Seductress (7 page)

Once at the interior temple chamber, pilgrims joined in an ecstatic quest to draw the goddess in their midst and appropriate her powers and sexual energy. Conjuring her through sympathetic magic, they imitated her Being. Like the creatrix, they created. They painted her sacred animals on walls, sculpted her visage, and carved an array of erotic objects, such as phallic batons, one with a lioness licking a gigantic human penis.

Their faces daubed in red-ocher spirals (emblems of rebirth and menstrual blood), they dressed as the goddess would. Which meant they “were adorned rather than clothed.” Some of the early Venuses look like rock stars run amok in a tattoo parlor, incised with meanders, whorls, and zigzags and rigged out in hip-slung aprons and animal masks.

Stone Age women likewise wore plumed headdresses on braided coiffures and red and black-striped bell skirts hitched up in front, their arms and necks decked with shell bracelets and necklaces. They circle danced topless to throbbing drums, rattles, and rasps, miming coitus with men.

They were in the business of rapture—a “sail away” epiphany, as Norman Rush says of erotic possession. On the basis of hemp seeds found on location, they might have used psychoactive substances to help them. More too than grain offerings might have been sacrificed to the goddess. Underscoring the archaic link between sex and pain, one cave contains hundreds of stencils of mutilated hands.

When votaries reached a state of collective delirium, they entered a mystical union with the goddess. Transfigured, reborn, they merged with the Most High. She recharged them with her cosmic vitality, fecundity, and libidinal force and sent them off larger than life, imbued with her divinity. All of which might have led to a sacred orgy where women (to judge from the number of in situ dildos) sated their heaven-born mega-appetites.

These primeval rites and the mythic goddess who inspired them form the matrix of desire. As eros evolved through Western history, it merely elaborated on these core leitmotivs: An overscale goddess woman who has it all, observes the “tortuous path principle” and exerts the same fascinations, from dance, music, setting, and costume to intelligence and plentitude, even pain. She pitches us into ecstasy (
ecstasis,
out of ourselves), takes us to paradise, and regenerates and redeems us.

“Sex,” in essence “is religion and vice versa.” When the hero of Philip Roth’s
Sabbath’s Theater
can think of no other way to describe the ultimate woman, he compares her to the “fat little dolls with big breasts and big thighs unearthed all the way from Europe down to Asia Minor and worshipped under a dozen different names as the great mother of the gods.”

One of her dozen names in later prehistory was Snake Goddess, the curvaceous deity of Minoan Crete, the first high civilization of Europe from 2500 to 1000 B.C. In contrast to the zaftig, ill-proportioned Stone Age Venuses, she has the designer body of a supermodel in all her statuettes—
Penthouse
breasts, tiny waist, and slim greyhound hips.

She stares at us with obey-me kohl-rimmed eyes, two writhing serpents in her upraised arms, in full coronation regalia. She wears a towering crown or wreath of roses and a dog on her head, a frontless jacket cinched at the waist by a tight belt, an ornamental double apron, and a tiered skirt. But she’s a “direct inheritor of Neolithic culture,” a sex goddess of the same cosmic grandeur, totality, and ever-evolving, restorative life force.

Her snakes, which undulate up her arms and in some cases enwrap her entire body, signified a wealth of divine powers to the ancient Minoans. It was a “seminal symbol” for the goddess, incorporating her vital energy, regenerative magic, maternal consolations, sexuality, and almighty wisdom. At the deepest level the serpent, coiled on itself with its tail in its mouth, connoted her wholeness, her primordial union of “male and female, positive and negative” in the uroboric “Great Round.”

Her snakes, associated with the moon since earliest times, also betokened immortality with their uncanny ability to shed their skins and renew themselves. Their lunar connections too made them emblems of ceaseless motion and activity. In one gold ring seal the Cretan goddess whirls down a mountaintop, head inclined to a gigantic snake, her hair flying behind her.

The Snake Goddess wasn’t the Minoan deity’s only incarnation. Although the details of Cretan mythology remain murky, we can see the Cretan deity in frescoes, seals, and figurines in many guises: Goddess of the Animals, Mistress of the Sea and Fruits of the Earth, Lady of the Wild Places, Lady of the Labyrinth, and Queen of the Mountain. But the “glorification of the meaning of sex” informs all her personas. It was also the heart and soul of her worship services.

The libido unbound—joy, action, gusto, and frank physicality—was the hallmark of Cretan culture and its religion. Sexual iconography pervaded the goddess and her cults. Celebrants adorned the caves and mountaintops where the first rites took place with tributes to the deity’s sex power: figurines of mating couples, amatory doves on her sacred pillars, and phallic stalagmites inscribed with her holy logo, the coital double ax. Its paired triangles with a shaft thrust through the middle could be an ideogram for copulation.

As in the Stone Age, access to her presence was fraught with difficulty, fear, and breathless wonder. Initially votaries navigated cave passages or scaled steep mountain crags to reach her altars and later simulated this tortuous path in the labyrinthine design at the Palace of Knossos. The route to the goddess’s sanctum sanctorum took them on a convoluted, thrill-inspiring trip through a maze of halls that wound in and out of light and darkness, around Piranesi-style staircases, down twisted corridors to the dim shrines of the goddess in the crypt.

On the ceilings and walls, Minoans, like their ancestors, painted goddess images to elicit her presence and divine eros. Art, for the Cretans, merged indissolubly with ritual and was both the first attempt at naturalism and “the most inspired of the ancient world.” Every fresco pulsates with the divinity’s cosmic élan and generativity. Dolphins leap, flying fish cavort in gravity-free space, blue monkeys pick flowers, deer bound over rocks. A Cleopatra-eyed priestess sways back to pour libations on a trussed bull while a man pipes furiously in the background.

Just as the Snake Goddess was “the one and the many,” so a variety of ceremonies honored the Divine Feminine in ancient Crete. All, though, shared the identical goal—mystical fusion with the goddess and personal and social transfiguration. Through cultic magic they sought to tap into her “principle of life-energy” and reanimate the world, to seize rebirth from the jaws of death. The Snake Goddess idols, with their stoned, bugged-out eyes, raise their arms in a gesture of epiphany. Reincarnation, holy madness, rhapsodic self-abandon: these were the aims of every religious rite.

Minoans made no distinction between the secular and sacred in their rites, most of which resembled carnival in Rio. The new year’s festival, the supreme drama of rebirth and transformation, took place when Sirius, the dog star, rose for the summer solstice at the end of the honey harvest. High on fermented honey (mead) and opium, they danced out their religion to music in a state of primal theater.

Costumes rivaled court dress at Versailles in glamour and sophistication. Women wore bright boleros open to expose their breasts, gold belts, embroidered rainbow skirts, and acres of pendants, chains, beads, bracelets, and rings. They had the big hair of a mafioso bride: a whorl of braids and curls on top with ringlets erupting in front of their ears and flowing in long tendrils down their backs. Hyper-groomed and depilated, they painted their eyes and faces with thick powders ground on special palettes.

Instead of the primitive crotch thrusting of earlier peoples, Minoan dancers performed a mystic round dance that imitated the labyrinthine way. To the hypnotic strains of lyre, harp, and double pipe, they wound and unwound in concentric circles, replicating the journey to the goddess and drawing dancers into rapturous contact with her spirit of “indestructible life.” Perhaps the new year’s celebration also included bull dances. At these gymnastic spectacles, men and women—cross-dressed in tribute to the deity’s androgynous powers—somersaulted and vaulted over charging beasts with death-defying bravura.

The festivities proceeded inexorably to the climactic holy mysteries at the altar. After food and honey offerings to the goddess, the bull, symbol of the divinity’s creative power, was killed with the double ax and sacrificed. As before, pain and violence were at the very marrow of the sexual experience. With the ritual bloodletting, the miracle of
parousia
occurred. The goddess made herself manifest, filled devotees with her transcendent presence, infused land and sea with new life, and resurrected the dead. Images of votaries (some nude) in ecstatic abandon, their long black fusilli curls streaming out at right angles, suggest the kinds of revels that succeeded this divine possession.

Later in Minoan culture, the bull, once an icon of the deity’s androgynous nature, acquired a masculine character. Eventually he became the goddess’s young son/lover, a proto-Dionysus, doomed to annual death and rebirth. Man’s place in the Minoan cosmology was strictly second class. He existed, as the palace frescoes attest, to serve and honor female sexual power. In one low relief a lady of resplendent authority receives a delegation of nearly a hundred handsome tribute bearers. So much for women’s instinctive asexuality and monogamy. A seal shows a man with his arm raised in salute, his eyes shaded against the radiance of the goddess, who stands on a mountaintop, flanked by lions, brandishing a swagger stick.

An heiress of the primeval creatrix, the Snake Goddess continued the divine line of cosmic queenship. She was the almighty “it”—the great unity, melder of sexes and opposites, the all-knower, and a perpetual-motion machine that woke the dead and spun the earth on its axis with her erotic energy. The Cretans played their own riffs on her personality and refined her Seductive Way, but the mythic under-drawing stayed intact: the supreme she-god awhirl in her heaven, men and beasts in adoration at her feet.

The invading Greeks who conquered the Minoans had to construct a myth to put her prepotency to rest. In the story of the Minotaur, Ariadne, a goddess avatar, saves the captive Theseus by leading him out of the labyrinth and follows him to Greece. Like a good Greek patriarch, Theseus ditches her en route and marries a docile child bride in Athens.

But Ariadne and her Snake Goddess archetype couldn’t be dispatched so easily. In another myth, she elopes with Dionysus, the divine consort and god of sexual excess, and migrates to Cyprus, where she founds the cult of Aphrodite Ariadne. She is the goddess who will not die, the erotic prima donna absoluta of the universe.

Before the reign of the Snake Goddess, another divine seductress inspired one of the most enthusiastic cults of the ancient world. Inanna, goddess of sexual allure and desire, was the supernova of Near Eastern deities. She originated in Sumer during the fourth millennium B.C. and, renamed Ishtar by the Babylonians, held sway for four thousand years. This time written records authenticate her stature and the scope of her sovereignty.

Although Inanna shared her power with a tribune of ruler gods, she outranked and outfoxed them all. She cut a formidable figure. Wearing a towering horned headdress, flounced skirt, lapis lazuli jewels, and a zodiac-tooled belt, she stands with one foot on a lion and carries a staff of intertwined serpents. Wings, tipped with buds and maces, flare from her shoulders. Above her shines Sirius, “the shape-shifting dog of the Great Goddess.”

Despite the goddess’s role reduction to the sphere of sexuality, Inanna retained the cosmic authority of the prehistoric deities. Like them, she was the “Totality of What Is,” the “Lady of Blazing Dominion,” who contained multitudes and contradictions and presided over life, death, and regeneration. Her numerous names reflect her myriad aspects: Queen of Heaven, Great Mother Cow, Princely Inanna, Lady of Vegetation, First Snake, First Daughter of the Moon, Lady of Raging Battle, and Bearer of Happiness. But her defining quality was her prodigal, hot-bodied female sexuality. She incarnated raw erotic desire, beyond societal laws and human control.

She is known as mythology’s “ultimate femme fatale.” She thumbed her nose at proper femininity and walked on the wild side, snaking men and slaking her voracious sexual appetite. But she was really the seductress writ large and at large. In a society that subordinated women to their husbands and punished female adultery with death by the iron dagger, Inanna represented the principle of female sexual empowerment.

She repudiated Sumerian sexism and demanded free use of her allure and holy vulva. The original rambling rose, she refused to stay put and restlessly roamed the neighborhood in quest of erotic adventures. Often she sat at the tavern door decked in gaudy beads, casing the goods and carrying off the comeliest men. When Inanna finally agreed to marry the young fertility god Dumuzi, she still wouldn’t toe the line. She insisted on no women’s work—weaving, dyeing, or child-bearing—and an equal place at the table.

Inanna not only violated social norms, she transcended gender divisions. Perpetuating the twin-sexed nature of the archaic goddess, she had
la-la,
“the vigor of a young man in his prime,” and enjoyed masculine pursuits, warfare and liaisons with women if she wished. Nothing, no cultural constraints, could curb Inanna’s all-inclusive, runaway carnality. She changed men into women and the reverse at her pleasure, confusing the sexes and casting the ancient spell of the androgyne, the promise of gender fusion and completeness. Devotees cross-dressed at her rituals, with women in the male robes of power and men in brooch-pinned gowns.

Her sex drive came straight out of prehistory, unmediated by civilized ideas of feminine sexuality. She adored her supercharged equipment and didn’t let it idle in neutral. After she crowned herself Queen of Heaven, she leaned against the apple tree in the Sumerian Garden of Eden and rejoiced in her “wondrous vulva.” Then she set off with her “ardent desire” and “holy water-bathed loins” and took them to town—to the marketplace, temple, brothel, and home front.