Women Should Be On Fire (But Not Literally)

The feminists were right.

At least partially, and I thank them for the correction.

A vast majority of their writing veers into the cringe (see: The Book of Gutsy Women by Hillary & Chelsea Clinton) or the absurd (anything written by Bell Hooks or my college friend's "art project" posting mason jars filled with menstrual blood on Instagram), but some of their critiques of 19th and 20th century historians were spot on.

Modern historians shoe-horned their ideals of feminity onto the past. Women, they concluded, should be meek, passive, obedient, and exist almost exclusively in the private sphere. This view, they argued, was abundantly attested to in world--and particularly European–history. Any deviation from this norm presages calamity.

History has not vindicated their ideas. In certain eras, their brand of femininity holds, but during the great epochs of European history, they are in the wrong.

Strong nations depend on strong women, and the women of Gaul, Sparta, and Rome were not quiet, submissive creatures that dutifully fulfilled the pleasures of husband and family.

The most convincing argument against the angelic brand of femininity is mythical: Hera.

Myth is the distillation of culture, carefully selected and curated through the inexorable wisdom of generations.

Hera’s disposition and conduct were no fluke. They were the product of a people's will and blood and struggles and the collective intelligence of the past bubbling up from the depths and taking shape, like Venus from the foam of the Aegean, as a goddess. Hera, however, did not emerge from salty bubbles. She was born from fire.

The Goddess of Fair Arms was notoriously cruel, jealous, dramatic, and vindictive. Her wrath was so great that she caused Zeus, king of the gods, to skulk around or transform into a bull, swan, or eagle as he shagged princesses and nymphs.

Zeus, in other words, was afraid of his wife.

He was not subservient—numerous examples prove otherwise, but he also knew better than to cross his queen.

Hera never physically fought with Zeus. In that department, no one could contend. Rather, the Golden-Throned Goddess would unleash her fury on Zeus’ paramours. Semele, the mother of Dionysus, was incinerated on the spot after Hera tricked her into beholding the majestic awesomeness of Zeus. Hercules, one of Zeus’ bastards, was harried until he was driven to madness, slaying his wife and children and sparking his quest for redemption.

Hera did not only react. She actively plotted for the victory of her favorites. During the Trojan War, Hera seduced Zeus and lulled him to sleep, buying her Olympian allies time to reverse the Trojan gains. Jason, a pious devotee of hers, found his trials eased by her blessings (in part, due to Hera’s outrage at King Pelias' impiety).

She was feisty, ambitious, conniving, ruthless, shrewd, and unruly. And she was the god of marriages and a lodestar among Greeks and Romans for what a proper wife ought to be.

The ideal woman of the house was not Aphrodite. Aphrodite possessed the charms and wiles of youth and the intoxication of lust, but she was second-rate compared to the Scepter-Bearing Hera. Aphrodite, like the effette Paris, was the play thing of lesser men beholden to base desires.

Hera devotees prized power above all else, as did the Greeks & Romans, and her temperament reflected what generations had learned the hard way: strong women win and weaker women are pushed aside, murdered, or abused.

Her archetype played out in their people’s history. You can read moralia exhorting women to be quiet, virtuous, and obedient—and, there is a degree of truth to that—but to conclude from these old men shaking their canes at women of loose virtue is foolish. It has about as much relevance as Billy Graham’s sermons to the behavior of a 30-year-old mother in Los Angeles.

Greek & Roman women were strong. The division of the sexes still held, buttressed by hard economic, political, and martial realities, and barred them from the public sphere, but don’t mistake their physical absence for a lack of influence. Behind the scenes, they pushed their husbands, made kings, forged alliances, sowed discord, tore down reputations, backstabed, plotted, started and ended wars, protected and promoted their children, assassinated rivals, and managed estates.

Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, has been pilloried for being an uppity woman (even in her own time), but she reflected the archetypal matron, modeled after the great goddess of wives and mothers.

Olympias’ life swirled with intrigue, scandal, and magic, but her most damning (and, perhaps, beneficent) charge was the assassination of Philip the II, her husband, to secure Alexander’s place on the throne. Even if the accusation is false, the fact that it is entertained demonstrates the influence that women held at the court and in political life—and the ends they would go to secure their child’s and their own future.

Celtic women enjoyed a similar reputation. The stories are numerous, from Boudicca’s uprising against the Romans to Grace O’Malley’s piratical exploits against the English, but my favorite is the tale of a vengeful chieftain’s vengeful wife.

During a campaign against the Galatians, the Roman army routed the Gaulish forces, capturing prisoners and loot. Among the captives was the exceptionally beautiful wife of the chieftain. The centurion entrusted with guarding her attempted to rape her. After her assault, she plotted revenge.

The chieftain’s wife offered the centurion a large sum of gold for her release, to which he readily agreed. She led him to a secluded rendezvous point and, while the he was weighing the gold, her relatives snuck up behind him and murdered him.
The wife triumphantly returned to her husband, Orgiagon, bearing the offending head.

This is bad ass, and, then, as now, the Romans rightly intuited that the fierceness of their enemies depended upon the willfulness of their women.

The ushering in of Christianity would undo the Heran woman. It took a centuries for the matriarch to fade away, but Hera was slowly replaced by the thinly-armed and pale-faced princesses of chivalry.

Some women broke this mold (both historically and mythically), but the Antigones, Boudiccas, and Heras as icons were gone.

Women modeled themselves after the Virgin—pious, dignified, chaste, and subservient to the Father.

The fit was always an uneasy one. The rambunctious spirit of the Celt and Roman resisted the strictures imposed upon them. The lower classes, as throughout much of history, largely ignored them and carried on with business as usual. Worrying about whether the stores will last until the summer trumped re-enacting quaint notions of femininity.

The middle- and upper-classes most vigorously enforced the Mother Mary model but with poor results. The medieval period was exciting, but it was also dreary and a low-point across the board. The music, the philosophy, the buildings, the inventiveness, and, most importantly, the quality of men precipitously dropped when compared to the heights of Archaic Greece, Republican Rome, or Renaissance Italy.

Women’s anemic role had no small part to play in this. Weak, dull, otherworldly women make for poor mothers, and poor mothers make for poor soldiers, and poor soldiers make for a sclerotic people.

While the Enlightenment period, drawing heavily on rediscovered classical sources, kicked this trend for a few centuries, it re-emerged in the Victorian Era as a response to the moral lassitude and the crumbling of a once great civilization.

Today, reactionaries trip over themselves to tame women again, returning them to their “proper place” as a homemaker waiting with dinner ready and a big smile to greet her man as he comes home from work. “The Angel in the House” of Victorian England and the dignified virginal princess of the chivalric era.

This image of “traditional” feminism, embedded in the minds of so many fed-up with the state of things today and looking to history for guidance, is misguided. The domestic Angel was by no means a constant—even in Christian Europe.

During the Age of Exploration, women were far more active in social, political, and religious life. They were expected to be modest and chaste, but also witty, intelligent, educated, willful, and capable. And it is this period of tremendous inventiveness, curiosity, and martial valor that would establish the supremacy that Europe enjoyed for centuries after.

The Hera-esque ideal of femininity, unsurprisingly, emerged as classical thinking flooded into Europe, a result of education levels sharply rising and the proliferation of texts. The Renaissance was, as the name suggests, a re-invigoration of the pagan ethos into European society. It was here, under the auspices of classicism and a more precocious and feisty femininity, that Christian Europe made its greatest gains.

The Victorian Angel in the House, on the other hand, was a long sigh from a dispirited people, a consequence of the sputtering out of the biological, economic, and creative momentum that had brought Europe to its greatest powers and extent. And as so often happens in cultural doldrums, retrograde forces turned to LARPing shallow archetypes to futilely attempt to reclaim their greatness.

"If only men could truly be MEN! And women could truly be WOMEN! The glory of the British Empire would live eternal."

It was not to be.

Churchill, in a top hat and vest, and Elizabeth the II, in a duchesse silk satin dress, would take the empire into the back, put a bullet in its brains, and throw the body into a shallow grave, never mentioning it over dinner because of the embarrassment it stirred up.

Gender roles have consequences, but the reactionary has been ahistorical and impotent. Like the bodices that squeezed tight the waists of women, the new-found ideal maintained a pristine exterior but lacked the health and vigor necessary to reclaim victory. The bodice proved a poor fit, and poor fits are doomed to being cast off once the ideological impetus upholding the deception sputters out. Then, a natural course-correction follows.

Many Celtic pagans still cling to this worn-out, wrong-headed, and Christian-coded notion of womanhood. The Angel in the Household and the poodle-skirt girls of the 1950s arrest the imagination because of the sharpness of the model and because they seemingly represent a cultural watermark. For a largely illiterate culture, almost no history exists beyond movies, TV, and what shows up in their Twitter feed. But remember: before Grace Kelly came Rosie the Riveter.

Mother Mary doesn’t cut it. The mature European women is Heran. Christianity has, by-and-large, been at war with this nature for over a millennia (Judaism, interestingly enough, cleaves closer to the classic model), but its ideals have proven unsustainable—and it has been at its best when the pagan spirit has infused its ferocity, sensuality, and appetition into its mores.

Weak men, like weak cultures, want quiet and submissive women.

The Celtic woman is not that. The Teutonic woman is not that. The Roman woman is not that.

Strong men, and peoples, need fiery, intelligent, and ambitious women. Women of appetite. Women of intrigue, wit, learning, and nobility.

Do you really want a fragile angel of virtue raising a young boy?

What do you really think will happen?

Young boys are willful, crafty, and violent. Virtuous mothers either crack under the pressure, proving incapable of reigning in their child’s instincts, or, far worse, impose upon his natural proclivities a morality that drains all life and creativity from him. Thus, they spawn either shrieking man-children or limp-wristed faggoty conservatives.

The breeding of great warriors, husbands, and fathers depends upon the formation of great matrons, wives, and mothers.

Behind every strong man is a strong woman.

Behind Alexander was Olympias.

Behind Robert Guiscard was Sichelgaito of Salerno.

Behind Charlemagne was Bertrada.

Behind William the Conqueror was Matilda of Flanders.

A strong woman will not brook excuses or weakness.

She will not tolerate failure or half-assed attempts.

She will not accept you crying in a corner and pointing the finger at everyone else for your troubles.

She will not allow you to be a burden.

She will spur you on to greater heights.

She will be an unforgiving judge.

A stern but caring mother.

A discerning manager of the house.

A partner in plots and crimes.

An enjoyer in pleasures of wine and flesh.

A charming host whose sweet words and flashing eyes enchant your guests.

She will stoke the fire in your heart.

She will draw you upwards to the airy realm of the divine.

And she will pull you through the blood and mud of the sublunary as you march towards glory.

Choose a woman of the flame.

Let women burn again!