Imagining Bronze Age Greece

The challenge of writing historical fiction is getting into the minds of people living in very different times from our own. Visiting archeological ruins of ancient civilizations tempts one to imagine those places in their glory when residents of every sort walked their streets. Visiting what remains of Roman communal toilets in Volubilis, Morocco, made me picture the Roman worthies, all male, of course, sitting in a convivial line talking about politics. No indication of partitions between—and yes, every sign of a sewerage system.

Bronze Age Greece began more than a millennium before classical fifth century Athens with its developments in philosophy, science, and the arts. Readers of Homer—and of Hesiod’s Works and Days, written at roughly the same time—see that Aegean civilization worshipped the same gods and goddesses celebrated in the temples and plays of latter-day Athens. The Iliad and Odyssey are dated around 800 BC, a good four hundred years after the events Homer depicts, so that history runs deep.

However, there’s ample evidence of Bronze Age religious beliefs predating the Trojan War, Mother Goddess worship in particular. Its roots go back to Ianna in Mesopotamia, with goddess artifacts in Sumer dated around 4,000 B.C. In Minoan Crete, goddess imagery prevails until around 1100 BC, when their peaceable kingdom collapsed from the consequences of violent earthquakes. Refugees brought their religion from Crete to mainland Mycenae, but over time the sky gods Zeus and Apollo—and Ares—became supreme.

Serpent Visions takes place when Mother Goddess worship is being driven underground. It remains a force in consciousness: She is the goddess of childbirth and to the Mother we return in death. In Mycenean times Her powers are parceled out between her daughters and diminished by male gods. Aphrodite, a powerful force dating back to Ianna and to Ishtar in the Hebrew Bible becomes, superficially at least, the capricious goddess of love.

Eventually the Romans suppressed so-called pagan religions; Christianity regarded them as cults or worse, and so in the western world they faded. Other indigenous religions came to the fore in early Europe with the Norse and Celts, but they too were eventually superseded by Christianity.

To imagine ancient beliefs, one must turn to sources like Sir James Frazer, whose Golden Bough, 1890, advances ideas about the significance of early myths. Though I’d read my mother’s copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, Frazer introduced many new angles on viewing the past. The editor of the 1959 edition of the Golden Bough, Theodor H. Gaster, points out that although Frazer’s ideas have been amended by subsequent research, his basic arguments about the primitive origins of later institutions and folk culture remain useful. The other, very different source, of psychological thinking about myth is, of course, Carl Jung and his disciple Joseph Campbell and the many commentators influenced by their approach.

In examining the puzzles embodied in the myth of Teiresias, however, I was thinking primarily about the human emotions involved when supernatural events happen to a real person. The few scholarly analyses of his story don’t consider him as a real woman those seven years spent female. No translation of Ovid’s tale that I’ve seen refers to Teiresias as ‘she’ when at the end of the seven years, she again strikes apart the serpents and returns to a male body, and none give her a name.

Teiresias lived in a time when gods influenced human behavior, as they do in Homer’s epics set three generations later, so the supernatural dimension simply exists. Fate and the gods operate outside mortal realms, and the gods often act on whim. We die; they do not.

What I especially enjoyed depicting in this novel was what remained of the Mother Goddess religion and its many manifestations. In his early life as a man, Teiresias worshipped Apollo.  His abrupt thrust into the female realm shows her all she missed. In mythology, Teiresias has three daughters, Manto, Historis, and Daphne. In my version, Daphne is born during the seven years she’s Teira. To answer Zeus and Hera as Teiresias does, he had to have to felt the full range of female experience.

All in all, Serpent Visions is the result of more than two decades of puzzle solving in the mythic realm.

.