Women in Greek Mythography: Pythias, Melissae and Titanides

by Max Dashu

What they didn’t teach us about women in Greek myth and iconography: a richly illustrated ethnohistorical sourcebook. Women’s dance, ceremony, and spiritual culture from 1600 BCE to 300 CE: bee and snake shapeshifters, priestesses, prophecy, goddess temples. But also sexual politics of war and captivity, conquest and slaving, and the origins of “rape culture” in Western Civ. Ariadne of the Labyrinth, Herophile the Sibyl, the diviner Manto, Iō the once-priestess of Hera; the Libyan Danaides, Helen of Sparta, Kassandra of Troy, and the prophetic but persecuted daughter, Melanippe the Wise.

What they didn’t teach us about women in Greek myth and iconography, this ethnohistorical sourcebook uncovers, beginning with the pre-patriarchal cosmogonies of Night, Earth, and the sea-titanides Tethys and Thetis.

Richly illustrated, the book highlights female iconography from the Mycenaean to the Hellenistic era, depicting women’s dance, ceremony, and spiritual culture. Weavers were culture-makers, encoding protective symbols in clothing, creating story cloths and votive robes for Athena or Hera. There’s a reason why weaving as speech—text from textile—was a prominent metaphor in Greek language and literature.

A rich record exists of women’s ceremonial culture: bee and snake shapeshifters, priestesses, women’s lamentations and ancestor libations, birth caves of Eileithyia, dream caves of the nymphai. The women’s dance is depicted in Geometric-era ceramic paintings in a style reflecting Libyan influences, followed by Phoenician themes in the Archaic.

Dashu delves into Goddess myths and imagery. Her analysis of textual and iconographic stratification documents how patriarchy visibly transforms the goddesses over time (although the Moirae, Hekate, Nemesis, and the Gorgons withstood these pressures).

A major focus is the sexual politics of war and captivity, conquest and slaving, and how the values of domination became mythically encoded in art and literature: Helen of Sparta, the invasion of Troy, women as “the prize of my spear.” Dashu sheds light on the origins of “rape culture” in Western Civilization—the gods and heroes are rapists—and on themes of female subjugation, captivity, sacrifice, femicide, but also defiance and resistance.

Oracular women preserved an important sphere of female spiritual authority. The most prestigious was the Oracle of Delphi, who legendarily predated the Trojan War and was quashed 1500 years later by a Christian Roman emperor. Once the prophetic sanctuary of Earth and her Snake, Delphi was taken over by Apollo, one of many mythic conquests.

Stories of legendary women include: Ariadne the labyrinth, Herophile the Sibyl, Manto the diviner, Iō the once-priestess of Hera; the Libyan Danaides, Helen of Sparta, Kassandra of Troy, and the prophetic but persecuted daughter, Melanippe the Wise. In this book, you’ll find the hidden stories of ancient Greek women.

368 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2023

About the author

Maxine Hammond, known professionally as Max Dashu, is an American feminist historian, author and artist. Her areas of expertise include female iconography, mother-right cultures and the origins of patriarchy.

In 1970, Dashu founded the Suppressed Histories Archives to research and document women's history and to make the full spectrum of women's history and culture visible and accessible. The collection includes 15,000 slides and 30,000 digital images. Since the early 1970s, Dashu has delivered visual presentations on women's history throughout North America, Europe and Australia.

Dashu is the author of Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700–1100 , the first volume of a planned 16-volume series called Secret History of the Witches.