This story that is told about Rome’s founding, formulation, and populating, and has bothered me for a long time. The story is usually called The Rape of the Sabine Women. Current attempts to make the story title less horrific has it being called The Abduction of the Sabine Women. It seems that every painter from the Renaissance on into the Romantic era seems to have depicted the story in a painting; some artists painted multiple paintings of the story.
The crux of the story is that the two founders of Rome needed to solidify relations with neighboring cities and needed women for the predominantly male and military encampment if the area was to be developed according to their vision. The Sabine people were neighbors and not interested in joining forces with nascent Rome strategically or biologically via their daughters marrying the Romans. Rome had a party and invited everyone. Rome abducted the Sabine women and fought off their fathers and brothers.
The Romans promised much to the women, but less was given than promised. But families were started and the women were, so the story goes, some of the first mothers of Rome. But the Sabine fathers and brothers were still ticked off about the theft of their family members (without recompense) so they attacked Rome again. This time the women interceded as is shown in this 1799 painting where the woman in white is flanked by children. Basic translation, “Dad, Brother mine, Husband, do not harm each other for your progeny, sons, nephews, grandsons need you.” The women are then celebrated as peacemakers. The Sabines all join in with this new city of Rome and everyone lived happily ever after.
The initial reaction to this story is that the abduction is terrible. Well yes, but it is such an iconic patriarchal story. Suitors do not reach agreement with males for the women they want to have as wives and have probably begun seducing. Would it have really been any better if the trade of young women for goods, services, or alliances by the young women’s male relatives been successful? The women’s perspective on being traded or abducted does not really enter into the story. Their only message seems to be, “Think of the children.”
I am pretty sure this story has undergone conversion to mythic structure, but it still has the element of historical truth about the basic status of women as chattel in the early European States. Another implicit message is that women, once bred, will become good wives and mothers no matter how they were procured.
This is really not that big of a difference from what happened earlier and to the north in Europe. This dispersal of women at marriage is referred to as patrilocal household structure. Men stay where they are born and women travel to a husband’s village upon marriage. Evidence from Germanic settlements as culture shifted from the Neolithic to Bronze Age showed this patrilocality too. It probably was not abduction as such as artifacts and burial patterns suggest that women brought in trade goods from their home areas, and that burial customs from the women’s cultural tradition were observed. The distinction between positioning of bodies in graves according to sex seems to show that there was a great deal of differentiation between women and men’s cultural traditions.
The unique thing about the Sabine story is that there was mass movement of many women, perhaps an entire generation from their place of birth to their husband’s residence.
What I want to find out is whether there was matrilocal residence patterns in the groups in this area before this time. Such an explanatory tale might be created to justify a change from one major cultural behavior such as marriage patterns and residence.
In any case, I think the Sabine women did not have much self-determination. Of course we all know the Romans were obsessed with patriarchal behavior. We also know that women are naturally arbiters in families and communities.
Iconic R: Aretha's R-E-S-P-E-C-T
I created this image last year to pay homage to the 50th anniversary of the recording of the song, Respect, by Aretha Franklin on Valentines Day.
Otis Redding wrote the song, but Respect as Aretha interpreted it, became an anthem for women and the downtrodden. Was it the song or the woman, or both that made this song version so iconic?
To this day Aretha is amazing! Jerry Wexler produced the album. This was her first recording with Atlantic her a great deal of artistic freedom. When she played the piano accompaniment for her own vocals, it was apparently magic that inspired all the musicians working with her. Family members can sometimes do things together vocally that only people with similar “pipes” can. Aretha’s sisters, Carolyn and Erma, provided backing vocals, and inserted their own touches such as repetitions of Aretha’s nickname, “Re, Re, Re, Re” and the “sock it to me” the performed lyrics. It was a perfect alignment of everything.
I grew up sleeping with a transistor radio under my pillow. At night I could get WLS and listen to music of the day that became the iconic songs for my generation of girls soon to be women. Most songs played on the air were rather piggish overtly or subliminally, it was the era of Mad Men after all. But when we heard a woman singing with the emotion and depth of Aretha, we listened, we imprinted. We emulated the ethos of the song that captured the essence of the civil rights movement and what women wanted and were beginning to demand interpersonally. It was what men and women of all backgrounds and ethnicities wanted and needed. Just a lil’ bit.
The arrangement nailed it. Aretha’s powerful, soulful, voice and inspired piano playing, along with her sister’s embellishments to the lyrics made the song hers. R and B? Pop? Gospel? It is all there. Otis Redding wrote the song originally, but it became hers. It was anthem, drawing together, and inspiration, drawing in.
The song topped the charts during 1967’s Summer of Love, but it had a timeless quality beyond much of the music of the day that simply reflected change and novelty rather than universal human desire that was at the core of Respect.
This was a moment of change, but it was also an embodiment of all the change that had happened up to that point. Music recognized, amplified, codified and distributed social change. Music is a powerful cultural communication tool. When the time is right, a single person’s message can travel around the world.
Iconic P: Pandora Got a Bad Rap
Women get very short shrift in Greek Myth. Doomed before creation.
Pandora was the first woman according to the Greek origin story. The Gods and Titans made men, and then became angry after Prometheus helped them gain fire and they became uppity. So to punish men, they created a woman, the first mortal woman, Pandora.
WTF!
So before we get to her box, which as it turns out was a sealed jar, probably an amphora and not a box, the lies start. This should be our first clue that the whole story is bogus, but then you already knew that right?
So how was Pandora to punish men? She was created by Hephaestos and Athena on Zeus’s orders. He was the craftsman, the blacksmith, potter, and stonemason of the Gods. As a master crafter and with Athena’s help Pandora was lovely and skilled, she could weave, and was beguiling with her beauty and sexuality. Other Gods added their two cents worth with Aphrodite giving Pandora beauty, desire, self-aware vanity, and grace. Hermes gave her a bold and shameless mind, a duplicitous nature, and language. Other Gods decorated her with gold and flowers.
I am far from the first to notice her similarity with Eve. First woman. Created for man. Temptress responsible for downfall of man per the apple. As a weaver Pandora has elements of Eve leading to the awareness of nakedness. The gold and flowers are not part of Eve’s story and probably related to early economics and the commercialization of sex or the definition of women as property.
Pandora certainly has all the patriarchal branding upon which our modern western world is built. There is potential linkage to an earlier story when you bring in the covered jar rather than a box which Pandora opens. There is an All Souls Day ritual that involved the opening of wine jars which also released the souls of the dead to the world while the drinking fest lasted over the course of a couple days.
After the harvest most proto European cultures have a festival where the worlds of living and dead come together as Winter descends. There is usually a female deity or supernatural being associated with Winter such as Cailleach. These late Autumn or early Winter associations may well trace back to a proto-European mythology which is fairly well evidenced by early three dimensional representational carvings of women.
In any case, the dispersal of all of life’s misfortune’s such as pestilence, illness, suffering and death are blamed on Pandora and the curiosity that sparked her opening of a sealed jar that Zeus gave her and then told her not to open. This sounds like Eve too, with the tree of knowledge and the snake representing human understanding and knowledge. Blaming women for death and the understanding of our mortality makes sense only if you understand that the cycle of life and death are obviously under women’s control because of gestation and birth in early cultures.
The Sheela na gig or witch on the wall obviously, to most researchers, connect this life/death cycle in Western Celtic cultures, and when you include Pandora and Southern European mythologies you see this cycle attributed to women. Patriarchal cultures often see this linkage as negative. More egalitarian or women-honoring cultures see this element of humanity as part of the mystery and wonder of the life cycle.
The shackling of women and blaming of them for all of society’s ills is clear example of bullying and psychologically-enforced servitude that is not a balanced nor productive structure for organizing society in the most beneficial way for all members.
Pandora, the first women of Greek myth, and all the women in society derived from that time on have been scapegoats of a negatively framed worldview.
Iconic M: Mama
Why do most languages have something like a word that sounds like mama that means mother? Etymology, the study of the history of language and words, tells us part of the story, but biology tells us the other part. And we really can figure out why some things come to stand for other things, like a mmmmm sound for the one who birthed you and feeds your from her breast and for a while in a child’s life is indistinguishable from the child’s self. A pretty good article all about this can be found in the Atlantic.
We naturally make sounds before we can consciously shape the mouth, tongue and lips. Unclasping the lips from nursing and releasing a breath makes something akin to a ma or na sound. The mother reinforces the baby making that sound and the baby emulates her words and the positive experience. And wah lah we have a pretty damn near universal word recreates with every generation. Me beginning with the same sound as ma is not universal but is an Eurasian phenomenon.
This month I said I was working with iconic imagery that is associated with the essential or elemental feminine. Mama is one of the words that truly meets the criteria of iconic. Everyone has a mother. The woman, food, comfort, love, and a state of contentment are components of a preverbal association laid down in our earliest experience. In this way a mother, and as a universal experience, the mother truly stands for a concept in such a way such that it is more than simple representation, and that the icon embodies the concept.
The inverse is also true; we come to include the child’s response of naming Mama as part of this essential and symbolic element of this primordial relationship. Messing with icons breaks all cultural rules. This is also why creepy dolls who say, “Mama” are the subject of horror stories.
I offer this A to Z entry up as a roll out for Mother’s Day posts.
Iconic L: Of Leisure, Luck and Lilith
This post has been drafted for over a year, but I never found the right time, so I am expanding it for A to Z posting it under Iconic L: Leisure, Luck, and Lilith. Leisure because this is an iconic element that every person, women included, should incorporate into their life and personal ideology. We should all be so lucky as to be able to do this. It is Friday the 13th, so luck is a timely topic, and as most of us know, Dame Fortuna is female. And the final L for today is Lilith, the oldest female in the Judeo-Christian origin tale.
So here I go creating a segue. I was often called Lil in my High School days due to the Beatles song lyrics in Rocky Raccoon. “Her name was McGill. She called herself Lil, but everyone knew her as Nancy.” This made me want to research Lilith. She was an ancient Goddess. Then the Judaic world spoke of her. The Bible I grew up with did not mention her. But apparently she was Adam’s first wife. She was all the things that patriarchy does not like. So Adam and the male God cast her out and created Eve, a subservient female. Eve did get the short end of the stick with the whole apple thing, but that is another story. Lilith was turned into a demon and child killer in most tales. I did not buy it then, and I do not buy it now. I’m not alone.
Just look at events like Lilith Fair, the all female concert tour in the late 1990s. Many women have reclaimed Lilith as a positive and powerful icon. For women to accept their own power and be comfortable with themselves, we have to learn to listen to ourselves. I am so very glad I write all the time. I have lots of entries, be they journal or otherwise, which I can go back to in order to see how I felt when. The following bit of writing was initially entitled, A Leisurely Week.
Upon rereading this, I decided that this leisure was actually a self-celebration of the luck I had made for myself. My primary goal in life after having my daughter in 1990 was to make sure she knew she was unconditionally loved and that she should never doubt she could do great things in life. I tried to keep the Eve/Lilith dichotomy away from aware from her awareness until she was near maturity. I think I succeeded. And in reflecting on life a short time after my daughter’s marriage to a wonderful man, I realized that I had given her the best of my worldview, for the most part.
I could have focused less on the negatives in life, but when it really counted, I was positive and that positivity created luck. We create our own mindsets, and positive mindsets are able to notice when Dame Fortuna presents herself. I am glad I took the time to appreciate this.
We have to give ourselves leisure, so we can relax enough to allow understanding of ourselves and our lives surface. Then we have to realize that luck is at least partially, if not mostly, made from our worldview and whether we see ourselves as lucky or not. At least I have to.
My found post follows.
January 2017
Last week I did not accomplish much, or if I did, there is no record of it, as I did not keep a task list. No check marks, circles, squares or triangles noted next to items on a list.
I was basking in the glow of a change of status for my daughter, myself, and our whole family. One of our guests reminded us that the marriage of the last child prompts special wedding celebration recognizing the parents in traditional Jewish culture.
My daughter married the day after Christmas. And while my step-daughter’s wedding in a loft near Gramercy Park was amazing, this one, at the Tanque Verde Ranch, was near perfect. I am writing about many aspects of the wedding process from my perspective as a mother-of-the-bride, as an anthropologist, and as a frugal person.
I needed last week. My mind and heart were full. I wanted to just personally and privately enjoy the feelings of love, success, and growth after visitors returned to their homes and families all across the country from Brooklyn to San Francisco.
I have learned over the course of the the last 15 years to enjoy moments and cherish good experiences. I have given myself permission to appreciate the good things in life by drinking in calm, glowing joy as well as the occasional exuberance of vivid experience.
I endorse giving oneself time and space, if possible, to process intense periods of activity or change. Even if it is only 15 minutes before bedtime for a week, allow yourself to review, to write, to imagine about what is transpiring. In many ways, this slows time and allows you to live in a moment of appreciation.
It is heartening to know that this time of life I am entering is to be one of gratitude and appreciation rather than bitterness and regret. We can and do have control over how we live, think, and act. So much has changed for me in the last few years. It has taken tremendous dedicated effort to address physical, mental, and emotional roadblocks, but it is worth it as new structures allow new life paths.
We have ability to act and perceive that is partially informed by accumulated experience. Let us appreciate where we are in life and work together in respect. This is the best way to build the world we want.
Iconic J: The Jaguar Goddess
As I write about iconic elements of The Feminine, or what are representations of essential aspects of figures that stand for women in various phases of life or in actions or behaviors that are inherently female, I try achieve some balance although biases are inevitable. All humans have biases. One of the biases that I would love to overcome is my Eurocentric bias. The world is a vast mixture of peoples and cultures. I am somewhat ashamed that I am not more global in my knowledge.
To overcome some of that bias, I want to travel to the world of the Maya who like so many other cultures have symbolically celebrated the wisdom and power of aged women in one of their Jaguar deities.
The incorporation of animal spirits into the gods and goddesses that helped the Maya give meaning and order to their world is essential to any understanding of their world view. Nature, people, and the animals and plants of their environment cannot be looked at individually. A pantheon of ruling and guiding spirits collectively influenced all peoples lives, not just human-formed deities, but mythic and magical beings taken from all aspects of the environment in which they lived.
The Jaguar was the top predator in the Mayan world. It is easy to understand the awe given to the Jaguar by the Mayans if you have ever been in the wild near a large cat.
My own first such experience was in Arivaipa Canyon in Arizona when my daughter was young. We were hiking as a group of around 10 people including a couple of children. This was a permitted hike in the section managed by the BLM. A mountain lion walked with us all of one day, as far as we could tell, pacing us along a cliff-top trail. It was stealthy but once spotted, we kept the kids in the middle of the group so the cat would not get any ideas that it could snag a straggler. I was not afraid, but I was in awe. I was just a part of nature, as was the mountain lion. Jaguars are bigger than mountain lions.
As a side note, a border wall would further endanger these cat species which do include the mountain ranges and wilderness area north of Mexico as the northern part of their ranges. A jaguar was spotted a couple years ago in Madera Canyon near Tucson.
Gods still walk among us.