me and my friend (both cis, childfree women) went to the Feminine Power exhibition at the British Museum the other year, and we both came out feeling disspirited by how many of the artefacts symbolised/were interpreted as symbolising fertility/childbearing/child-rearing. We were like 'women can be powerful outside of that context too!'

do you mean that in 2000 years, you'll have archaeologists looking through the remains of red light districts going: "so they had all those shops dedicated to fertility gods and godesses"?

I'd done a wiki-walk the other day on Mediterranean goddesses, and it seemed like a definite pattern to their roles getting redefined and restricted by patriarchy.

You mean people do not have sex just to procreate?

case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lajja_Gauri

HERESY!!!

We see far too much of the past through a filter of our own prejudices at the time. It's like anything we don't understand the purpose of, or don't want to acknowledge the obvious purpose of, is a "ritual object".

The Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose is hilarious to tour. For a large variety of reasons, actually, not the least of which is how comically deadly serious they are about themselves. But there's one room that has several entire display cases filled with these tapering — and I DON'T mean conical, I mean organically tapering — textured cylinders of smooth, polished stone. And the po-faced museum guide stands there and pontificates about how they are doubtless some kind of ceremonial seals.

DUDE. LOOK at them. They are DILDOS. 🤣

Always bothered me why Yakshi's are associated with fertility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakshini

Also, the sexual identity doesn’t have to relate to men. What about the goddess of “felt cute, might delete later idk”? Enjoying herself and celebrating herself for her own sake, that sort of thing.

Cite or link PLEEEEEAZE???

Aphrodite is the one I can think of that didn't get that treatment. Got plenty of weird patriarchal reinterpretations along the way but there was enough stuff left around and well known to pull off the old switcheroo.

But I imagine that most polytheistic pantheons end up having gods and goddesses whose main purview is lust because they do reflect human nature and, well, have you looked at humans. Them horny all the time.

As so much of the older social science material, it says a lot more about the old social scientists than about their subjects of study.

@toxic This you?

It may look like like a 3 foot pile of crap to a casual observer, but my desk is in fact a highly sophisticated filing system, whose workings are known only to myself, and required documents can be retrieved faster than many a modern database is capable of. The bottom drawer however is more like a data warehouse, where documents containing scraps of info that could possibly be of use one day get stashed in a completely unstructured manner, with appropriately long (...)

I recently pointed this out to an archaeologist on YouTube, except it was about 35 skulls with horns. When he was asked what it was all for, he said it was “for ritual” and the problem I had with it is that every archaeologist says the same thing.

He ended up using thanksgiving as a ritual.

If ritual is so broadly defined as to mean literally anything from self-mutilation for magical jeesaas to watching a game, then the word means nothing. Say you don’t know.

Freya is the goddess of "love" in the sense of "lust". They tend not to tell that part to kids haha

My BA Anthro was archeology to the extent Michigan has any ("no jade idols here", we used to say), and I don't remember any references to gender at all.

It was the Seventies, I admit, but most people had at least heard about it. I think.

How many of these depictions were actually not even goddesses? Maybe the artists were just being horny?

Also a good question 😆