The Little Bears of Artemis

I intended this post to be about cultural attitudes toward motherhood in antiquity. With a new school year starting, I was remembering when I taught part-time (not by choice) and my troglodytic chair congratulated himself on how he was facilitating my 'work-life balance.' Yuck.

But while poking around I came across the delightful Cult of Artemis at Brauron. This is the cult of the arkteia, the 'bear-dance' performed by young Athenian girls as a rite of passage into womanhood. I enjoyed the Wikipedia article on it for the couple of WTF? moments it gave me.

Basically, girls between 5 and 10 would worship Artemis in a festival culminating in a wild dance in which the participants stripped. So, the first head-scratching moment comes when Wikipedia explain that this is part of the rigorous preparation for a young woman's first childbirth. 

However, it seems that the dance associated the girls with Iphigeneia, who was to be sacrificed in atonement for the killing of a mother bear. She shed her robes in order to draw the viewers' pity for her innocent state. So there is at least a tenuous connection with motherhood.

The second 'what the heck?' moment came when I read about the rather macabre gifts made to Iphigeneia as the mortal patroness of the shrine. Apparently, she was given the sewing and weaving projects left over when a woman died in childbirth. But she seems to have been urged to grant the women a positive afterlife in return for the gift (Euripides Iphigenia at Aulis 1468).

I do truly treasure these moments of delighted puzzlement. It's great to talk about how the classics are universal and speak to the human condition, etc., but it's also a pleasure when their real differentness from us comes across, as it so often does in ancient religious practices. 

Artemis' sacred groves are considered forerunners of modern wilderness sanctuaries (see this article in Forest & Conservation History).You can read more about Brauron in Nancy Demand's book. I've also read about the 'little bears of Artemis' before in this young adult novel based on Demosthenes 59 (Against Neaira).

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