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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpt from Chapter Eight: In A Certain Way Unbodily
These days, we have a bad habit of imagining the consecrated virgins of the ancient world through the rather adolescent lens of movie stereotypes. We imagine their lives as a cross between some perpetual sorority party and a fantasy harem, lovely young things lounging around in pampered indolence, periodically forming a decorative processional of lissome virginal bodies traipsing in and out of some marble edifice with the requisite tranquil steps and columns, or perhaps having clandestine love affairs with their strapping, virile guards.
Stereotyping the ancient world's consecrated virgins is nothing new. Just as feverishly sexualized, and no more accurate than our own imaginary versions of these women, the Church Fathers wrote descriptions of these pagan priestesses that were as extraordinary in their creativity as they were in their vitriol. John Chrysostom and Origen both illuminated their scenes of the Oracle of Delphi at work with the harsh lights of misogyny and contempt, showing her seated on the tripod with her legs spread. In a grotesque caricature of the medical practice of fumigation, they described evil spirits wafting up from the crevasse in the earth below her into the Oracle's vagina, causing her to go mad, babble incomprehensibly, and foam at the mouth. Origen asks: "In this was there not proof of the impure and vicious nature of this spirit? It insinuated itself into the soul of the prophetess not by way of scattered and imperceptible pores, much purer than the female organs, but by ways the chaste man was not allowed to see, much less to touch."
Sadly, we know more about Origen's fantasies of the Oracle at Delphi than we do about the real women who served as Pythias. The actual workings of the Oracle, the ways in which the women who performed the role became Pythias, and the day-to-day routines of their lives are lost to us; they were lost even to later Greek writers like Plutarch, who could only report the stories he'd heard and flesh them out with writerly imagination. We do not know, for instance, if the Pythia was in any way visible to the people who sought the prophecies she brought forth, or did her work behind a screen or in a separate chamber. We don't know how the women in question were chosen, how or even whether they were trained, or how long they were expected to serve. We do know that at some point, after one of the Pythias was seduced and deflowered, that the Pythias were replaced by chaste widows, no longer literal virgins by our standards, but, because they no longer belonged to any man and were thus available to be owned entirely by Apollo, virginal enough by the standards of their place and time.
What we do know about the Pythias is primarily conceptual in nature, scraps of writings about them that give us some insights into the ideological reasons that their sexual status mattered. Giulia Sissa, a historian renowned for her explorations into ancient Greek virginity, says that the reason sexual status was so important an issue was that these women issued prophecies from Apollo. There could be nothing within them that could interfere with the integrity of Apollo's messages, nothing that might interfere with the god's ability to inhabit them and use their bodies and voices to communicate, no chance that they might compromise the god's intentions with their own. This was not merely an issue of sexuality. The oracle was to be as devoid of outside influence as possible, "to resemble a tablet on which nothing has been written... not only must she have had absolutely no sexual relations, but also she must have no social ties or elaborate education."
Strictly prohibited from friendships or family, disallowed lovers or marriage, educated only in the absolute necessities of a very limited life, these virgins must have had a strange, isolated, otherworldly existence indeed. It is almost impossible to imagine what it would have been like. These girls, and their later counterparts the chaste widows, were to exist as ciphers, as empty vessels, and it seems likely that their emptiness would have been strictly enforced by social isolation. No matter how devoted the women might have been to the service of their god, there must have been times when their severely limited lives made them feel as if they had already been consigned to the tomb.
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I welcome anyone interested in translating any or all of these excerpts to do so, as long as you put them up on the Web and notify me of where they can be found. I plan to link all translated versions from this page.
Photos by Hanne. Site by Jhames