Goddesses and Men

By Stephen O’Connor

When I was a child, my parents gave me an oversized storybook entitled Pegasus. On the cover, a brilliant white stallion charged heavenward on great feathered wings, bearing the young Bellerophon. I was smitten. My interest in classical mythology has never waned. One Christmas, when I was a teenager, my parents gave me a book I treasure to this day, Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Iliad.

I thank God or Fortune that I was born at a time when the written word and the human imagination were paramount. Gladstone once said that he had read The Iliad twenty-five times. “The Iliad teaches one how to die,” he explained.

It has also taught us, for nearly three thousand years, the power of words to create in the human imagination, ideas, ideals and scenes that stay with us through life. I remember as a young man, sitting in a Greyhound station in New York waiting for a bus, but worlds away in time and place, reading The Iliad. The mighty Akhilleus, driven to anger by Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces at Troy, is about to draw his sword to settle their dispute when

…Athena, stepping up behind him, visible to no one,
except Akhilleus, gripped his red-gold hair.

The warrior recognizes her immediately. “What now, O daughter of the god of heaven…”

This is one of those scenes that is permanently catalogued in the hall of literary scenes that every reader acquires over a lifetime: the great son of Peleus, lion in war, subservient to a goddess, his head tilted slightly backward as she grips his hair and whispers her message in his ear: he may lash Agamemnon with words, but may not draw his blood. “Obey,” she says.

He “stayed his massive hand on the silver pommel,” as he must. Though he unpacks his heart with bitter words, a tongue lashing for the ages, he is galled and humiliated. He goes and sits “by the grey wave, scanning the endless sea,” weeping, and prays to his mother, the sea-nymph, Thetis. For thousands of years, readers or listeners have imagined the scene:

…her ladyship his mother heard him
In the green deeps…
Gliding she rose and broke like a mist from the inshore
Grey sea-face, to sit down softly before him,
Her son in tears… 

No one in life will ever love us, believe in us, suffer so much for us, or be so ready to die for us as our mothers. Paul McCartney was tapping into a beautiful and universal connection when he sang,

When I find myself in times of trouble,
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, ‘Let it be.’

Veterans of the grisliest battlefields have related how dying men often call for their mothers, and even Akhilleus, the pillar of the Greek army, cries like a child, seeking and receiving the comfort of his mother’s care.

Aphrodite was the mother of Aeneas, and though it must have gone against her divine nature for a goddess of love and beauty to intervene on a plain where swords flashed and spears flew, she was not reluctant to do so to save her son. What mother can watch her child in danger and do nothing?

There is something about a goddess that men don’t find in gods. Maybe they see something of the longed-for maternal in a figurative sense. The embodiment of the Greek ideal of a warrior, Odysseus, who, unlike Akhilleus, relied on guile and intelligence as much as on raw strength, was naturally beloved of Athena, the goddess of courage, wisdom and the strategies of war.

There was no Olympian that a warrior would rather have on his side, and that includes Zeus, who may often remind the reader of one of the men who appear in modern advertisements, a helpless blockhead who needs the guidance of a woman. “The Lord of Storm” can be humored, and he can be manipulated. Athena is well able for him.

After his return to Ithaca, Odysseus, outnumbered and apprehensive, lies awake knowing that the following day he must take on the throng of suitors with the help only of his son and an old swineherd. He is visited during the night by “the grey-eyed goddess.”

Why so wakeful…?
Though a hundred swords sing for your blood,
With me by your side you will come away unscathed,
And steal their cattle.

As Christianity spread across Europe, a new sort of goddess, the Virgin Mary, replaced the old. Athena herself had been called Athena Parthenos, the Virgin. A virgin goddess is beholden to no man and can act independently for the supplicant. In his book The Uses of the Past, Herbert Muller, spoke about Henry Adams, and his feeling that “the love of the Virgin Mary which had raised the cathedral of Chartres, was ‘the greatest force the Western world had ever felt,’ or even ‘the highest energy ever known to man.’”

The recitation of the rosary is a long meditation on and a prayer to the Virgin Mary. It’s a religious practice I saw my grandparents and parents perform as Irish Catholics, and for many years my wife has said the rosary in Spanish every evening on Zoom with her family.

So humans in Western religious tradition have long sought the help of goddesses. Ancient Greeks, like modern Catholics, wanted a heavenly woman on their side, just as on this mortal plane, men generally need a woman on their side; a mother, then a wife or a trusted friend, and let the Fates and the jealous gods do what they may.