Rules and The Roost

Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign.
- Luce Irigaray on Divinity
If women have no God," she argues,

"they are unable either to communicate
or commune with one another"
"The Only Diabolical Thing about Women...":
Luce Irigaray on Divinity
Penelope Deutscher
Page | 1
While sexual activity and the sacred were incompatible in the

Greek religious system, whatever impurity was incurred
through intercourse could be eliminated in most Greek women
simply by washing. For priestesses, however, washing was not
always sufficient; they had to remain chaste for short periods
of time.
The Role Of The Old Priestess: Ritual Agency And The

Post-Menopausal Body In Ancient Greece
Kristen Marie Gentile
RULES &
THE ROOST
gender wars at the home front
and the menstrual aura of death
Sacrifice as a gender reversal of male and female roles
patriarchal societies and rituals of blood sacrifice –
male appropriating and transcending women's
reproductive powers
curated by -
amma birago
In order to demonstrate their masculine ritual potency

men must “menstruate” and “give birth”.
Menstruation And The Origins Of Culture
Chris Knight
Maternity and childbirth is the truest legitimization of humans and entities. By the canalisation of violence for protecting a
particular social entity, the existence of that entity is made legitimate.
Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign. - Luce Irigaray on Divinity
It is significant that Jay critiques Rene Girard and Walter Burkert

for presenting sacrifice in terms of a universal human nature, which
includes gender relations determined by biologically given male violence.
Page | 2
Male “menstruation” is in fact central to initiation-

rites throughout much of the world.
When women still insisted on carrying their sons to the synagogue—and possibly also, once they were already there,
holding them during the circumcision rather than giving them up to one of the men—a ba’alat brit was instituted.
Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals
Brian Luke
Symbolic identifications: nearness to women is believed always to impart

femaleness to males, and hence, pollution (demasculinization). In ritual, boys
are identified with mothers, and husbands with wives. The rule is: female
contacts make one less masculine, so avoid them.
Sambia Nosebleeding Rites and Male Proximity to Wom
Gilbert H. Herdt
Jay illuminates the relationship between sacrifice and maintenance of

a male-dominated social order. First, Jay's analysis points to sacrifice as
a gender reversal of male and female functions and roles, …
Nancy Jay and a Feminist Psychology of Sacrifice
Kelley Ann Raab
… men may actually envy women’s ability to have children and one of
the purposes of initiation rites is to claim that men too can give birth.
Sacrifice from a Maternal Perspective in Religion, Art, and Culture
Céline Guilleux

Brian Luke
Circumcision is a way for men to appropriate credit for childbirth from women. It is important for women to be
absent or only to have a peripheral role at the ceremony, lest the overt physical dependence of the child on the
woman overwhelm the image of male life-giving that is being constructed.
In his book on circumcision, Lawrence Hoffman recounts the historical process by which women were more and
more completely excluded from participation in the ritual. Though women had once held their sons on their laps
during the cutting, by the Middle Ages all women, including the mother, were forbidden to attend a circumcision
(Hoffman, 1996: 95).
Hoffman notes that: When women still insisted on carrying their sons to the synagogue—and possibly also, once
they were already there, holding them during the circumcision rather than giving them up to one of the men—a
ba’alat brit was instituted. Page | 3
Now she, not the mother, brought the child to the synagogue doors... [T]he circumcision had finally become
exclusively male. ... The only woman who came to the synagogue (the ba’alat brit) gave up the child outside the
synagogue doors (205).

Brian Luke
The man who holds the boy on his lap during the circumcision is called the sandek. Sixteenth-century rabbis
characterized the sandek‘s knees as an altar on which a sacrifice was being offered to God (Hoffman, 1996:207).
This is one of many ways in which circumcision is associated with animal sacrifice. It is worth recounting some of
the other connections here.
Endowing religious specialists with secrets is often

presented as stealing the secret of fertility from
women. Among the Yoruba, in the Itefa initiation
ceremonies, male diviners take over the birthing role
by “re-birthing” men into a new identity.
Envy of Maternal Functions in Sacrific Rituals
Naomi Janowitz
The Act Itself:

Tracing The Roots Of Violence In Ritual
Tom F. Driver
In childbirth, blood is shed involuntarily; in sacrifice the
shedding of blood is voluntary. In childbirth, blood pollutes; in
sacrifice, it purifies. Childbirth is something only women can
do; ritual sacrifices are reserved for men only to do. Sacrifice
thus serves as a "remedy for having been born of woman."
The Tomb as an Instrument of (Re)birth

Women and the tomb were seen both as instruments of regeneration, …The connection between the female body
and the transformational space is explicated in the conceptualization of the transfiguration of the dead as a biological
process, with the sarcophagus and the tomb being identified as the body of the sky-goddess. … This discussion can
be extended in the view of the “containers,” both the sarcophagus and the tomb, as a womb.
The Menstrual ‘Taboo’ In Ancient Egypt
PJ Frandsen
Later, symbolically, one must match one's wife's periods with private bleedings
to ensure that he is as clearly male and as productively masculine as she is
productively feminine. Page | 4
Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays from the Field
Gilbert Herdt
Sacrifice in ancient Greece substituted social and ritual paternity for childbirth
and established an alternate system of creating lineage that was not threatened
by the sacrificial role of these post-menopausal women at the Chthonia because
these women could no longer bear children.
Reclaiming The Role Of The Old Priestess:
Ritual Agency And The Post-Menopausal Body In Ancient Greece
One of the reasons for their exclusion was the male desire to keep
separate the "involuntary, unclean, vulnerable" bringing of life into
the world that takes place during childbirth from the voluntary
"purifying" taking of life that occurs in the "sanctioned
killing of sacrifice".
Kelley Ann Raab
Death was seen as a transition to other forms of existence. When placed in a cofﬁn and tomb, the body returned to
the uterus of the sky-goddess. Rebirth, rejuvenation, and regeneration were key notions in Egyptian cosmology. …
For the beneﬁt of both worlds, fertility in this world, eternal participation in the solar cycle in the other world,
menstruation and the sacred space of funerary regeneration had to be kept apart.
PJ Frandsen
SEND TO MISOGYNY AND TO MATRIARCHY AS WELL
Women then were often understood in these societies as

polluting to this type of conceptual logic or sense of a
lineage based in male blood. They visibly contradicted this
patrilineal way of thinking about connection over time.

Often women’s clearer bodily claim to creating connection
was “undone” in the ritual logic. The blood sacrifice of
animals undid the blood let during a birth to a woman. Men
ritually transcended their dependence on women’s
reproductive, creative and connective powers. Page | 5
But it was a particular and peculiar type of connection. Jay demonstrated that the major
religious ceremonies in patrilineal societies were often considered by the participants as a
“better” birth into the world of grown men. A rebirth, so to speak! But women’s presence or
active participation at the ritual was a glaring reminder that women could give birth and were
more clearly linked to sons to the next generations. Women then were often understood in
these societies as polluting to this type of conceptual logic or sense of a lineage based in male
blood. They visibly contradicted this patrilineal way of thinking about connection over time.
Often women’s clearer bodily claim to creating connection was “undone” in the ritual logic.
The blood sacrifice of animals undid the blood let during a birth to a woman. Men ritually
transcended their dependence on women’s reproductive, creative and connective powers. The
patrilineal eternal line creating the society became a “remedy for being born of women.
Thus, in being a threat to sancta, a menstruous or post-partum woman was a

threat to the divine realm. In Levitical thought, the divine realm was located at
the center of Israel's wilderness camp, in the tent-dwelling of Yahweh, the god
who created life and gave order to the cosmos.
Levitical Thought And The Female Reproductive Cycle
R. Whitekettle
Political power, in its incipient form as male sexual-political violence, takes over, cloaking itself however in its very
antithesis - the non-violent, self-bleeding language of women’s ritual rule. This, it is argued, is perhaps the paradox
of all paradoxes which anthropology has needed to unravel as the precondition for an understanding of how human
gender-relationships cross-culturally have evolved.
Animal Sacrifice in Modern Times

In men’s envy of women’s reproductive capacities and its connection to violence
… men struggle against the respect women are naturally ceded due to their obvious and essential contributions to the
reproduction of human society.
... it would be known who was the mother of a child, but not who its
father was: hence relationship only in the female line, with exclusion of
the male line – mother-right.
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 1891 Page | 6
A Remedy For Having Been Born Of Woman

Pamela Eisenbaum
In ancient Greece, where there was scarcely ever a gathering of elite
males without a sacrifice to legitimize it, sacrifices were enacted on
both large and small scales to remove the pollution created by
childbirth. It seems that the pollution created by childbirth was often
considered as severe as that created by death.

PJ Frandsen
When placed in a coffin and tomb, the body returned

to the uterus of the sky-goddess. Rebirth, rejuvenation,
and regeneration were key notions in Egyptian cosmology.
Women and the tomb were seen both as instruments of regeneration, with men taking up the position of
intermediaries. As “containers” or “houses” both women and tombs were imbued with the ability to transform
potential into actualized existence.
Re-gressus Ad Uterum
The connection between the female body and the transformational space is explicated in the conceptualization of the
transfiguration of the dead as a biological process, with the sarcophagus and the tomb being identified as the body of
the sky-goddess. For this process, the term re-gressus ad uterum has been adopted from Freud.
PJ Frandsen
Around the world, ordinarily only adult males (fathers, real and metaphorical)
may perform sacrifice. Where women do so it is as virgins or in some other specifically
nonchildbearing role. It is not women as such who are regularly prohibited from
sacrificing, but women as childbearers or as potential childbearers.
Sacrifice As Remedy For Having Been Born A Woman

Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader
Edited by E. Castelli, R. Rodman
Page | 7
'Just as women are without the political rights reserved for male citizens,
they are kept apart from the altars, meat, and blood ... When women have access
to meat, the rules of the cult are careful to specify the precise terms and conditions.
For these things are not self-evident.'
On Marcel Detienne
Women and Sacrifice in Classical Greece
Robin Osborne
Prior to the menstrual or puerperal discharge, a woman was pure.

At the onset of these discharges, a woman was impure. After seven
or forty days, a woman was pure.
A fish was always and a crab was always an impure crab. A woman,
however, certain times pure, and at other times impure.
R. Whitekettle
It was animal sacrifice that linked the human world with the gods.
Women, Menstruation, And Nineteenth-Century Medicine

Vern Bullough And Martha Voght
According to Bettleheim (1962), men may actually envy women’s ability to have children and one of the purposes
of initiation rites is to claim that men too can give birth. … the symbolic appropriation of female reproductive
powers by men. … to be able to tell themselves they are capable of procreative power.
Céline Guilleux
First, man is "able to exist" because of his identification

with a masculine-paternal God (Irigaray 1993a, 61). Second, that no divinity,
and no other symbolic figure in Western culture plays an equivalent role for women.
Third, the absence of a specifically feminine "divinity" as contributing to the
atrophied state of women's identity, subjectivity, and community.
There can be no reshaping of women's identity and subjectivity and indeed of culture in
general, without reshaping our conceptions of divinity.
The Only Diabolical Thing about Women

Penelope Deutscher
… In the piece "Divine Women," included in Sexes and Genealogies (1993a), Irigaray makes intrepid claims for the
role of divinity in the cultivation of human subjectivity and society. She declares, "Divinity is what we need to
become free, autonomous, sovereign. No human subjectivity, no human society has ever been established without Page | 8
the help of the divine" (1993a, 62). Irigaray asserts that there is a connection between the absence of an autonomous
"subjectivity" for women and the fact that "woman lacks a divine made in her image" (1993a, 63).
Revisiting Matrilineal Priority:

The Discovery of Matriliny
Chris Knight
Father Lafitau (1724) described in glowing terms the apparent equality and even (in important respects) superiority
of the female sex over the male among the Iroquois; “Nothing ... is more real than this superiority of the women. It
is essentially the women who embody the Nation, the nobility of blood, the genealogical tree, the sequence of
generations and the continuity of families. It is in them that all real authority resides: the land, the fields and all their
produce belongs to them: they are the soul of the councils, the arbiters of peace and war: they conserve the finances
or the public treasury; it is to them that slaves are given: they make the marriages, the children are in their domain
and it is in their blood that the order of succession is based.”
… The children are considered as pertaining to the mother, with little regard to descent on the father’s side.”
Thus, men have an anxiety about women’s reproductive powers

due to their reliance upon women for the continuation of their society.
Therefore, in patrilineal societies, men take control and regulate the reproductive
power and rights of women by establishing a lineage system to control
inheritance and the means of production.


Kelley Ann Raab
In ancient Greece, where there was scarcely ever a gathering

of elite males without a sacrifice to legitimize it, sacrifices
were enacted on both large and small scales to remove the

pollution created by childbirth. It seems that the pollution
created by childbirth was often considered as severe as that
created by death.
Pamela Eisenbaum
Page | 9
The development of this connection between sacrifice and patrilineality

arises because social structures “idealizing eternal” male intergenerational
continuity meet a fundamental obstacle in their necessary dependence
on women’s reproductive powers.”
Towards A Gendered Typology of Sacrifice
Susan Sered
The Phallic flutes and bullroarers, the genital mutilations,

the nosebleeding in explicit or implicit imitation of menstruation
the transparently pseudo-creative rituals should make the most hardened
Lévi-Straussian turn to Freud and Bettelheim.
A Re-interpretation of a Male Initiation Ritual: Back to Freud via Lacan
Graham E. Bull
It is thought that because blood represents life (Lev. xvii 11, 14), the loss of
blood represents or symbolizes death. Thus, the menstruous or post-partum body
is surrounded by an "aura of death".
A Menstruous Or Post-Partum Woman Was A Threat To The Divine Realm.

Menstruation and parturition are natural and normal reproductive processes. Why, then, was a woman deemed to be
impure at these particular times, for these specific lengths of time? It is a common assumption that impurity was
ascribed to a woman during menstruation and following parturition because of the bloody, vaginal discharge which
occurs at these times. It is thought that because blood represents life (Lev. xvii 11, 14), the loss of blood represents
or symbolizes death. Thus, the menstruous or post-partum body is surrounded by an "aura of death" (Wenham [n. 3]
p. 434).
R. Whitekettle
“For, if bleeding, not having political rights, and not shedding blood are causally linked, then whether we take
sacrificial exclusion to be a product of having no political rights, or having no political rights to be a product of
sacrificial exclusion, the bleeding at least must be the cause and not the product of either sacrificial or political
deprivation.”

Robin Osborne Page | 10
Early Human Kinship Was Matrilineal

Chris Knight
The development of this connection between sacrifice and patrilineality arises because social structures “idealizing
eternal” male intergenerational continuity meet a fundamental obstacle in their necessary dependence on women’s
reproductive powers.” Thus, men have an anxiety about women’s reproductive powers due to their reliance upon
women for the continuation of their society. ... The emphasis on sacrifice in patrilineal societies allows for the
development of social reproduction, instead of relying on biological reproduction (childbirth); descent becomes
social and ritual in nature and, therefore, is no longer dependent on women.
Early Human Kinship Was Matrilineal

Chris Knight
In order to ensure this separation between descent through sacrifice and biological descent, women are generally
excluded from direct sacrificial practices. In many cultures, this exclusion is achieved through the establishment of
the dichotomy between the purity of sacrifice and the pollution of menstruation and/or childbirth. This opposition
between bloodshed in sacrifice and blood shedding by women excludes women from performing sacrificial acts.
Typically only adult males - those in the position to be fathers - have the ability to sacrifice. Jay notes the rarity of
female sacrificers, and “when women are reported performing sacrifice it is never as mothers, but almost always in
some specifically non-childbearing role: as virgins (or dressed as if they were virgins), as consecrated unmarried
women, or as post-menopausal women.”
For these things are not self-evident.'
On Marcel Detienne
Robin Osborne
… in the case of the kanephoros (a blameless maiden at the

front of the procession carries on her head the sacrificial
basket), the sacrificer' (he cuts some hairs from its forehead)
and the sacrificial cry (' As the fatal blow falls, the women
must cry out in high, shrill tones').
Robin Osborne

Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader Page | 11
... it would be known who was the mother of a child, but not
who its father was: hence relationship only in the female line,
with exclusion of the male line – mother-right.
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State,
1891


Penelope Deutscher
There can be no reshaping of women's identity and

subjectivity and indeed of culture in general, without
reshaping our conceptions of divinity.
Prior to the menstrual or puerperal discharge, a woman was pure.

At the onset of these discharges, a woman was impure. After seven
or forty days, a woman was pure.
R. Whitekettle
productively feminine.
Gilbert Herdt

Vern Bullough And Martha Voght Page | 12
Bleeding like a sacrificed beast was a good thing. The classical Greek medical writers also mentioned the ideal of a
woman bleeding “like a sacrificed beast”. To the modern reader, that sounds unpleasantly bloody. For a woman in
ancient Greece, it would have been seen as something more admirable, since it was animal sacrifice that linked the
human world with the gods.
According to Bettleheim (1962), men may actually envy women’s ability to

have children and one of the purposes of initiation rites is to claim that men too
can give birth. In later anthropological research male initiation rituals are
actually very often shown to promote the symbolic appropriation of female
reproductive powers by men (Hugh-Jones 1979, Godelier 1982). Men want to
know how it feels to give birth or to be able to tell themselves they are capable
of procreative power.
Céline Guilleux
women for the continuation of their society. Therefore, in patrilineal societies, men take control and regulate the
reproductive power and rights of women by establishing a lineage system to control inheritance and the means of
production.


When women sacrifice, they actually subvert the matriphobic symbol system which is constituted, in part, by the
exclusion of women. Ponte-Jace suggests that woman as "birthing mother" becomes separated from woman as
"sacrificial officiant functioning symbolically as male."
… Rather, women sacrificing symbolize many things, among them the figure of the early mother, the ways in which
women have been "crucified" by patriarchy, and women giving of body and blood to bring forth new life-a "gender
re reversal" of male and female reproductive roles. Women sacrificing is not as simple as women "being women."
Yet there is something female underlying the male social exterior of sacrifice, …
Kelley Ann Raab
When women sacrifice, they actually subvert the matriphobic symbol system
which is constituted, in part, by the exclusion of women. Ponte-Jace suggests
that woman as "birthing mother" becomes separated from woman as "sacrificial
officiant functioning symbolically as male."
Pamela Eisenbaum
Page | 13
… the real threat of women performing sacrifice is that it would reestablish

female genealogical structures through the mother and give back to women their
reproductive powers. As a result, a male-dominated social order could no longer
be maintained, nor could sacrifice continue to function as a remedy for "having-
been-born-of-woman."
Kelley Ann Raab
Revisiting Matrilineal Priority:

The Discovery of Matriliny
Chris Knight
Father Lafitau (1724) described in glowing terms the apparent equality and even (in important respects) superiority
of the female sex over the male among the Iroquois; “Nothing ... is more real than this superiority of the women. …
they make the marriages, the children are in their domain and it is in their blood that the order of succession is
based.”
In 1767 the great Scottish historian Adam Ferguson was the first to generalize on the basis of Lafitau’s and other
missionaries’ and explorers’ reports. Writing of “savage nations” in general he remarked that (Ferguson 1767: 126):
“... as the domestic cares are committed to the women, so the property of the household seems likewise to be vested
in them. The children are considered as pertaining to the mother, with little regard to descent on the father’s side.”
Fear and envy of maternal abilities result in male appropriation of those

abilities in rituals of blood sacrifice, which in turn serve as a means of
maintaining male control. ... Blood sacrifice has expressed men's
appropriation of female capacities in patriarchal societies because this
constellation has best symbolized the male infant-mother separative
process during the pre-oedipal period.

Pamela Eisenbaum
In ancient Greece, where there was scarcely ever a gathering of elite males without a sacrifice to legitimize it,
sacrifices were enacted on both large and small scales to remove the pollution created by childbirth. It seems that the
pollution created by childbirth was often considered as severe as that created by death. Literary and epigraphic
evidence indicates that death and childbirth represent the most polluting forces in society.' … According to Jay,
sacrifice generally makes possible the stripping away the limits of biology and mortality (associated with women) so
that one enjoy membership in an eternal social order.
Jay eloquently sums up the association between sacrifice, patrilineage, and immortality, worth quoting at length:
The twofold movement of sacrifice, integration and differentiation, communion and expiation, is beautifully suited
for identifying and maintaining patrilineal descent. Sacrifice can expiate, get rid of, the consequences of having been
born of woman (along with countless other dangers) and at the same time integrate the pure and eternal patrilineage.
Sacrificially constituted descent, incorporating women's mortal children into an "eternal" (enduring through
generations) kin group, in which membership is recognized by participation in sacrificial ritual, not merely by birth,
enables a patrilineal group to transcend mortality in the same process in which it transcends birth. In this sense,
sacrifice is doubly a remedy for having been born of woman.
Page | 14

Kelley Ann Raab
… the real threat of women performing sacrifice is that it would reestablish female genealogical structures through
the mother and give back to women their reproductive powers. As a result, a male-dominated social order could no
longer be maintained, nor could sacrifice continue to function as a remedy for "having-been-born-of-woman." To
conclude, the use of feminist psychology to analyze Nancy Jay's theory of sacrifice reveals the existence of deep-
seated psychological reasons to support her sociological findings. Fear and envy of maternal abilities result in male
appropriation of those abilities in rituals of blood sacrifice, which in turn serve as a means of maintaining male
control. ... Blood sacrifice has expressed men's appropriation of female capacities in patriarchal societies because
this constellation has best symbolized the male infant-mother separative process during the pre-oedipal period.
Kelley Ann Raab
Sacrifice as Remedy for Having Been

Born of Woman - by Nancy Jay
Some of the most prominent of these features are gender-related, such as an opposition between sacrificial
purity and the pollution of childbirth, and a rule that only males may perform sacrificial ritual.
In the polarity between blood sacrifice and childbirth, killing receives a positive value and giving birth a negative
value.
Gender-Related Features of Sacrifice
A review by E. A. Castelli (ed.), Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader
Gilbert Herdt
A menstruous woman was impure for seven days even though the duration of a menstrual discharge is variable and
can last from three to nine days. A post-partum woman was impure for forty days even though the puerperal
discharge is variable and can last from twenty to sixty days. Thus, a menstrual or puerperal discharge could stop
before or after the standardized cessation of impurity.
Prior to the menstrual or puerperal discharge, a woman was pure. At the onset of these discharges, a woman was
impure. After seven or forty days, a woman was pure. A fish was always and a crab was always an impure crab. A
woman, however, certain times pure, and at other times impure.
R. Whitekettle
Page | 15
It was animal sacrifice that linked the human world with the gods.
Bleeding like a sacrificed beast was a good thing. The classical Greek
medical writers also mentioned the ideal of a woman bleeding “like a
sacrificed beast”. To the modern reader, that sounds unpleasantly
bloody. For a woman in ancient Greece, it would have been seen as
something more admirable, since it was animal sacrifice that linked the
For these things are not self-evident.' Marcel Detienne

Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader

Robin Osborne
… in the case of the kanephoros (a blameless maiden at the
front of the procession carries on her head the sacrificial
basket), the sacrificer' (he cuts some hairs from its forehead)
and the sacrificial cry (' As the fatal blow falls, the women
must cry out in high, shrill tones').
Burkert, in his description of sacrifice in Greek Religion states that 'The sacrifice is a festive occasion for the
community' and only specifies the gender of the participants in the case of the kanephoros (a blameless maiden at
the front of the procession carries on her head the sacrificial basket), the sacrificer' (he cuts some hairs from its
forehead) and the sacrificial cry (' As the fatal blow falls, the women must cry out in high, shrill tones'). Elsewhere
in his description he talks of 'Everyone hopes as a rule that the animal will go to sacrifice complaisantly, or rather
voluntarily'; 'Once the procession has arrived at the sacred spot, a circle is marked out which includes the site of Page | 16
sacrifice, the animal, and the participants'; 'All stand round the altar. As a first communal action water is poured
from the jug over the hands of each participant in turn'; 'The participants each take a handful of barley groats'; 'To
taste the entrails immediately is the privilege and duty of the innermost circle of participants'.

R. Whitekettle
Kelley Ann Raab
Endowing religious specialists with secrets is often presented as stealing the

secret of fertility from women. Among the Yoruba, in the Itefa initiation
ceremonies, male diviners take over the birthing role by “re-birthing” men into a
new identity.
Naomi Janowitz

Women and the tomb were seen both as instruments of regeneration, …The connection between the female body Page | 17
and the transformational space is explicated in the conceptualization of the transfiguration of the dead as a biological
process, with the sarcophagus and the tomb being identified as the body of the sky-goddess. … This discussion can
be extended in the view of the “containers,” both the sarcophagus and the tomb, as a womb.
PJ Frandsen

All three of the ancient sources that discuss the Chthonia in some way mention the involvement of old women.
However, the reason why old women were able to act as priestesses, sacrificers, and slaughterers at the Chthonia is
not explored in the ancient evidence.
The role of the old women at Chthonia

With the sacrificial theory of Jay, … post-menopausal women were the only women who could act as slaughterers in
the Greek sacrificial system. Because of the physiological and social identity of the post-menopausal woman, she
was able to participate in sacrifice without disrupting the male patrilineal sacrificial system.
… The priestesses‟ separation from the spheres of motherhood and childbirth eliminated the pollution associated
with childbearing and the male anxiety concerning female reproductive power. However, with an odd twist of logic,
these post-menopausal priestesses, in a sense, became more manlike, and thus regained their ability to “give birth”
via their roles of sacrificer and slaughterer.


Penelope Deutscher
Three claims are made here. First, Irigaray argues that symbolic gods play a crucial role in relation to human
identity. In fact, she claims that man is "able to exist" because of his identification with a masculine-paternal God
(Irigaray 1993a, 61). Second, she argues that no divinity, and no other symbolic figure in Western culture plays an
equivalent role for women. Third, she interprets the absence of a specifically feminine "divinity" as contributing to
the atrophied state of women's identity, subjectivity, and community. Consequently, if a culture of sexual difference
is desired, one in which women were not "cut off from themselves and from one another" (Irigaray 1993a, 64), one
necessary factor would be the generation of a feminine divine. Page | 18
Penelope Deutscher
When placed in a coffin and tomb, the body returned

to the uterus of the sky-goddess. Rebirth, rejuvenation,
and regeneration were key notions in Egyptian cosmology.
The connection between the female body and the transformational space is explicated in the conceptualization of the
transfiguration of the dead as a biological process, with the sarcophagus and the tomb being identified as the body of
the sky-goddess. For this process, the term re-gressus ad uterum has been adopted from Freud.
PJ Frandsen
Symbolic identifications: nearness to women is believed always to impart

femaleness to males, and hence, pollution (demasculinization). In ritual, boys
are identified with mothers, and husbands with wives. The rule is: female
contacts make one less masculine, so avoid them.
Sambia Nosebleeding Rites and Male Proximity to Woman

Gilbert H. Herdt
Each successive initiation introduces changes in the bloodletting act--roles,

scripts, signs, and audiences which unfold and transform the social organization
of experience.
Gilbert Herdt
Among the Yoruba, in the Itefa initiation ceremonies, male diviners take over
the birthing role by “re-birthing” men into a new identity.
Naomi Janowitz
In all of these instances one of the beauties of the rituals is that it is not a permanent change; men can experiment
with being female temporarily. They can symbolically undergo childbirth, lactation and all the other roles, which are Page | 19
not open to them in normal life. Endowing religious specialists with secrets is often presented as stealing the secret
of fertility from women. Among the Yoruba, in the Itefa initiation ceremonies, male diviners take over the birthing
role by “re-birthing” men into a new identity. The founding myth for the ritual claims that it was originally the wife
of the deity of divination who told it to her husband. He then proceeded to produce sixteen “children”, that is, the
sixteen major divination signs. As a reminder of this origin a woman carries a closed gourd during the ritual.
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 1891
While women are completely excluded from sacrifice,

they are able to participate in some circumstances in initiations.
post-menopausal women were the only women who could act as slaughterers in the Greek sacrificial system.
Because of the physiological and social identity of the post-menopausal woman, she was able to participate in
sacrifice without disrupting the male patrilineal sacrificial system.
But in any case, the old consensus has been challenged by Detienne who has championed the view that women were
normally excluded, not just from the central sacrificial act of slaughtering the animal, but also from sharing in the
meat. Detienne considers that what needs explaining are the cases in which women are explicitly included. He
writes: 'Just as women are without the political rights reserved for male citizens, they are kept apart from the altars,
meat, and blood ... When women have access to meat, the rules of the cult are careful to specify the precise terms
and conditions. For these things are not self-evident.'

eternal‟ male intergenerational continuity meet a fundamental obstacle in their necessary dependence on women’s
women for the continuation of their society. Therefore, in patrilineal societies, men take control and regulate the
reproductive power and rights of women by establishing a lineage system to control inheritance and the means of
production. The emphasis on sacrifice in patrilineal societies allows for the development of social reproduction,
instead of relying on biological reproduction (childbirth); descent becomes social and ritual in nature and, therefore, Page | 20
is no longer dependent on women.
In order to ensure this separation between descent through sacrifice and biological descent, women are generally
excluded from direct sacrificial practices. In many cultures, this exclusion is achieved through the establishment of
the dichotomy between the purity of sacrifice and the pollution of menstruation and/or childbirth. This opposition
between bloodshed in sacrifice and blood shedding by women excludes women from performing sacrificial acts.
Typically only adult males - those in the position to be fathers - have the ability to sacrifice. Jay notes the rarity of
female sacrificers, and “when women are reported performing sacrifice it is never as mothers, but almost always in
some specifically non-childbearing role: as virgins (or dressed as if they were virgins), as consecrated unmarried
women, or as post-menopausal women.”
... it would be known who was the mother of a child, but not
who its father was: hence relationship only in the female line,
with exclusion of the male line – mother-right.
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State,
1891
Why, then, was a woman deemed to be impure at these

particular times, for these specific lengths of time?
Menstruation and parturition are natural and normal reproductive processes. … It is a common assumption that
impurity was ascribed to a woman during menstruation and following parturition because of the bloody, vaginal
discharge which occurs at these times. It is thought that because blood represents life, the loss of blood represents or
symbolizes death. Thus, the menstruous or post-partum body is surrounded by an "aura of death".
In Levitical thought, the divine realm was located at the center of Israel's wilderness camp, in the tent-dwelling of
Yahweh, the god who created life and gave order to the cosmos. Contraposed to this spatial center was a periphery,
located in the wilderness beyond the encampment, a place of disorder and desolation. The divine presence
transformed the center of the camp into sacred space. Along the axis extending from the center to the periphery was
a continuum composed of varying degrees of consecration to the sacredness of the center. Consecration (and the
attendant need for purity) increased with movement towards the center and decreased with movement towards the
periphery.
The spatial orientation of an Israelite shifted between the center and the periphery depending upon his or her moral
or physical condition. When free from sin or an impure physical condition, an individual was oriented towards the
center and permitted to approach the divine realm. When encumbered by sin or an impure physical condition, an
individual was oriented towards the periphery and was disqualified from approaching the divine realm. The physical
condition needed to approach the divine realm is epitomized by the phrase "fulness of life", a quality commensurate
with the vivific character of the divine realm. If something was full of life or fully given over to life (alive, perfect,
unblemished), it was deemed to be pure and allowed to approach the divine realm (Lev. i 3, 10, xxi 16-23). Page | 21
The physical condition which disqualified an individual from approaching the divine realm was the lack of "fulness
of life," a quality antithetical to the vivific character of the divine realm, but commensurate with the character of the
wilderness. If something was not full of life or fully given over to life, it was deemed to be impure and was not
allowed to approach the divine realm, often being physically relegated to the wilderness
The Duration of Impurity Two things can be inferred from the preceding analysis. First, a woman remained
impure during the seven or forty days following the onset of the menstrual or puerperal discharge because her
reproductive system was thought to be dysfunctional during that time. Second, a woman was deemed to be pure on
the eighth or forty-first day because her reproductive system was thought to be functional then.
A Re-interpretation of a Male Initiation Ritual

Graham E. Bull
However, since psychoanalysis was founded, various psychoanalysts and a few anthropologists, using
psychoanalytical theories, have looked at some aspects of this initiation phenomenon, which is not surprising, for as
Keesing, an anthropologist, says: The Phallic flutes and bullroarers, the genital mutilations, the nosebleeding in
explicit or implicit imitation of menstruation, the transparently pseudo-creative rituals should make the most
hardened Lévi-Straussian turn to Freud and Bettelheim.

Gilbert Herdt
There are four domains of constraints based on ritual custom and belief.
Symbolic identifications: nearness to women is believed always to impart femaleness to males, and hence, pollution
(demasculinization). In ritual, boys are identified with mothers, and husbands with wives. The rule is: female
contacts make one less masculine, so avoid them. Later, symbolically, one must match one's wife's periods with
private bleedings to ensure that he is as clearly male and as productively masculine as she is productively feminine.
Cultural timing: enforced nosebleeding checks personal choice at critical junctures in attachments to women:
separation from mother; puberty and sexual maturation; marriage and cohabitation; birth and postpartum "distance";
and encroaching agedness, which threatens overdependence on one's wife.
Gilbert Herdt
. Page | 22
The Phallic flutes and bullroarers, the genital mutilations, the nosebleeding in
explicit or implicit imitation of menstruation, the transparently pseudo-creative
rituals should make the most hardened Lévi-Straussian turn to Freud and
Bettelheim.
A Re-interpretation of a Male Initiation Ritual: Back to Freud via Lacan
Graham E. Bull
Each successive initiation introduces changes in the bloodletting act--roles,

scripts, signs, and audiences which unfold and transform the social organization
of experience.
Private nosebleeding therefore enables a man to maintain lifelong proximity to
his wife - with some intimacy - by serving as a sign that he is separate and
potent (it keeps him "heterosexually masculine") and a vigorous warrior.
… In all of these instances one of the beauties of the rituals is that it is not a permanent change; men can experiment
with being female temporarily. They can symbolically undergo childbirth, lactation and all the other roles, which are
not open to them in normal life.
Endowing religious specialists with secrets is often presented as stealing the secret of fertility from women. Among
the Yoruba, in the Itefa initiation ceremonies, male diviners take over the birthing role by “re-birthing” men into a
new identity. The founding myth for the ritual claims that it was originally the wife of the deity of divination who
told it to her husband. He then proceeded to produce sixteen “children”, that is, the sixteen major divination signs.
As a reminder of this origin a woman carries a closed gourd during the ritual (Drewal, 1992, p. 73).
Levitical Thought And The Female Reproductive Cycle:

Wombs, Wellsprings, And The Primeval World
Richard Whitekettle
Levitical law declared a woman to be impure for seven days during menstruation (Lev. xv 19-24), and for forty days
following parturition (Lev. xii 2-4).2 Although the legal conditions and ritual procedures out-lined by these texts are
straightforward, it is baffling why they were enacted. The ability to reproduce was considered a constitutive part of
human createdness (Gen. 1 28a). Menstruation and parturition are natural and normal reproductive processes. Why,
then, was a woman deemed to be impure at these particular times, for these specific lengths of time? It is a common
assumption that impurity was ascribed to a woman during menstruation and following parturition because of the
bloody, vaginal discharge which occurs at these times. It is thought that because blood represents life (Lev. xvii 11,
14), the loss of blood represents or symbolizes death. Thus, the menstruous or post-partum body is surrounded by an
"aura of death" (Wenham [n. 3] p. 434).
The Aura Of Death Page | 23

No Woman Has Ever Menstruated To Death
Careful consideration shows, however, that the bloody, vaginal discharge did not evoke death in Levitical thought.
Furthermore, the locus of impurity was neither the female body nor the discharge. Note that the Levitical interest in
bleeding was limited to vaginal discharges. Numerous situations in which there is potentially fatal bleeding, such as
wounds or accidents in the workplace, are not the subject of legislative strictures. If there is no concern with an
"aura of death" in many situations in which it would seem appropriate (e.g., a wood-chopper whose hand has been
cut off), it could not have been a concern in more inappropriate situations. Note, too, that the Levitical interest in
bodily discharges was limited to male and female genital discharges (Lev. xii and xv). This restricted focus indicates
that impurity was ascribed to menstruous and post- partum women not because they experienced a bodily discharge,
but because they experienced a discharge from their reproductive system. The locus of menstrual and post-partum
impurity was the female reproductive system in particular, not the female body in general. Note, finally, that,
although the onset of impurity was coordinated with the onset of the discharge, the cessation of impurity was not co-
ordinated with the cessation of the discharge.
A menstruous woman was impure for seven days even though the duration of a menstrual discharge is variable and
can last from three to nine days. A post-partum woman was impure for forty days even though the puerperal
discharge is variable and can last from twenty to sixty days. Thus, a menstrual or puerperal discharge could stop
before or after the standardized cessation of impurity.
Prior to the menstrual or puerperal discharge, a woman was

pure. At the onset of these discharges, a woman was impure.
After seven or forty days, a woman was pure.
When she was impure, a woman threat to sancta (Lev. xii 4, xv 31). When she was pure, a not a threat to sancta.
What variable, transient aspect of reproductive system would cause a woman to vary in her sancta?
Impurity and the Construction of Levitical Space Sancta included any object which had been symbolically or
physically transferred to the divine realm. Thus, in being a threat to sancta, a menstruous or post-partum woman was
a threat to the divine realm. In Levitical thought, the divine realm was located at the center of Israel's wilderness
camp, in the tent-dwelling of Yahweh, the god who created life and gave order to the cosmos.
R. Whitekettle
Death was seen as a transition to other forms of existence. When placed in a coffin and
tomb, the body returned to the uterus of the sky-goddess. Rebirth, rejuvenation, and
regeneration were key notions in Egyptian cosmology. The actual act of procreation,
however, was never shown, as is well known. It could be spoken of but not represented.
Page | 24
Sacrifice as Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman - by Nancy Jay

A review by E. A. Castelli (ed.), Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader
Among the Israelites, the pollution of childbirth, and also of menstruation, typified pollution in general. For
example, Ezekiel described the Exile as divine punishment for conduct "like the uncleanness of a woman in her
impurity" (36: 17). The very first illustration in the priestly rules for occasions requiring purifying expiatory
sacrifice is after childbirth, when a woman must bring a sin offering and a burnt offering for the priest to sacrifice. If
she has given birth to a female child, her uncleanness is exactly double that for a male child's birth. She must wait
twice as long before her impurity has faded enough so that the priest can "make atonement for her and she shall be
clean" (Lev. 12:8).


Penelope Deutscher
There can be no reshaping of women's identity and subjectivity and

indeed of culture in general, without reshaping our conceptions of
divinity.
The Act Itself:

Tracing The Roots Of Violence In Ritual
Tom F. Driver
In childbirth, blood is shed involuntarily; in sacrifice the shedding of blood is voluntary.
In childbirth, blood pollutes; in sacrifice, it purifies. Childbirth is something only women
can do; ritual sacrifices are reserved for men only to do.
Sacrifice thus serves as a "remedy for having been born of woman."
Jay's "general theory" of sacrifice is hinged on the observation that the reckoning of descent through male parentage
is not given in nature but must be socially and religiously constructed. The chief instrument for establishing descent
through men rather than women, she avers, is ritual sacrifice. According to what she calls "the logic of sacrifice,"
which is a binary opposition between communion and separation, ritual sacrifice separates male-children (boys)
from their origins as the offspring of women so as to incorporate them into an all-male community that reckons
lineage not through mothers but through fathers. Ritual sacrifice is thus a key technique for delivering the rule of
society into the hands of men. The principal function of sacrifice, says Jay, is to "extol bonds of intergenerational
continuity between males that transcend their absolute dependence on childbearing women".
Page | 25
Bleeding like a sacrificed beast was a good thing. The classical Greek medical writers also mentioned the ideal of a
woman bleeding “like a sacrificed beast”. To the modern reader, that sounds unpleasantly bloody. For a woman in
ancient Greece, it would have been seen as something more admirable, since it was animal sacrifice that linked the

Sacrifice as Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman

Nancy Jay
"This pollution is none other than the filth that

estranges man from the gods."
What is it about childbirth that can only be undone,
remedied by sacrifice?
Around the world, ordinarily only adult males (fathers, real and metaphorical) may perform sacrifice. Where women
do so it is as virgins or in some other specifically nonchildbearing role. It is not women as such who are regularly
prohibited from sacrificing, but women as childbearers or as potential childbearers. These common gender-related
features of sacrificial practice cannot be explained culturally as features of a single religious tradition. Nor are they
noncultural, inevitable features of all human societies at a certain level of development; in spite of its wide
distribution, the practice of blood sacrifice is not universal.
We can understand gender-related features, along with many other aspects of sacrificial ritual, by recognizing the
relation of sacrifice to a particular kind of social organization, itself gender-related. That is, we must understand the
relation between sacrifice and family structure, taking "family" structure in its wider sense to include the kinship
structures in which tribal societies organize themselves.
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 1891
Page | 26
"Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign.
the absence of a specifically feminine "divinity" as contributing to the atrophied state of women's identity,
subjectivity, and community. Consequently, if a culture of sexual difference is desired, one in which women were
not "cut off from themselves and from one another" (Irigaray 1993a, 64), one necessary factor would be the
generation of a feminine divine.
women for the continuation of their society.
Typically only adult males - those in the position to be fathers - have the ability
to sacrifice. Jay notes the rarity of female sacrificers, and “when women are
reported performing sacrifice it is never as mothers, but almost always in some
specifically non-childbearing role: as virgins (or dressed as if they were virgins),
as consecrated unmarried women, or as post-menopausal women.”
Kelley Ann Raab
“For, if bleeding, not having political rights, and not shedding blood are causally linked, then whether we take
sacrificial exclusion to be a product of having no political rights, or having no political rights to be a product of
sacrificial exclusion, the bleeding at least must be the cause and not the product of either sacrificial or political
deprivation.”

Robin Osborne
Page | 27

Kelley Ann Raab
… men may actually envy women’s ability to have children and one of
the purposes of initiation rites is to claim that men too can give birth.
Céline Guilleux
Kelley Ann Raab
The roles of “mothers” in sacrificial ritual were limited to participation in the Page | 28
procession and crying of the ololygê. Childbearing women did not have access
to the sacrificial animal or instrument.
The roles of females in typical Greek sacrifice, therefore, are given additional meaning when their childbearing
status and relationship to patrilineal Greek society are considered. However, as even Osborne admits, women did not
wield the sacrificial knife, with the exceptional example of the Chthonia. For instance, the fourth-century comic poet
Pherekrates jokes that no one has ever seen a female mageiros (fr.64 Kock). Even in the barbaric land of the
Taurians, who practiced human sacrifice, Iphigeneia herself does not perform the physical slaughtering (E. IT 40-41,
621-624). 133
The post-menopausal priestesses at the Chthonia in Hermione are exceptions among the extant ancient evidence.
Their ability to carry out this unparalleled ritual responsibility to slaughter hinged on their post-menopausal identity.
As Jay has noted, in patrilineal cultures when women participate in sacrificial ritual, they are post-menopausal. In
ancient Greece women were allowed to perform more sacrificial roles than other patrilineal societies; only the role
of the slaughterer was restricted to men and post-menopausal women at the Chthonia.
The priestesses‟ separation from the spheres of motherhood and childbirth eliminated the pollution associated with
childbearing and the male anxiety concerning female reproductive power. However, with an odd twist of logic, these
post-menopausal priestesses, in a sense, became more manlike, and thus regained their ability to “give birth” via
their roles of sacrificer and slaughterer.

a woman of childbearing age and status (the “mother” figure) was seen as a potential threat to patrilineality. The
roles of “mothers” in sacrificial ritual were limited to participation in the procession and crying of the ololygê.
Childbearing women did not have access to the sacrificial animal or instrument.

Céline Guilleux
According to Bettleheim (1962), men may actually envy women’s ability to have children and one of the purposes
of initiation rites is to claim that men too can give birth. In later anthropological research male initiation rituals are
actually very often shown to promote the symbolic appropriation of female reproductive powers by men. Men want
to know how it feels to give birth or to be able to tell themselves they are capable of procreative power. Yet, in
making such a claim, men do not have any “sympathy” for the woman and try to belittle her importance. Simulated
childbirth by men both emphasizes men’s contribution to childbearing and minimizes women’s contribution.
It represents an extreme form of empathy in which the husband identifies so closely with the maternal role that he
creates within himself the need for the special care that should rightfully be given the woman, but which he denies
her. She is expected, when not actually forced, to go straight back to work, even if she is exhausted from the labor
and the physiological consequences of birth.
Nevertheless men can only imitate the insignificant external features, not the essential ones, which they are
effectively incapable of replicating. As Bettelheim suggests, “such an aping of the superficial only emphasizes the Page | 29
more how much the real, essential powers are envied” by men who “enact couvade to fill the emotional vacuum
created by their inability to bear children”.
Céline Guilleux
Sacrifice and Male Birthing

Men give birth through violence. By threatening to destroy, by demonstrating the will and capacity to destroy, a man
constructs a situation in which those who live do so only through his grace. The relatively powerless around him are
constantly on the brink of the death he can cause; he sustains their lives - brings them into life - through his decision
not to kill them. He thus gives birth to his children deliberately, creating through pure will as is represented in the
biblical God’s acts of generation by fiat - "Let there be light."
This male birthing is not mythological. There are real acts of violence and real decisions about who to kill and who
to spare. Male dominance as an ongoing institution entails a dependence of the powerless on the mercy of those who
administer the apparatus of violence. Tales of primordial male birthing - Eve from Adam’s rib, Athena from Zeus’s
head - would be unthinkable in the absence of some material basis for attributing generative powers to men. This
material basis lies in men’s application and selective withholding of acts of destruction.
This fits sacrifice within the first possible response to womb envy, called “compensation” …
Compensation, revaluation, and appropriation are processes we would expect to see if men are envious of women’s
status as life-generators. Compensation and revaluation are in fact quite common cross-culturally, while
appropriation is evidently proceeding as quickly as the technology can be developed and deployed (see Corea,
1985).
This suggests that in many cultures men do experience and act on feelings of “womb envy.” The term “womb envy”
was coined by Kittay (1983) specifically to contrast with the Freudian notion of “penis envy.” By womb envy Kittay
means “not merely envy of the specifically named organ but of the complex of a woman’s organs and capacities,
particularly as it relates to her distinctive childbearing functions” including both gestation and suckling (Kittay,
1983:95).
Women sacrificing is not as simple as women "being women."

Kelley Ann Raab
et there is something female underlying the male social exterior of sacrifice,

R. Whitekettle Page | 30
When women sacrifice, they actually subvert the matriphobic symbol system which is constituted, in part, by the
exclusion of women. Ponte-Jace suggests that woman as "birthing mother" becomes separated from woman as
"sacrificial officiant functioning symbolically as male." … Rather, women sacrificing symbolize many things,
among them the figure of the early mother, the ways in which women have been "crucified" by patriarchy, and
women giving of body and blood to bring forth new life-a "gender re reversal" of male and female reproductive
roles.
Women sacrificing is not as simple as women "being women."
Yet there is something female underlying the male social exterior of sacrifice,
Kelley Ann Raab
… the real threat of women performing sacrifice is that it would reestablish female genealogical structures through
the mother and give back to women their reproductive powers. As a result, a male-dominated social order could no
longer be maintained, nor could sacrifice continue to function as a remedy for "having-been-born-of-woman." To
conclude, the use of feminist psychology to analyze Nancy Jay's theory of sacrifice reveals the existence of deep-
seated psychological reasons to support her sociological findings. Fear and envy of maternal abilities result in male
appropriation of those abilities in rituals of blood sacrifice, which in turn serve as a means of maintaining male
control. ... Blood sacrifice has expressed men's appropriation of female capacities in patriarchal societies because
this constellation has best symbolized the male infant-mother separative process during the pre-oedipal period.
It is significant that Jay critiques Rene Girard and Walter Burkert for presenting
sacrifice in terms of a universal human nature, which includes gender relations
determined by biologically given male violence.

Kelley Ann Raab
"[A] feminist theory of sacrifice," writes Jay, "must recognize the historically contingent nature of the gender
relations of different traditions, seeing them neither as universal nor as biologically determined, but as historical
social products"
A danger arises in defining sacrifice as solely a "male" ritual. Perhaps this is precisely what some men would have
women think. If male sacrifice, as Jay points out, is a means of taking away power and descent from the mother and
ritually giving them to the father, then sacrifice also reflects hidden female abilities. Female functions have been
appropriated by men and, in the process, disconnected from actual women. In this sense, sacrifice expresses a gender
reversal of male and female capacities.
Kelley Ann Raab
Page | 31
The evidence for priestesses having sacrificial duties and claims to portions of the sacrificial meat is definitive and
widespread in the Greek world. … As a ritual, a state of cleanliness and purity was necessary for participation in
sacrifice. In contrast, childbirth was strongly associated with pollution. This inherent opposition between sacrifice
and childbirth, which is common in many patrilineal societies, strongly influenced the types of women who could
participate in sacrifice and the roles that they could play. Childbearing women, i.e., wives and mothers, may have
had some roles in sacrificial ritual, but because of their physiological and social identity, they were not permitted
full participation.

Childbearing women did not have access

to the sacrificial animal or instrument.
The roles of females in typical Greek sacrifice, therefore, are given additional meaning when their childbearing
status and relationship to patrilineal Greek society are considered. ….
Sacrifice in ancient Greece substituted social and ritual paternity for childbirth and established an alternate system of
creating lineage that was not threatened by the sacrificial role of these post-menopausal women at the Chthonia
because these women could no longer bear children. The priestesses‟ separation from the spheres of motherhood
and childbirth eliminated the pollution associated with childbearing and the male anxiety concerning female
reproductive power. However, with an odd twist of logic, these post-menopausal priestesses, in a sense, became
more manlike, and thus regained their ability to “give birth” via their roles of sacrificer and slaughterer.

"If women have no God," she argues, "they are unable either to
communicate or commune with one another"
"The Only Diabolical Thing about Women...": Luce Irigaray on Divinity

Penelope Deutscher
She asserts as an often-forgotten fact of ancient mythology most of the gods of the universe start out as goddesses.
The solar goddesses are obliterated or displaced when the universe is taken over by the men-gods, especially by
Zeus and his son Apollo. This domination of the cosmic world by the gods by means of the couple of a unique God-
Father and an all-powerful son, erases the fact that mothers and daughters once presided as goddesses over the solar
seasons and, together, protected the fertility of the earth in its flowers and fruits. (Irigaray 1993a, 80) These
comments suggest ways in which feminist reflection might reshape our interpretation of key religious myths and
texts, so that the importance of women was not eclipsed.
Page | 32
"Divinity is what we need
to become free, autonomous, sovereign.
The Only Diabolical Thing about Women -

… the absence of a specifically feminine "divinity" as contributing to the atrophied state of women's identity,
subjectivity, and community. Consequently, if a culture of sexual difference is desired, one in which women were
not "cut off from themselves and from one another" (Irigaray 1993a, 64), one necessary factor would be the
generation of a feminine divine.
… In the piece "Divine Women," included in Sexes and Genealogies (1993a), Irigaray makes intrepid claims for the
role of divinity in the cultivation of human subjectivity and society. She declares, "Divinity is what we need to
become free, autonomous, sovereign. No human subjectivity, no human society has ever been established without
the help of the divine" (1993a, 62). Irigaray asserts that there is a connection between the absence of an autonomous
"subjectivity" for women and the fact that "woman lacks a divine made in her image" (1993a, 63).
The Only Diabolical Thing about Women -
Penelope Deutscher
"If women have no God," she argues, "they are unable either to communicate or commune with one another"
(1993a, 62). As long as woman lacks a divine made in her own image, "she cannot establish her subjectivity or
achieve a goal of her own. She lacks an ideal that would be her goal or path in becoming" (1993a, 63-64).
Three claims are made here. First, Irigaray argues that symbolic gods play a crucial role in relation to human
identity. In fact, she claims that man is "able to exist" because of his identification with a masculine-paternal God
(Irigaray 1993a, 61). Second, she argues that no divinity, and no other symbolic figure in Western culture plays an
equivalent role for women. Third, she interprets the absence of a specifically feminine "divinity" as contributing to
the atrophied state of women's identity, subjectivity, and community. Consequently, if a culture of sexual difference
is desired, one in which women were not "cut off from themselves and from one another" (Irigaray 1993a, 64), one
necessary factor would be the generation of a feminine divine.
A description of women as "lacking" their own subjectivity will sound strange to some ears. Clearly, the claim is not
meant literally, in the sense that women are not conscious subjects. Rather, it evokes the familiar argument, first
articulated by Irigaray in early texts such as Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a) and This Sex Which Is Not One
(1985b), that "the 'feminine' is always described in terms of deficiency or atrophy, as the other side of the sex that
alone holds a monopoly on value: the male sex" (1985b, 69).
... We have considered one of Irigaray's most grandiose claims: that there can be no reshaping of women's identity
and subjectivity and indeed of culture in general, without reshaping our conceptions of divinity.
First, man is "able to exist" because of his identification with a masculine-paternal God
(Irigaray 1993a, 61). Second, that no divinity, and no other symbolic figure in Western
culture plays an equivalent role for women. Third, the absence of a specifically
feminine "divinity" as contributing to the atrophied state of women's identity,
subjectivity, and community.
The Only Diabolical Thing about Women - Page | 33

Penelope Deutscher

Kelley Ann Raab
… men may actually envy women’s ability to have children and one of the purposes of initiation
rites is to claim that men too can give birth. Sacrifice from a Maternal Perspective in Religion,
Art, and Culture Céline Guilleux

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Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign.

- Luce Irigaray on Divinity

If women have no God," she argues,

While sexual activity and the sacred were incompatible in the

The Role Of The Old Priestess: Ritual Agency And The

In order to demonstrate their masculine ritual potency

It is significant that Jay critiques Rene Girard and Walter Burkert

Male “menstruation” is in fact central to initiation-

Symbolic identifications: nearness to women is believed always to impart

Jay illuminates the relationship between sacrifice and maintenance of

Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals

Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals

Endowing religious specialists with secrets is often

The Act Itself:

The Tomb as an Instrument of (Re)birth

SEND TO MISOGYNY AND TO MATRIARCHY AS WELL

Women then were often understood in these societies as

patrilineal way of thinking about connection over time.

Thus, in being a threat to sancta, a menstruous or post-partum woman was a

Animal Sacrifice in Modern Times

A Remedy For Having Been Born Of Woman

The Menstrual ‘Taboo’ In Ancient Egypt

When placed in a coffin and tomb, the body returned

Sacrifice As Remedy For Having Been Born A Woman

Prior to the menstrual or puerperal discharge, a woman was pure.

Women, Menstruation, And Nineteenth-Century Medicine

First, man is "able to exist" because of his identification

The Only Diabolical Thing about Women

Revisiting Matrilineal Priority:

Thus, men have an anxiety about women’s reproductive powers

Reclaiming The Role Of The Old Priestess:

Jay illuminates the relationship between sacrifice and maintenance of

In ancient Greece, where there was scarcely ever a gathering

were enacted on both large and small scales to remove the

The development of this connection between sacrifice and patrilineality

The Phallic flutes and bullroarers, the genital mutilations,

A Menstruous Or Post-Partum Woman Was A Threat To The Divine Realm.

Women and Sacrifice in Classical Greece

Early Human Kinship Was Matrilineal

Early Human Kinship Was Matrilineal

… in the case of the kanephoros (a blameless maiden at the

Sacrifice As Remedy For Having Been Born A Woman

First, man is "able to exist" because of his identification

The Only Diabolical Thing about Women

There can be no reshaping of women's identity and

Prior to the menstrual or puerperal discharge, a woman was pure.

Women, Menstruation, And Nineteenth-Century Medicine

According to Bettleheim (1962), men may actually envy women’s ability to

Reclaiming The Role Of The Old Priestess:

Nancy Jay and a Feminist Psychology of Sacrifice

… the real threat of women performing sacrifice is that it would reestablish

Revisiting Matrilineal Priority:

Fear and envy of maternal abilities result in male appropriation of those

A Remedy For Having Been Born Of Woman

Nancy Jay and a Feminist Psychology of Sacrifice

Sacrifice as Remedy for Having Been

Sacrifice As Remedy For Having Been Born A Woman

Women and Sacrifice in Classical Greece

Thus, in being a threat to sancta, a menstruous or post-partum woman was a

Endowing religious specialists with secrets is often presented as stealing the

The Tomb as an Instrument of (Re)birth

Reclaiming The Role Of The Old Priestess:

The role of the old women at Chthonia

Reclaiming The Role Of The Old Priestess:

The Only Diabolical Thing about Women

When placed in a coffin and tomb, the body returned