Rage becomes her: The Anger of Demeter
Soraya Chemaly’s important book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Angerwas published earlier this year. I gulped it down as soon as it was published in the UK, and rejoiced in it, because the power of women’s anger is increasingly the force for change that it should be, worldwide; and because a long time ago, when my two daughters were six and two years old, I wrote an article on the cults of Demeter and Kore, in which the Anger of Demeter was crucially powerful (Nixon 1995).
The cults of Demeter and Kore were part of the ancient Greek world. Three things struck me when I started looking at them: the story; the cults themselves; and the significance of plants mentioned in relevant texts.
- The Story
The story, told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter(HHD; see Foley 1994) is striking, because it’s about a mother, the goddess Demeter, who got angry on behalf of her daughter, Kore, aka Persephone. There are many ancient Greek stories about fathers and sons, usually involving intergenerational rage and violence. But Demeter was angry for Kore – and as part of that anger negotiated a better future for her daughter.
According to the HHD, Kore was the daughter of Demeter and the main Greek god Zeus. Without consulting Demeter, Zeus permitted Hades, god of the underworld, to abduct Kore and marry her. Demeter was bereft, and angry. As an Olympian deity, like Zeus, with power over agriculture, Demeter prevented the earth from releasing any seed, so that nothing could grow. The results were famine for mortals, and no possibility for gifts or sacrifices for the gods. Affronted by the latter, Zeus told the messenger god Hermes to bring Kore back from the underworld.
The mother-daughter reunion was joyous, but Demeter knew that something was wrong; she asked Kore if she’d eaten anything in the underworld, and the answer was yes. Demeter’s response was that Kore would spend one third of the year in the underworld, returning in the spring to spend the other two thirds ‘up’ with her, an arrangement later approved also by Zeus.
From antiquity, people have said that this story is a fable about crop fertility, and the cycle of the seasons, and indeed it is ‘about’ that. But it is also about the very becoming rage of Demeter: her agency as a goddess, her powerful anger, and her positive intervention in a situation which adversely affected her daughter.
- The Cults
There were two kinds of Demeter cult, constituting a Demeter cult package: the Mysteries at Eleusis, unique and grand; and the Thesmophoria, so common that most cities in the ancient Greek world had at least one. The HHDgives an account of how the grand Mysteries were founded at Eleusis, not far from Athens. These Eleusinian Mysteries – mysteries in that initiates were forbidden to reveal what actually happened — were celebrated in a unique cult-building, the Telesterion; reconstructions show a large structure with room inside for many people (unlike ‘normal’ Greek temples).
Thesmophoria cults were also ‘mysterious’ in that we do not know what actually happened. It’s thought that most ritual activities celebrating the Thesmophoria took place outside. These sanctuaries also had structures unlike ‘normal’ temples – no two site plans are alike! We do know that only citizen women from each city could take part, indeed that yearly participation in the Thesmophoria was an important duty.
Thesmophoria cults, like others, attracted dedications such as figurines and miniature pots, and occasionally agricultural implements. Sometimes there is writing on dedications giving the name of the dedicator, but most dedications are anonymous. At one Thesmophoria sanctuary at Bitalemi near Gela in Sicily, agricultural tools were identified, all iron, including axes, hoes, a plough point or hoe, a pick, and small sickles, obviously linked with Demeter as goddess of agriculture (Tarditi 2015, 47); querns (special stones used for grinding grain) were also found here.
Inmy article, I talked about the connection between some Thesmophoria dedications and work linked with Demeter, and I mentionedthe tools — but I didn’t actually say what comes next here. Like most dedications, these tools have no writing on them, but their discovery in a Thesmophoria sanctuary to Demeter, goddess of agriculture, associated with a cult in which only women could take part, suggests that the dedicators were women involved in agricultural work. In other words, these tools are not random dedications, but objects plausibly reflecting the economic agency of their plausibly female dedicators. This is an important point, because it’s easy for scholars and others to assume that allactivities connected with ancient Greek agriculture were done by men – even though there are obviously other possibilities.
- The Plants
In 1995 I suggested that the plants associated with the Demeter story, used together, might have been a way for women to regulate and control their entire reproductive lives from menarche to menopause, and that sharing this knowledge might have been part of the activities at Thesmophoria sanctuaries. Pennyroyal, a specific kind of mint, and pomegranate are mentioned in the HHD; two other plants, pine and the chaste tree (Vitex occur in later sources. All four plants were, and are, very common in relevant Mediterranean landscapes, and people in classical antiquity definitely knew about their medicinal properties, described in another ancient text, the Hippocratic Corpus, with full details (which parts of the plant to use; how to prepare them; what the dosage should be ).
4. A Landscape of Agency
I’ve called my blog Landscapes, Archaeological and Otherwise. Initially I thought that this first blogpost, rather perversely, wasn’t really about landscape. But then I realised with delight that it is: the story, the cults, and the plants all add up to a landscape of agency. In particular, the Thesmophoria sanctuaries all over the ancient Greek world literally map out a landscape of women’s agency and power, in a period when women weren’t supposed to have much of either. People have always been able to see that ancient Greek women had general religious agency — it was crucial for them to celebrate rituals for several goddesses, and the Thesmophoria of Demeter is only one such cult. But the Thesmophoria suggests that women also had other forms of agency: what we would perhaps call medical agency (the ability to control their own fertility); and economic agency (the ability to contribute to food production through their own agricultural work).
Demeter’s rage was transmuted into agency, on behalf of her daughter, and on behalf of ancient Greek women. Yet we don’t hear much about the Anger of Demeter, despite its fine old pedigree. The ancient Greek anger that we do hear about is the Anger of Achilles, the stated subject of Homer’s Iliad, and more recently of Pat Barker’s novel The Silence of the Girls.
And yet, the basic story of Demeter and Kore has continued to be powerful – think of interventions by mother figures on behalf of daughters in fairy-tales such as Cinderella, and of similar themes in feminist science fiction. We women like the idea of a maternal figure who gets angry on our behalf. But we also need to get angry for ourselves, and to see ourselves as part of a living landscape of agency. Rage became Demeter, as it becomes each of us, and Chemaly’s book now gives a wider context for women’s anger and the power that it brings.
A (Very) Few References
Barker, Pat 2018. The Silence of the Girls, London: Hamish Hamilton
Chemaly, Soraya 2018. Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, London/NYC: Simon and Schuster
Foley, Helene P. (ed.) 1994. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Translation, Commentary and Interpretive Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press (plus the Greek text)
Hippocrates, Hippocratic Corpus, Greek text and translation, Loeb Classical Library, in multiple volumes
Nixon, Lucia 1995. The Cults of Demeter and Kore, in Richard Hawley and Barbara Levick (eds), Women in Antiquity. New Assessments, London: Routledge, 75–96 https://www.academia.edu/18087483/The_Cults_of_Demeter_and_Kore_1995
Tarditi, Chiara 2015. Metal Finds from the Votive Deposits of the archaic sanctuary of Bitalemi, Sicily. Typological and quantitative Remarks, in E. Dreschler-Erb and Ph. Della Casa (eds), New Research on Ancient Bronzes, Zürich (on academia.edu under Tarditi)
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