mouthed forever as the biggest slut in a pantheon of sex maniacs. Echo's shy advances to Narcissus are brutally rebuffed; Eos claims a man and has to watch him wither into a grasshopper, while her sister can only sleep with her beloved while he is actually asleep. And it's never made universally clear whether Persephone was a product of rape or not.

Isis and Osiris, Susan Seddon Boulet

Things don't get much better elsewhere. The contemporary Norse turned a relatively blind eye to Freya's gadding about, but nearly everyone since has passed judgment on her actions, either by censoring, over-excusing, or simply writing her sex drive out of the story. Isis, who as a mother goddess derives an enormous amount of her power from her sexuality, gets mostly a throwaway mention about how she resurrected Osiris and slept with him to get pregnant and can we move on now please? Inanna's undeniable and insatiable passion gets her typecast as a terrifying hellion to fear and avoid, and her very real power is, if not shunned, then not actively courted. And the Virgin Mary's power is right there in her name: to be important, she has to lack desire.

So what are we talking about here? Is female sexuality too much to handle, even in primal tales of basic urges, even in pantheons with characters like Zeus and Odin and Jacob? Did the mostly-male mythologists shy away from really discussing women and sex out of blind fear? If myths ignore or censor women harnessing their sexuality free of judgment, isn't that really just an age-old manifestation of the madonna-whore complex?

Well, maybe not.

Female sexuality is an astoundingly powerful force, in myth and in reality. Women hold the power to create life as a direct result of their sexuality. You get early matriarchal society because early humans recognized and acknowledged that power. And you get creation myths like the Greek one, where Gaia trains her children to destroy her selfish and unsatisfactory consort, harnessing the product of her sexuality to annihilate Uranus once he's given her the missing ingredient to make life. And she turns that same power on Cronus when he too displeases her. It is no accident that Cronus' final defeat is Zeus castrating him; by going against the will of the female - that is, the one in charge - Cronus brings on himself his unmanning, by all the classic Greek rules of hubris.

Jupiter and Juno, Annibale Caracci

And even in the less satisfactory myths, you can see the threads of that power. Hera distracts Zeus from the most epic war of all time just by flashing a bit of cleavage. Inanna may be frightening, but as Gilgamesh aptly points out, she is not someone to mess with; tapping into her primal power allows her to control men's lives. Freya snatches up the best warriors for her own hall before even Odin gets his pick, and no one dares to question her. Isis and Mary turn the alarming threat of female sexuality into salvation by giving birth to their respective messiahs.

The Awakening of Adonis, John William Waterhouse

Yes, openly sexual women are scary things to the makers of myths. But it's not plain old misogyny. It's born of a healthy respect for the change a woman can make in the world, just by embracing her sexuality. And while stainless Vestal Virgins might get a story or two - Artemis, anyone? - it's the women grounded in their instinctive power who keep coming back to shake things up, even when the men around them get scared and try to push them away.

Deadlier Than the Male

Last week I touched very briefly on war goddesses in the general context of "humans feel weird about war." But they're rather fascinating in their own right. For instance: what makes a culture like, say, ancient Greece produce a total badass like Athena, who's smart, gorgeous, and aggressive all in one? Or Freya, creation of the wargoing Norse, who could be Athena's twin (now with 78% more marital issues)? What's the story behind Hathor's alarming transformation into Sekhmet? Can anyone really ever explain Inanna?

Well, probably not. But I'll do my best.

Creation of the Witchblade, Stjepan Sejic

There's one thing a lot of them have in common. It's very glaring, and very weird. War goddesses are intimately entwined with violence and sex, in about equal measure. Gilgamesh's rejection of Inanna consists of him reciting to her a list of the ex-lovers she screwed over on a whim. Sekhmet, mad with bloodlust, is the dark side of beautiful, sensual Hathor. Durga and Kali, the best-known Indian warrior goddesses, are both manifestations of Parvati, the beloved wife of Shiva most closely identified with fertility and motherhood. Freya, goddess of beauty and fertility, had a temper that could shake the halls of the Aesir and got prime pick of the fallen dead, before even Odin. And Athena, let's not forget, never took vows of chastity like Artemis, and was invested enough in her own beauty to claim Eris's golden apple as her own.

The disturbing and obvious conclusion is that a sexually voracious female is dangerous. She's dangerous beyond the warning inherent in a goddess like Aphrodite, who's aggressive but kind of dumb. Subtext won't do for someone like this; it's got to be blatant text. You've got to dress her up in armor and give her a sword or a spear to make sure everyone gets the point. Danger! Danger! This incredibly hot woman is going to destroy you!

The Washer at the Ford, lindowyn-stock

It gets weirder. It's not just sexual aggression in a woman that gets portrayed as dangerous. It's femininity, period. The three aspects of the Morrigan - Macha, Badb, and Nemain - have little if anything to do with sex appeal. Yet they're still goddesses of war, individually and together. Their primary domain is the fear and frenzy of battle. The symbol of the Morrigan is still the crow, the eater of carrion. One of the ways in which Badb foreshadows death in battle is by washing the doomed soldier's clothes - a very feminine act of caretaking, become suddenly ominous in context. Macha, whose husband made her race horses while pregnant, went into labor after her win and cursed the male spectators to feel the pangs of childbirth at the most inconvenient time possible. This forced femaleness incapacitated all the men of Ulster except for Cuchulain in battle. No wonder Macha was worshiped - no one wanted to become like a woman again.

Is it safe to say that powerful women scared the men of ancient times? Sure. Is that the only reason for these origin stories? Absolutely not. If they were so scary, why are there so many of them? Why are they available to pray to as protectors and guardians? The very power that freaked people out seems to have been a fact of life. One highly feminized war goddess would be an anomaly. So many of them present an organized front of acknowledged power that any sane person, male or female, would want on their side. So maybe Athena gets vain from time to time. It doesn't mean you want her fighting against you. It doesn't matter whether Inanna ruins her lovers' lives; she's an unstoppable force that you might as well court.

Having a war goddess like you is certainly better than the alternative. Remember, these women don't just get angry when they're slighted. They know the ins and outs of bloody vengeance. If you don't want to go into labor in the middle of a duel to the death, you had better respect the hell out of them.

And maybe, the next time your wife or your mother or your sister took your clothes to the river to wash them, you'd remember the war goddesses and respect your own women, too. It couldn't have hurt.

Fighting With Gods

Thor vs. the Fire Trolls, Howard David Johnson

War. What is it good for?

Well, it produces some rather entertaining gods. Ares very kindly volunteered to be the butt monkey for the entire Greek pantheon. Thor's tempers are quite literally the stuff of legend. Durga, created to defend the world from a rampaging demon, trounces Mahishasura in what had to be the best show ever seen on the face of the earth. Nothing draws the eye quite like a war god out to make a point.

The really militant cultures understandably put the most thought into their war gods. Ares might get trapped in a jug and run screaming from the plain of Troy, but he does also have Terror and Fear pulling his chariot. And his affair with Aphrodite points up the seductive appeal of war in a culture based on fighting. Eighteen-armed Durga also represents the force of compassion; joined with fierce fighting energy, her very existence makes a fascinating argument for humanity in warfare. The Mithras cult, a favorite of Roman soldiers, provided a forum for sworn brotherhood; the god's very name might come from the Sanskrit word mitra, meaning friendship. Hachiman isn't just an ancient Japanese war god, he's the patron and teacher of warriors, as well as the particular god of an entire clan. These aren't just creatures of bloodlust - they're complicated deities with lots of responsibilities, both in their stories and symbolically.

Inanna, Luis Royo

And that's not even getting into the war goddesses. The Mesopotamians, one of the most bloodthirsty ancient cultures out there, had Inanna, goddess of sex and war. (She saw no reason not to mix the two; mythical humans rejected her as a lover at risk of their lives.) Freya has been bastardized down to the goddess of beauty, but in her day she got first pick of the battlefield dead, to take to her own halls. Athena combines wisdom and warfare, much like Durga; Bastet's most familiar manifestation, as a cat, means that she's also one of the patron goddesses of the pharaohs. Even Aphrodite enters the fray when she's needed, and is quite capable of rescuing a son here and there.

In short, we're ambivalent about war. Even in cultures that glorify strife and battle, war gods come with a mitigating circumstance built into their worship. You can pray to Thor as a thunder god, not just as a death-dealer, and if it's glory you're after, you might be better off talking to Tyr or Odin anyway. Nobody is quite easy with letting a god represent only the savagery of the field.

Ares, j-art

And that savagery is there in spades. Ares never goes anywhere without the goddess of discord; all three aspects of the Morrigan are intimately identified with death and killing; Hathor, who represents beauty and music, gets so angry at one point that she turns into Sekhmet, the lion-headed war goddess, and goes so out of control that Ra has to trick her into thinking beer is blood. Thor, the main Norse war god, is not in charge of honor or victory, only of the act of war itself.

So what creates this very real concern with war? We're not afraid of glorifying it; if we were, we wouldn't be the kind of life form that creates war gods. It could just be a storyteller's reluctance to let a perfectly good god be one-use-only. It's easy to make the leap from thunder god to war god, from sexually voracious to aggressively combative. If Inanna stories are popular, why not expand her mythos?

It could also be the up-close nature of these cultures' relation to war.

The Battle on the Ice, Boris Olshansky

If we're still talking about an ancient culture, you can bet anything they had lots of personal encounters with war. (Their enemies - the ones we've forgotten about - might not have had so many war gods.) A Norse berserker, coming off the high of a battle frenzy while surrounded by corpses, might well draw a distinct line between war and honor. The path from doer to teacher is a perfectly logical one; since Hachiman started out as the patron of fishermen, it's not hard to see how he might have become a patient instructor rather than a battlefield threat. Wisdom and compassion are very desirable things to have tempering bloodlust, especially for people who saw little of either. (Let's not forget the Iliad's massive death lists, or the straight-up anti-war sentiments of Lysistrata and The Trojan Women.) And while you'd definitely want your war gods aggressive, you'd probably prefer that the protector of your king be rational Bastet, consort of levelheaded Anubis, rather than kill-crazy Sekhmet.

Humans know it's easy to lose control when emotions are running high. But we want our gods to be better than us. We want there to be a reason to need their help. It makes sense, for whatever reason, that we'd create war gods with other things on their minds. If they can maintain control, maybe they can show us how. If they could devote themselves to other aspects of life, maybe ancient worshippers who didn't like the people that they became in war could hold out hope that there was still a better side to themselves. Either way, it shows us that even in highly war-based cultures, people still wanted their gods to have something to fight for.