A MYTHOLOGICAL IMAGE OF GIRLHOOD
To my Nine-Year-old Daughter ~Karl Kerenyi, D.D.
“So spoke the child and tried to touch her father)s chin. But in vain she stretched up her little hands several times. Then with a smile her father leaned down and caressed her, saying: (When goddesses bear me children like this) the wrath of jealous Hera troubles me very little. Little daughter., you shall have all you desire.'”*
Any reader at all familiar with Greek mythology will recognize in these words the divine patriarch Zeus.
But who is the little daughter sitting on her great father’s knee, who fails to reach his chin?
Greek religion, like no other the world over, is characterized by maiden goddesses, indeed more markedly so than by the acknowledged lordship of Zeus over gods and men, which relates Greek religion to the great father religions such as the Jewish and the Christian religions of our own culture.
For religion in ancient Greece never became exclusively patriarchal.
Even Athens, the most intellectual cicy of Hellas, retained a venerated mother divinity, stemming from the time of an older, more matriarchal religion, and, at the side of Father Zeus, worshipped his daughter, Athene, addressing her as mother.
Hence the question, who this small daughter on the knee of Zeus may be, is not unwarranted, even after we divulge the fact that this scene is taken from Callimachus’ “Hymn to Artemis.”
What we want to make clear is that this passage might just as well refer to some other one among the glorious maiden figures of the Olympian household.
For example, to the aforementioned great daughter of Zeus, whose full name is Pallas Athene?
The Greeks associated the word pallas–depending on whether they thought of it as masculine or feminine-with the image of a vigorous youth or a stately young girl, or perhaps of a young woman, say the figure of a caryatid.
But the Athenians also spoke of their goddess as the maiden, Kore) or -to distinguish her from Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, who was worshipped in nearby Eleusis under another aspect of divine maidenhood-as the “Kore here with us.”
What is there, then, in this tale of a little girl, not yet ripened into a vigorous pallas, but still sitting on her father’s knee, [and asking for gifts beyond her age] that is not
equally applicable to Athene or Persephone?
We have a human situation, depicted here with the sly playfulness of the all-proficient Hellenistic literature, in which Artemis appears as a very little girl in a patriarchal Greek family.
This particular scene may be an original creation of Callimachus.
On the other hand, the poet would hardly have falsified what for the Greeks was the human reality of the situation, the actual “station” and image of a Greek young girl of the age that the child aspires to.
For now we must be very precise: what we are concerned with here is a stage of life and an age class.
Under natural conditions, among ancient peoples and also much later, such a stage was represented and realized, not only in poetry but also in· religion, by definite rules and ceremonies.
There existed-and still do exist, mostly in impoverished forms-maturation ceremonies guiding those in the same age group from one stage to another, from one “station” to another, and originally these were true mystery initiations, though not always so termed.
To belong to an age group-not here to be thought of as in any way a conscious organization but simply as being of a certain age-is for all those who have not reached it, or are not yet ripe for it, a mystery that no words can communicate.
The secretive doings, such as using masks and costumes, which characterize initiation ceremonies, give this mystery an outward shape which is often a caricature and sometimes even a misrepresentation.
For the being of such or such an age is truly a secret-indeed, a mystery.
Those who are younger never really understand it, and even those of the same age
cannot put it into words among themselves; at most, they can hint of it.
Puberty rites are impressive intimations designed to make the initiants aware of the stage they have reached.
In ancient times the intimation of the new way of being was provided by the image of a divinity.
So let us be definite and inquire concerning the age group imaged by Artemis, whom Callimachus describes, surely not without good reason,
in terms of the events of a young girl’s life in the Olympian family-and therewith in the family as such.
Neither Athene, who, so to speak, guards the boundary of the patriarchal family with shield and lance, nor Persephone, destined to be abducted and carried into another realm, could take the place of Artemis.
Human existence, in its becoming and un-becoming, progresses through all the stages of life.
The being of the immortal gods is of a different kind.
It may be thought of as periodic, corresponding not only to the orbits of heavenly bodies that sink and rise again, but also to the natural periodicitie5 in human life-in the life of women, for example.
In this way it can include opposites, like the dying and reigning of the underworld queen, Persephone, or it can in a mysterious way achieve motherhood and yet remain virginal, like Pallas Athene: thus the being of a god is eternally bound to a
single, though contradictory, form.
When a knowledgeable poet characterizes Artemis’ age as girlhood, this must surely refer to a stage of life corresponding to her form of being, to a life form which the
goddess helped mortal maidens to become aware of, even though as an immortal she is usually represented-except in the hymn of Callimachus-as more adult and yet more ageless than a mere nineyear-old.
Callimachus tells us that Artemis asked her father for sixty daughters of Okeanos to be her playmates: all nine years old.
That age cannot be explained except as indicating a definite age group, to which as its protectrice the goddess herself belongs and always will belong.
The previous stage of life has also been established exactly by Callimachus.
It begins with Leto showing her daughter Artemis, as a three-year-old, to her divine relatives and receiving gifts from them, because they were being allowed for the first time to see the child.
Callimachus then describes the visit of Artemis to the master smith, Hephaistos, and his fellow workers, the Kyclopes, who are unable to frighten the little girl.
The same procedure must certainly have been followed with human children.
In Athens little boys were first shown publicly during their third year and were given presents of small wine flasks and toys.
For girls the next life stage began with their ninth year.
It corresponded with the ephebe or early manhood stage of boys, and probably was called the parthenia.
Artemis announces this age as the only one really conformable to herself when, according to Callimachus, she asks her father above all for an ever-enduring parthenia.
This means not merely virginity-by which word parthenia can also be translated-but the particular way and fullness of life lived by girls between their ninth year and that time, not much later, when a Greek maiden began to wear the cincture of the bride.
To us a nineyear-old seems too young to be a “young girl,” and no longer a child.
The very strangeness of the concept forces us to focus on what is essential: that the ninth year-which seems to us too early, but was not too early for a Greek girl-was established by Athenian custom as the beginning of the stage preceding marriage.
Before marriage, we are told, Attic maidens were consecrated to the Artemis of Brauron or Munichia.
In this way they entered a period of service to the goddess, a mystery initiation-this, too, is expressly reported-and their age could not be less than five or more than ten.
It may have happened sometimes that a girl was a few months older than ten when she took the vows, but the ninth year appears to have been the standard age.
That is why in the hymn it is the right age for the playmates of Artemis.
But the prototype, the goddess herself-how much more archaic she must have appeared in he holy places high on the hills of Brauron and Munichia than in
the tender family scene described by Callimachus !
The girls who were dressed to take part in the cult of Artemis, the representatives of the age group of which we are speaking, were called arktoi, “female bears”; their service, the celebration of their stage of life, was called arktoia, “bearhood,” and the reason given was: “Because they act like female bears.” [See Jung above, p. 33.J
Here is expressed a strange, disquieting savagery, which is not entirely lacking even in the classic Homeric figure of the goddess.
But in Homer her wildness is depicted as that of a meridional beast of prey: Zeus has made Artemis a lioness toward women [in childbirth J, she is allowed to kill whichever of them she will.
And there is another opportunity for the exercise of her hunting lust; there are wild animals, hinds, that she may also kill.
This lust for hunting is ascribed by Callimachus even to the young child on Zeus’ knee, and it gives her her special character.
The only reason that Artemis does not ask her father then for the bow and arrows is that she will fetch them herself from the Kyclopes.
But she does ask for a short hunting dress: “So that I can kill wild animals!”
She provides the Olympian family with game.
This practical side of her daily hunting is important only from the point of view of greedy Herakles at whom the gods all laugh.
The other, lustful, side of killing seems more essential.
It is stressed by both Homer and Callimachus, less explicitly, not as ferocity but as an incomprehensible aggressiveness directed, in the chase, against animals-beloved animals, like hinds-and, in the human realm, against members of her own sex, against women.
The Artemis of Brauron, to whom because of her multiple and close relations to the feminine sex a shrine on the Acropolis was dedicated, was given the garments of the women who successfully survived childbirth.
The priestess inherited the clothes of those who died-dread trophies of the Huntress.
The picture of the daughter of the house, who has ripened to young girlhood, turning out to be a huntress is almost as startling as that of a representative of this age group being called a bear.
During the historic period with which we are familiar, hunting was not a usual or suitable pastime for Greek girls, although it may appear so in the legend of the huntress, Atalanta, who is the humanized manifestation of the goddess herself.
When Atalanta is changed into a lion, she is given one of the animal forms of the goddess.
The same is true of another metamorphosed figure of the Artemisian circle, Kallisto, who was changed into a bear.
Thus the hunting life of Greek youths had about it something of the aura of an initiation.
That initiation really was involved is indicated by the ruling in Xenophon’s ittle book on hunting that the Hellenistic mother tongue must be a prerequisite in the selection of beginning hunters.
We have further evidence of this in the initiation scenes decorating the marble sarcophagi of Attic ephebes) which show the youthful dead immortalized in hunting clothes.
In Greek legends, such an initiation is represented in purest Artemisian form by the figures of young men, Hippolytos or some other young huntsman, of whom only the name may be known to us, or not even that, they are so recogniz.able as a type.
This brings out, even more clearly than before, another trait in the image of the divine huntress.
She has a relation to the opposite sex which is in a way boyish, and at the same time sisterly, indeed almost brotherly; since to the huntress Artemis belongs her brother,
the hunter Apollo, and also Hippolytos, bound to her as a younger brother.
For Greek girls, before [as young matrons] they reached the stage that the goddess herself never entered, and before the companions of the hunt were changed into the spoils of hunting, there was similarly a time during their parthenia when a male pleasure was taken in the chase.
Also Greek women in their rites themselves slaughtered the beasts of sacrifice.
At the feasts of Brauron and Munichia, goats were provided for this purpose; in a way they were the prey of the female bears.
However, these bears did not wear the short, fringed hunting tunic of Artemis, but the krokoton) another characteristic crocus-colored garment designed to replace the bear hide of prehistoric times.
The worshippers of Bakchos, too, wore this saffron-yellow over-garment in place of fur, and the mantle of Meleager the Hunter was of the same color-the color which symbolized a sphere of life in which hunt and ecstasy, dance and sacrifice,
did not pertain to the underworld. ( Red pointed to that darker realm. )
This was the reddish yellow usually worn in Athens for the feasts and rites of women.
So the life stage of the parthenia) in spite of its boyishness, is a very feminine stage.
In the figure of the great huntress the little human bears met a new aspect of their feminine nature.
It was a meeting with something wild and vigorous which would enable them, if the unwritten laws of the all too patriarchal cities would permit,
to compete as siblings with the ep,hebes in all their boyish tests and exercises-as, to a certain extent, the Spartan girls actually did.
Moreover, someday the Artemisian strength and aggressiveness pertaining to such activities-ordinarily tempered by the women’s tasks of which Athene took charge-would be turned against them: in the savage pangs of childbirth, they would be required to exercise a greater strength than is demanded in any athletic contest in which men can take a part.
But at that time they will no longer be bears, nor saffron-clothed slaughterers of goats, they will be victims of the same goddess whom they began to serve in their ninth year.
Dressed in the krokoton) to serve the maiden goddess, the Athenian young girl was herself like a bright flame.
A bow and arrow were not given to her then to hold, but another attribute, the flaming torch, which Callimachus mentions among the gifts that-along with the parthenia and the hunting dress-Artemis begged as a child from her father Zeus.
Flaming torches were carried in the ritual procession and dance that took place, by night, between sea and sky on the promontories that the Athenians held holy.
And in Munichia even the cakes offered to the goddess were ringed with burning candles.
How cold and inhuman the moon-interwoven divinity named Artemis ( and Diana) would indeed be without this worship of flaming torches borne by rosy-cheeked young girls!
In Gotter Griechenlands) Walter Otto’s description of her runs as follows:
“She dwells in the clear ether of the mountain peak, in the golden shimmer of the mountain meadows, in the flashing and flickering of icicles and snowflakes, in the silent amazement of fields and forests, when the moonlight shines down on them and drips from the leaves.
All things are transparent and light.
Earth itself has lost its heaviness .. . . There is a floating along the ground as of white feet dancing.”
And in this purity is sublimity:
” … [She is] the dancer and huntress, who takes the bear cub on her lap and runs races with the deer, death-bringing when she bends her bow, strange and unapproachable, like untamed nature, who is yet, like nature, wholly magic, living impulse, and sparkling beauty.”
And this has an immediate correspondence to something warm
and throbbingly alive in our own house: in our own young daughter. ~Karl Kerenyi, Spring 1969, Page 93-100
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