This is part of an occasional series on Goddess spirituality and political activism. Hat tip to MazeDancer and Caneel for the title. Future installments should appear on Wednesdays if the Muses cooperate.
The political establishment, including the corporate media, has certain terms that it loves to throw at progressives. Recently we pushed for the practical step of removing a reward (a plum committee chair assignment) from a Senator who had openly attacked our interests. This comes two years after we tried to remove him by throwing our support to a better candidate in the primary.
On both occasions, this led to much tut-tutting about those silly lefties, using terms like: shrill, vindictive, petty, shrill, extremist, vengeful, temper tantrum, and oh yeah, shrill. We were called, in essence, bitches. And I thought: this seems familiar. Oh yeah, that’s because I’m a feminist. Those are my extra names.
The Greek Goddess Hera knows a bit about being shrill.
We tend to think of Greek mythology as a coherent set of stories where it’s clear who’s who and how they’re related. In fact, the Greeks started out as a mishmash of tribes, each with it own mythology. As the Zeus-worshiping tribes conquered others, their deities were absorbed as his siblings, children, or concubines. Powerful Goddesses like Rhea and Gaia couldn’t be suppressed, so they were called his mother and grandmother. Others were rewritten as mortals that he seduced or raped.
The story goes that Hera refused Zeus’s overtures until he came into her bedchamber disguised as a wounded bird, a cuckoo. Hera took pity on the bedraggled creature, and held it against her breast to comfort it. At which point Zeus assumed his true form and raped her. Afterward, a shamed Hera agreed to become his obedient wife. That’s a pretty clear a metaphor for the conquest and subjugation of the Hera-worshiping tribes.
After her marriage to Zeus, Hera was called the Goddess of wives and mothers. But before that, Queen Hera had been the Goddess of the sky, the winds, the fertile fields and the fertile womb. When she conceived her son, the blacksmith God Hephaestus, she didn’t need any help from Zeus. Hera simply slapped her hand against the fruitful earth, and gave birth to her son. Unamused, Zeus seized the baby and threw him from Mount Olympus. So while all the other Greek deities were physically perfect, Hephaestus walked with a severe limp.
Most of the stories about Hera are about her vindictiveness toward Zeus’s other sexual conquests. Her anger is always aimed at the woman or her children, never at Zeus. Those in power understand the concept of horizontal hostility, turning oppressed groups against each other so that they don’t unite to topple the power structure.
There’s another, lesser-known story about Hera. It seems Zeus’s tyranny wasn’t just aimed at her; he treated everyone on Mount Olympus with an iron fist. Hera began whispering with the other deities about putting an end to his bullying. Asclepius, the God of medicine, gave Hera a drug which she slipped into Zeus’s wine. When Zeus lay snoring on his couch, the other Olympians tied him with a hundred knots. High-fiving each other, the deities gathered in the throne room....
...and promptly fell to squabbling among themselves.
Like a certain political party, the Olympians weren’t used to winning. They didn’t know what to do with power once they had it. Poseidon, being the oldest brother, wanted to keep the monarchy but with himself ruling in Zeus’s place. Athena had a plan drawn up for a new Constitutional government. Artemis wanted no government at all. And Aphrodite...well, Aphrodite didn’t really care about much of anything besides getting laid. She was like that.
While the argument escalated, Briareus saw his chance. Briareus was a hundred-handed giant who wanted to go back to the old, comfortable way of doing things – and figured he’d get a nice promotion from Zeus as well. He slipped into the bedchamber where Zeus was tied up. A hundred hands, a hundred knots, it didn’t take long to set him free.
The king of the Gods stormed into the throne room, waving thunderbolts in both fists, and demanded to know who was behind the rebellion. If they had all stood together, they could have overpowered Zeus. But, again like a certain political party, they were used to rolling over whenever Zeus made a demand. Someone was going to get thrown under the chariot.
Fingers started pointing at Hera.
Zeus grabbed the queen, and ordered that she would be hung from the sky by golden manacles. And since Hephaestus was the blacksmith, he would have to forge the chains. Without a word in his mother’s defense, Hephaestus limped off to fire up his forge.
Carolyn Kizer’s poem, Hera, Hung from the Sky , imagines what was going through Hera’s mind:
I threw myself to the skies
And the sky has cast me down.
I have lost the war of the air:
Half-strangled in my hair,
I dangle, drowned in fire.
With her hands and feet immobilized, and her allies too cowed to intervene, Hera used the only tool she had left: her shrill voice. (Gratuitous Dungeons & Dragons reference: In "Legends & Lore," Hera could actually use her shrill voice as a weapon, causing 2-16 hit points of damage per round.) She yelled, she whined, she screamed. She brought up Zeus’s abandonment of habeus corpus, his use of torture, his abuse of signing statements. She bitched.
Zeus might have held out, except that he could see it was getting to the other deities as well. With Hera goading them on, he might have had another rebellion on his hands. He made a few vague promises of reform, or at least forming a committee to study reform, and allowed them to cut her down. The Olympians burbled their gratitude to Zeus, and told Hera to behave herself from then on.
Progressives are never the ones who get to wave around our thunderbolts and declare victory. Too often we’re treated as expendable, the first ones thrown under the chariot. Most of the time, all we have are shrill voices saying no to an unjust war, no to spying on our phones and computers, no to endless detentions without charge and confessions gained by torture.
With the change in administrations, we’re the ones saying no to letting the old regime’s abuses go unexamined and unpunished. The serious, unshrill folks say that we should be bipartisan, let bygones be bygones, don’t get distracted from more important things. Our shrill voices say: what’s more important than forcing our government to abide by the law? If we let this go, we know what will happen once Zeus and his party come back into power.
How a woman becomes a Goddess: raise your voice. Get used to being called a bitch. Be shrill. Silence is consent.