How fear, sex and power shaped ancient mythology
In the 1st Century, bathers in the city of Bath who suffered the ignominy of having their clothes stolen while they were enjoying a soak knew exactly who to call upon for help. The goddess Sulis, who presided over the hot baths, cold baths and glistening plunge pools of the Roman complex, was known principally for her ability to heal, but she also had a remarkable capacity for vengeance. More than 100 ancient curse tablets have been excavated from her spring, many of them featuring strong-worded pleas for the goddess to punish those who’d made off with other people’s possessions. Thieves beware.
Sulis is just one of a number of goddesses who feature in an ambitious new exhibition, Feminine Power, at the British Museum in London. Examining the prominence of female deities and figures of reverence from six continents across thousands of years, the show is as rich in scope as it is in divine faces. Sharing the gallery with Sulis, a local manifestation of the Roman goddess Minerva, is everyone from the Egyptian deity Sekhmet to the Hindu Kali, the Japanese Kannon and the Mexican Coatlicue.
It is striking how many of these goddesses have been worshipped for seemingly contradictory qualities. Just as Sulis was credited with powers of healing as well as powers of exacting revenge, so Inanna of ancient Mesopotamia was viewed as a goddess of both sex and war. An early hymn describes her as a dread deity who brings death to men on the battlefield and mourning to the households they leave behind. In other writings, she is celebrated for the sexual potency she inspires in mortals she favours. Sumerian kings did their best to combine the best of both worlds by envisaging themselves as sleeping with Inanna in order to attain her protection in war. This was, perhaps in part, a way of tempering their fears of her authority.
The ability of goddesses to cross societal boundaries established between the sexes on Earth was one of the main things that elevated them above most mortal women. Inanna, who was credited with the power to transform men into women, and women into men, was sometimes even described as if she herself were male. Professor Mary Beard, one of five guest contributors to the exhibition, observes in her prologue to the show’s catalogue that the Greek goddess of wisdom Athena similarly had “martial attributes that fundamentally conflict with Greek concepts of female gender”.
The Roman goddess Venus overstepped the accepted boundaries with particular aplomb. Like Inanna, she found a place in men’s hearts on the battlefield as well as in the bedroom. Mary Beard explains: “It’s Venus and the unswayable, unstoppable power of desire that in a way brings Rome its military victories.” Julius Caesar claimed to be a descendent of Venus via her son Aeneas, heroturned-refugee of the Trojan War, and placed the goddess prominently on some of his coinage. Later leaders, too, looked back to Roman goddesses almost as a hallmark of their authority. Minerva was depicted in the presence of Wellington and Napoleon as well as Queen Elizabeth I.
The idea that female figures of power have been more important to women throughout history than to men is certainly belied. Amenhotep, a Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty in Egypt, went so far as to commission a vast quantity of sculptures of Sekhmet for his mortuary temple on the Nile, in the belief that she would help ward off pestilence and plague. And men were responsible for making at least some of the cult statues and artworks of goddesses that still survive today.
Belinda Crerar, lead curator of the exhibition, tells BBC Culture, “In a lot of cases, we don’t know exactly who was making the objects. We tend to assume they were made by men, but this was not necessarily the case. In the first section of the