The Divine Feminine

An Analysis of the Feminine Role in Western Literature.

By: E. Melton

Chapter One: Eve

From the genesis of the western world’s literary canon, women have been exalted above
the base.

In the Judeo-Christian mythos, the human female is the final form rendered by God. In
animistic religions, the concept of a divine mother often reigns supreme. Pre-Christian
tribes of the Ancient Near East, as well as Europe, attributed women with being more
connected to the divine and their intuitions essential for the weaving of a comfortable
society. Through an analysis of occidental literature, the evolving interplay between the
masculine and the feminine serves as a symbol of an efficient division of labor and the
ascent from nature into a cultured world.

Though the biblical figure Eve is often cited as the first woman in Abrahamic tradition,
woefully tempted to beget the fall of man; much has been lost in translation. The
writers of the
Hebrew bible describes “Elohim” forming the “Adamah”, (Earth) and from it, the dust of
the earth, forming the progenitor of man: Adam. According to some scholars, the word
“Adam” was used to denote an individual with advanced cognitive abilities (Altein).
Following Adam, the
final form defined was that of Chavah, who becomes known as Eve. Her name comes
from the Hebrew roots for joy, life, and experience (Crispe). The rendering of Eve from
Adam does not imply female inferiority but shows that Adam needs the civilizing and
nurturing feminine force found in her.
In this story the masculine seems tied to the material, making the feminine akin to a
spiritual fountainhead for the human soul. A breath of life; Adam tills the earth, but Eve
guides his hands.
Within the garden, the pair are placed grows trees. The tree Eve infamously approaches
is not merely representative of knowledge in a general sense but the specific knowledge
of good and evil. Nearby there also grows the Tree of Life, to contrast the mere
sustaining of existence with awareness of it.
Eve dares to taste the forbidden fruit, she dares to know. She is cast from the pastoral,
thoughtless bliss of the primordial garden. Then, in sharing it with Adam, they become
aware of the sheer complexities of life and feeling abstract, quintessentially human
emotions such as shame:

“And the Lord God said ‘Behold, the man has become as one of us; to know good and
evil.’

Genesis 3:22

Chapter Two: Shamhat

Why is it a woman who is selected to possess the most agency in this ubiquitous creation
myth? What is being underscored in the story as it relates to the division between the
masculine and the feminine?

Gregory Mobley illustrates this well in his book highlighting the fact that in the
beginning “the first man lives among the animals in the primeval garden, unclothed and
without human companionship. At the end of the story, Adam, clothed, lives outside
nature in human society” (99).

In this sense, the feminine, represented by Eve, is what steers humanity from nature to
culture. The sequence could also be specifically expressive of the early transition from
hunter-gatherer nomadic living to that of agrarian life. The pair are informed that they
will now have to toil constantly, to work the land and eat bread.

Paradoxically, the female form is over-represented as symbolic of nature itself. At the

surface, this can be attributed to their physical role as mothers of subsequent
generations. As Jordan Peterson describes “it is Nature as Woman who says, ‘Well,
bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not
indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation”.

An earlier work, the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, also emphasizes the role of women as
compared to an idea of natural selection as well as domesticators of men. Shamhat, a
royal prostitute, comes to Enkidu who is living on the Steppe as an utterly uncivilized
beast. She goes to him to tame him, to “treat him, a human, to woman’s work” (“Epic”
63).
Through this period of six days and seven nights, “Shamhat, through coitus and
instruction, leads Enkidu through his transition from animal to human society” (Mobley
96).

The epic tells of Enkidu losing some of his physical prowess, becoming shunned by the
lower beasts of the Steppe but also that “he had gained reason and expanded his
understanding”
(“Epic” 63).

Many parallels can be drawn between Eve and Shamhat; at the beginning of the epic,
Enkidu is naked and savage in the wilderness but very quickly “the counsel of Shamhat
touched his heart. She took off her clothing, with one piece she dressed him, the second
she put on. Clasping his hand, like a guardian deity she led him” (“Epic” 66).

Gilgamesh’s mother, the cow goddess, also highlights the elevated role of women in
early literature. She interprets Gilgamesh’s dreams and directs him towards friendship
with Enkidu, who then himself plays a civilizing role to the king.
The first interaction between the two men occurs after Enkidu becomes enraged that
Gilgamesh forcibly beds newlywed women before their grooms. This is because, in
Gilgamesh’s adherence to his bodily lust and desire for dominance (nature), he
repeatedly disrupts the eugenic and civilizing institution of marriage (culture).

Chapter Three: Siduri

Gilgamesh is eventually led to another guiding figure, to a tavern at the edge of the sea
kept by an alewife named Siduri. This placement at the boundary between the wild sea
and human society is expressive of the role of Siduri as a liminal figure.
During their interaction Siduri, who at first barred him from the tavern due to his
apparent wildness, chastises him for chasing impossible dreams, imploring him to
explore his motivations asking, “Gilgamesh, wherefore do you wander?” (“Epic” 97).
Siduri’s extols the virtues of mundane life in a speech that can be considered “a paean to
quotidian pleasures – food, dance, clothing, cleanliness, parenthood, marriage” (Mobley
101).
She’s imploring him to appreciate the comforts afforded by a simple life, the
accumulations of toils therein being the seeds of the civilizational fabric that facilities
Gilgamesh’s philosophical musings and pursuits of grandeur. It appears Gilgamesh
does internalize her words eventually when returning to his city.
He is overwhelmed with a newfound appreciation for Uruk and its technological
superiority, perhaps sensing that immortality may be realized in service to the upward
drive of organic life and its evolution.
Chapter Four: Ishtar
Another literary female character known to the peoples of the Ancient Near East is
Ishtar. She is depicted as vengefully sending the raging bull of heaven to run amok
amongst the mortals after Gilgamesh denies her romantic advances.
Gilgamesh explains his refusal, noting how Ishtar’s previous lovers suffered fates such
as being turned into wolves and birds. This inversion feels prescient of the dichotomy
later presented in the Garden of Eden: the predictable natural order of the pastoral and
uncivilized juxtaposed against the chaos of rising complexity, of nature refigured into
something
more.
Ishtar is still playing as an agent of conversion, but one of returning culture to nature
rather than the reverse. Ishtar was regarded by the peoples of the ancient Near East to
be the queen of heaven, the goddess of not just love and fertility, but of war, justice and
political power.
The feminine, as an image of nature, is the primal mother shown uniquely able to birth
ever new orders out of the primordial chaos of existence.

Chapter Five: Lysistrata and Hellenistic Women

A couple of millennia later in Athens, the first female lead character of a Greek comedy
was unveiled amidst a literary backdrop concerning matters of war and political power.
“Lysistrata", written by Aristophanes, centers around a woman attempting to end the
Peloponnesian War between the Greek city-states through rallying the women to abstain
from marital relations with their husbands.
In Hellenistic literature, prose emphasizes women’s seclusion from political affairs yet
within “Greek drama [women] step out from the enclosed private world of the Oikos,
whose values they represent, in response to a previous failure of the male to respect the
interests of the household in his external sphere of the polis” (Foley 1).
Alongside Aristophanes in those whose pens left their mark in ancient Athens,
Xenophon wrote what is essentially the first book on economics: Oikonomikos.
In the work, Xenophon outlines the duty of the woman to the household (Oikos) and the
man to the external state (polis) through an emphasis on their complementary natures
stating that “the gods with great discernment have coupled together male and female, as
they are called, chiefly so that they may form a perfect partnership in mutual service”
(7.19).
Chapter Five: Antigone
19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel drew much
inspiration from early Greek literature and thought. His philosophical discourse
discussed the connection between the ethical domains of human law and divine law, the
masculine versus the feminine.

Hegel describes that “the husband is sent forth by the spirit of the family into the life of
the community, and finds there his self-conscious reality” (454) Subsequently the spirit
of the family is embodied by the wife, finding in the community it essentially engenders
“its universal substance and subsistence” (Hegel 454).
To Hegel, Sophocles’ Antigone was one of the most sublime literary presentations of
family piety “as principally the law of woman, and as the law of a substantiality at once
subjective and on the plane of feeling, the law of the inward life, … This[divine] law is
there displayed as a law opposed to public law, to the law of the land” (167).
The concept of a state as an organized political entity can be defined as the possessor of
monopoly of violence over a geographic region. Contemporarily, the apparent historical
exclusion of women from external, stately life has been seen as a symptom of
compounding, systemic subordination rather than a natural evolution playing a
balancing and beneficial role to the stunningly complex social structures emergent in
groups of the human-animal.

The subversive behavior displayed by Antigone to her king portrays a final, fatal attempt
to defend the prerogatives of the family and household against the imperious demands
and overweening claims of state power that run rough-shod over deeply rooted values.
Antigone is indeed a poignant avatar for shared communal values, for the idea of a
divine law ever in opposition to an expanding and impersonal state.
She does not beg forgiveness for acting against the government; she owns it, avowing
that her “criminal conduct [is] blameless, for I owe more to the dead, with whom I will
spend a much longer time, than I will ever owe to the living” (Sophocles 709).
 Antigone is loyal to her family, her bloodline, her nation where-as Creon cannot see
past his devotion to the state. Creon cannot imagine giving both of Antigone’s brothers’
honorable burial rights, as she sought to against his command because Polyneikes died
fighting against the city Creon now helms.
Creon is subsumed in a way by his masculine loyalty to growing the state without
developing a sufficient appreciation for the cultural substrate whence political orders
are formed, nourished and directed. Though both Antigone and Creon are maximally
strong-willed and blind to compromise (therein paving the way for the seriously tragic
component of the play); they fully invoke conviction towards their respective realms of
the Oikos and the Polis.
Creon remains blind throughout most of the play to the reality that the people he
governs empathize with Antigone’s plight. He sees himself as a champion of the city
that shelters its
citizens, rebuking his dissenters for “rebelling against a just yoke” (Sophocles 714).
In his folly Creon forgets that the real yoke of civilization, in his case Thebes, is the ethos
of the citizenry. The king’s son, Haimon, tried to warn his father, pleading him to “think
of trees caught in a raging winter torrent: those that bend will survive with all their
limbs intact; those that resist are
swept away” (Sophocles 725). Creon does not relinquish his shortsighted ruling until it
is too late.
Antigone kills herself, but in losing that battle she won the underlying war for the soul of
her city: “Look at me, princely citizens of Thebes: I’m the last daughter of the kings who
ruled you. Look at what’s done to me, and by whom it’s done, to punish me for keeping
faith”
(Sophocles 730).

Conclusion
As demonstrated, a journey through literary history paints a compelling image of
feminine nature as the prime exemplification of both the creative and the destructive
force. The female form continuously birthing higher orders out of primordial chaos or
efficiently sowing chaos within a present order. Perhaps best demonstrated by Antigone,
literary women are simultaneously an image of the past whilst being arbiters of the
future.

References
1. Altein, Yehudah. "The Story of Adam and Eve in the Bible." Chabad-Lubavitch
Media Center, 1993-2018,
www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/246606/jewish/The-Story-of-Adamand-Eve-
in-the-Bible.htm

2. Crispe, Sarah Esther. "Chavah, Mother of All Life." Sarah Tikvah and Doron
Kornbluth: Editors, Chabad-Lubavitch Media Center, 1993-2018,
www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/246606/jewish/The-Story-of-Adam-and-Eve-
inthe-Bible.htm

3. Foley, Helene P. “The ‘Female Intruder’ Reconsidered: Women in Aristophanes’

Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae.” Classical Philogy, vol. 77, no. 1, 1982, pp. 1-21. JSTOR,
JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/269802.

4. G.W.F. Hegel. Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J.B. Baillie. New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1910.

5. Sophocles. Antigone. Trans. Robert Bragg. Norton Anthology of Western

Literature. 8th ed. New York. W.W. Norton and Company, 2014. 706-742.

6. Xenephon. Xenephon in Seven Volumes, 4. Harvard University Press,

Cambridge, MA; William Heinemann, Ltd., London. 1979

7. Anonymous. Epic of Gilgamesh. Trans. Benjamin R Foster. Norton Anthology of

Western Literature. 8th ed. New York. W.W. Norton and Company, 2014. 706-742