[HPforGrownups] Re: Female Archetypes

[Amanda Lewanski]

No: HPFGUIDX 11136

Schlobin at aol.com wrote:

> Oh my goodness, these are not female archetypes..they are a misguided
> and awful attempted to place women into two and only two categories...
> Which is ridiculous..women fall into a multitude of categories just as
> men do..

Ohmigod, I'm agreeing with Susan again! Somebody throw water on me,
quick!

> this reminds me of the Indo-Europeans..when they invaded Crete/Greece
> they tried to divest the pre-patriarchal Goddesses of their complexity
> and make them into, maiden, virgin, whore, mother, crone..real women
> are very complex.....

Um, interesting choice of examples. The IEs were tremendously
patriarchal, judging from linguistic analysis, and probably did this
everywhere. And Greek goddesses, in their often confusing personality
quirks, still reflect plenty of complexity in that they don't always do
what their role would suggest. There's been lots of discussion about the
pre-IE culture in Greece--there was a lot of survival in names and
places---as I recall, "Hera" isn't even an IE root, nor are placenames
like Ithaca and Corinth. So there's likelihood that more of the
complexities of the pre-IE Greek pantheon survived the IE onslaught,
than the goddesses of elsewhere.

The Minoan culture was overrun by Greece, but I believe it was before
the IEs got there, wasn't it? I'm fuzzy on the details, but wasn't
Linear A a non-IE language, but written in Greek characters? So the
Cretan pantheon might easily have been pretty intermingled with the
mainland before the IEs got there.

And just to normalize things, I must point out that however complex the
woman in question, when you get down to things like "maiden, virgin,
whore, mother, crone" etc., this is one generalization that does fit.
Most of these are stages of life (I hope whore isn't!), not attempts to
generalize personality.

> Oh goodness, that was a very misogynist post

Doncha mean misandronist? (correct word, someone?) <g>

--Amanda


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