Emilie Kutash - Goddesses in Myth and Cultural Memory

Goddesses in Myth and Cultural Memory

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Goddesses in Myth and Cultural Memory

Emilie Kutash

To three talented and creative women: Anne, Charlotte, and Danielle

Phiroze Vasunia, in his preface to Brooke Holmes book on gender and antiquity, points out that reception studies is a growing field and that cultural debates today can be illuminated through the lens of Greco-Roman antiquity. In 2011, I delivered a paper, Theogonic Mythology Reinvented: Goddesses and Late Antique Ontogony to the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies. The paper discussed how the goddesses of Hesiods Theogony became the goddess of philosophy in the texts of the Platonists and Neoplatonists. Many of my colleagues wanted to know more about this intriguing subject. Harold Tarrant, in a discussion we were having after the talk, suggested that I might consider writing a book on goddesses and I thank him for that suggestion. As time went on, I became engaged with the fascinating work of Jan Assmann on cultural memory, or what he calls mnemohistory, Gerald Brunss book Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, Robert Lambertons Homer the Theologian on allegorical readings of the epic tradition, and Luc Brissons How the Philosophers Saved Myths. That there is continuity between ancient and modern thought, I came to realize, can be augmented by Assmanns idea that cultural memory is an abiding and lasting influence and that allegorical and symbolic reading of ancient myth can move its reception forward in time. In every period of history, including the present, it seems that goddesses and their ancient mythical epic presence have never succumbed to oblivion. It is the scholars and writers of every generation who have made goddesses immortal.

Memory, according to Walter Benjamin, creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation. It is the Muse-derived element of the epic art in a broader sense and encompasses its varieties. In the first place among these is the one practiced by the storyteller. It starts the web which all stories together form in the end (Illuminations, p. 98). With a better understanding of how allegorical and hermeneutical, and philosophical interpretation can preserve and enhance collective memory, I also came across studies of goddesses that were philosophical and hermeneutical. Spyridon Rangos study of Artemis and Tuomo Lankilas study of Aphrodite, Sarah Iles Johnstons evocative Hekate Soteira, are prime examples. I had been impressed before this project began by Johnstons exploration of the goddess Hekate, recognizing the Chaldean Oracles influence on creating a mediating goddess in Platonist ontology. Pierre Hadot, in the Veil of Isis, studied, among other things, the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and the use of the imagery of Artemis/Isis and the veiled goddess of antiquity in icon and idea. All such investigations allowed me to place the study of goddesses within the much wider purview of hermeneutics, historiography, and cultural memory. A further realization emerged during my research when I found that every era also had in common the deployment of gender binaries along similar lines. This confirmed, for me, that there is continuity between very diverse interpretive communities in relation to a cultural code that is embedded in the very long common history they share. It is a history that is sometimes known but sometimes operates without awareness as an unknown known. Male gender is treated as an exemplar of logic, ideas, and transcendent spirituality, while female gender is associated with the maternal, indeterminate, nature, receptivity, and even with the presymbolic in discourse. Although each period of history has transformed goddesses according to its own priorities, whether political, theological, philosophical, or literary, all the assumptions concerning gender remained the same. For late Platonists, the goddesss shameful activities could only be sanitized by treating them as food for allegory. For the later theologized philosophy of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists, goddesses as metaforms became placeholders for the highest metaphysical truths. For the Christians, they signified sinful female presences that should be excluded from the canon, but to some spiritual feminists of our own time, they constitute a newly revivified object of worship and antidote to the male-only divinity of the Judeo-Christian legacy. Gender essentialism, however, played a role throughout. This code appears ubiquitously today evidencing its intransigence, even if only in the fact that it has needed and received widespread criticism by current scholars.

That Hesiods phantasmagorical dreamlike vision of the whole could contribute to both the known and the unknown known of a whole culture is striking. Thus while this book is about goddesses, in fact it is equally about hermeneutics, the persistence of myth as an important feature of normative discourse, about how goddesses became the metaform goddess, about cultural memory, and about the historicality of interpretation and the reception of ancient texts. It is also about a certain kind of forgetting which Slavof iek has called the unknown knowns: the influences of certain ideas are so embedded in a culture that they operate out of the awareness of those that have fallen under their sway. Such are the so-called binary oppositions of gender. They appear in Near Eastern myth, in Hesiod, in Homer, in the Pythagorean table of opposites, in medieval allegory, and remarkably in some contemporary psychoanalytic and feminist scholarship, even if only to reverse the valuation of female characteristics in a presumably biased history. I hope the book helps to support the idea that there is no such thing as a de-historicized reading of a text, that indeed the past is not a natural growth but a cultural construction, as Jan Assmann has elaborated. In addition, I am hoping that my book will serve to increase appreciation of the fact that myth is an integral and dominating feature of our collective imagination.

I want to thank all my Neoplatonic and Classics friends who encouraged my work and whose examples I follow: my good friend Sarah Pomeroy for her pioneering work on women in antiquity, and especially for our very productive sessions and discussions, furthering my understanding of late antiquity, while translating Plutarchs Isis and Osiris, Eunapius Life of the Sophists, and IamblichusThe Life of Pythagoras, something we did for our own edification. Svetla Slaveva Griffin; John Finamore, Harold Tarrant, all important influences and interlocutors, John Turner, with gratitude for his extensive work on Gnosticism, specifically on Hekate and female goddess prototypes within Gnostic literature, Christina Manolea, for her understanding of allegory and symbolic argument in relation to interpretive reading of Homer through the lens of late Neoplatonists, Robert van den Berg on the Proclus hymns; Luc Brisson for his invaluable work on mythology and philosophy; and John Dillon, the founding father and originator of so many scholars continued work on Platonism, early, middle, and late. Zeke Maazur was a friend whose work on Gnosticism and erotic imagery in Neoplatonism was a source of mutual interest and discussion. I hope that mention of this work here will help to memorialize him as he so deserves. I am also grateful, as always, to James Davis who is unceasingly supportive of all my work and to Deborah Blake.