by Naomi Wolf
And from the beginning of recorded history, every early culture that has been studied had a version of a sex goddess, from the Sumerian creation epic Gilgamesh’s Inanna to the many versions of Ashtaroth worshipped in ancient Mesopotamia, to the sixth-century-BCE Egyptian goddess Astarte who grew out of Ashtaroth worship, and onward to the cultures of classical antiquity, Greece and Rome.
Five thousand years ago in what is now Iraq, Inanna’s vulva was worshipped as a sacred site; Sumerian hymns praised the goddess’s “lap of honey,” compared her vulva to “a boat of heaven,” and celebrated the bounty that “pours forth from her womb.” The connection of her sexuality to the earth’s fertility was so direct that even lettuces were described as the pubic hair of the Goddess.4 Inanna’s vagina was magical, a locus of pure holiness: “Inanna . . . leaned against the apple tree / When she leaned against the apple tree, her vulva was wondrous to behold / Rejoicing at her wondrous vulva, the young woman Inanna applauded herself / She said, I, the Queen of Heaven, shall visit the God of Wisdom. . . .”5
The core of the Sumerian religion was a “Sacred Marriage” between the shepherd god Tammuz and Inanna: coins from this era show Inanna spreading her legs wide apart in sacred congress with Tammuz.6 Women worshippers dedicated vases symbolizing the uterus to Inanna. A sacred text of the period notes that “Once the Holy Inanna had washed / Then was she sprinkled with cedar oil. / The King then proudly approached her sacred lap. / He proudly joined with the glorious triangle of Inanna. / And Tammuz, the bridegroom, lay with her / Tenderly pressing her beautiful breasts!” Inanna’s “wondrous vagina” is connected with the search for wisdom. Eventually all the early major Goddess religions included a male consort, with whom the Goddess would copulate in sacred marriage.
Qadesh, a variant on the Astarte archetype, the Egyptian goddess of nature, beauty, and sexual pleasure, was portrayed as a naked woman standing on the back of a lion, adorned with a crescent moon headdress. She was often shown holding snakes or papyrus plants in her right hand, which represented the penis; and in her left hand, lotus flowers, which stood for the vagina. Serpent symbology often accompanied representations of sex goddesses. Minoan goddess figures also depicted the Goddess bare-breasted, holding a snake in each hand. The story of Eve, tempted by the serpent into the original sin of her shameful female sexuality, is a later, Hebraic negative transposition of the sacred symbolism of the Goddess with her serpent.
Throughout the Fertile Crescent, worship of the sex goddess Astarte/Ashtharoth was universal in the period before the rise of the Hebrew patriarchal God. Goddess worship in this period identified Astarte with sexual generation, but also with the wisdom of the cosmos itself. But, as Judaism grew away from its Sumerian antecedents, all aspects of Goddess worship were gradually transformed into negatives, as the younger religion sought to focus its followers on a masculine version of the One God.7 When the Hebrews developed monotheism, they did so in a context in which the Goddess religions had developed a system of sacred priestesses. At certain points in the calendar, these priestesses would copulate with male worshippers, a practice seen as bringing into the community the order and goodness of the Divine Feminine. Worshippers regarded sacred prostitutes reverentially, and in no way as degraded sex workers. There are many steles that depict these sexual priestesses having what was considered to be sacred intercourse with male worshippers.
The Hebrews’ aversion to this form of worship—which again and again tempted the tribes of Israel—their political struggle to compete with such a religion, and the consequent hostility to the tradition of the sacred prostitute, are all evident in the horror with which the Five Books of Moses speak about unconstrained female sexuality, and especially about “harlotry.” The Hebrews recast what had been seen as divine unions as abominations.
The worship of the sacred vagina and of female sexuality as metaphors for a larger divinity extended, before the arrival of Christianity, to Europe. In pre-Christian Ireland, and even into the Christian era, stoneworkers carved many Sheela-na-Gig figures on the outer walls of buildings. In these carvings, naked women—representing the “sacred hags” of Celtic mythology, and, as we saw, symbolizing liminality—are portrayed with their legs apart, hands holding open their labia.8 Some architectural historians believe that even the dimensional, peaked stone folds that form the entrances of medieval European cathedrals incorporate vaginal imagery from this pre-Christian tradition. (Indeed, I was startled once as I wandered about the peaceful, and traditionally sacred, island of Iona, in the Scottish Hebrides, when I looked up onto the outer wall of an ancient nunnery and saw large and elegant labia carved, with nothing else around them, into the convent’s stone wall.)
But sex goddesses were not all sweetness and light: in every culture that worshipped the Goddess, though she had a majestic and alluring aspect, she also had another aspect that was dark and potentially destructive. Many cultures have a version of what anthropologists call “the vagina dentata.” This means, literally, “the vagina with teeth.” In his Theogony, for instance, the Greek poet Hesiod described the unborn god Kronos reaching out from his mother’s womb to castrate his father, Ouranos. In Hindu mythology, the demon Adi, in the form of the goddess Parvati, has teeth in the vagina. Author Erich Neumann, in his account of Goddess worship, The Great Mother, identifies the vagina dentata motif also in North American Indian mythology, in which “a meat-eating fish inhabits the vagina of the Terrible Mother.”9 Inuit myths also describe women with dog heads where the vagina should be. The archetypal and universal association (usually by men) of the vagina with the mouth make the vagina dentata a universal and timeless symbol of male anxiety about engulfment and annihilation by a threatening Mother—so universal that Sigmund Freud would explore this symbol in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.10 These universal vagina dentata images are not about personal aversion to the human vagina, I believe; rather, they are archetypal images that are a necessary balance to the reverence for women’s life-giving powers. They address the inevitable dark side of the Goddess by acknowledging that destruction is the other side of generation, that incarnation—the womb, the birth canal—is a gateway into being, but that incarnation also inevitably leads to death.
THE VAGINA BECOMES PROFANE
While some of the power and seductiveness associated with the earlier goddesses still appeared in Greek narratives of female Eros and desire, women’s subordinated status was complete with the establishment of the first Greek city-states. Some ancient Goddess symbolism survived into the classical period; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for instance, in the story of Cadmus and Arethusa, Arethusa is converted into a serpent—which represents, counterintuitively, the vulva—and the man into a fountain, representing the penis. Another figure who echoes the powerful vagina symbolism in Goddess-worshipping antiquity is that of Baubo, who lifts her skirt to show her vulva, and who makes Demeter—who has lost her daughter, Persephone—laugh once again. Demeter’s laughter helps restore fertility to a world threatened with barrenness by her grief.
No historian has conclusively explained how women lost status in the transition from the earliest civilizations to those of classical antiquity. By Plato’s time (427–347 BCE), sexual perfection was seen as the union between a man and a boy; Greek wives were strictly for reproduction. Pleasure for women was restricted to the class of hetairae, or the courtesan class; wives were well contained behind the walls of private homes and immured in legally subordinated marriage. An exception was the poetess Sappho of Lesbos, who celebrated female eroticism, giving us the first vibrant metaphors in the Western poetic tradition for female arousal and orgasm.
Even the nature of female desire became hypothetical and contested in the classical period. Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BCE) believed that both women and men needed to climax—both “bursting forth seed”—in order for conception to occur, but Aristotle (384–322 BCE) noted, in contrast, that women did not need to be aroused in order to conceive.
The Roman physic
ian Galen (129–c. 200 CE) believed that the vagina was an inside-out penis: as Thomas Laqueur expresses the Galenic paradigm, “Women . . . are inverted, and hence less perfect, men. They have exactly the same organs but in exactly the wrong places.”11 Galen’s influence extended for centuries after he was rediscovered in the Middle Ages. (He also recommended that single women masturbate for the sake of their health.) The Greeks maintained a concept of the floating uterus—they believed that the uterus traveled throughout a woman’s body, and they developed the notion that women’s nervous aspect and other diseases were caused by these agitations of the uterus, a belief the Romans adopted (the root of the term hysteria—hyster—comes from the Greek word for “womb”).
THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN VAGINA: THE EVOLUTION OF SHAME
Woman is defective and misbegotten.
—Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
While the Hebrew Bible was intent on condemning the “harlotry” of the sacred prostitutes of the polytheistic religions that dominated in the Fertile Crescent, as we saw, it almost never mentions the vagina directly, except euphemistically. But it does contain passages that eloquently express female sexual desire. The Song of Songs contains many subtle metaphors for female arousal and orgasm. The Hebrew tradition had not promoted a mind-body split, and sex was still sacred within the confines of marriage: rabbinical exigesis in the post-Exilic period insisted that a devout man must satisfy his wife sexually at least weekly, depending on his profession.
But Paul, a Hellenized Jew, introduced to the first-century-CE Jewish-Christian and pagan-Christian communities around the Mediterranean the Hellenic concept that the mind and the body are at war with each other. His letters codified the notion—so influential in the next two millennia—that sexuality is shameful and wrong, and that unbridled female sexuality, even within marriage, is particularly shameful and wrong. With the rise of the church in Europe and the spread of the Holy Roman Empire, Paul’s teachings become synonymous with Christianity, and Christianity, with Western culture itself.
THE CHURCH FATHERS: THE HATEFUL VAGINA
The rise of a Western ideology that cast the vagina as being especially hateful, and that portrayed female sexuality in general as a toxic lure to perdition, reached its formative point with Paul then with the Church Fathers of the subsequent four centuries. The Hebrew Bible certainly excoriates female sexuality that circumvents the boundaries of marriage—you can stone your daughter to death for fornication, for instance—but it also has harsh words condemning male infidelity and excess. Within marriage, both male and female sexuality are seen as blessings. The vagina is addressed, in Leviticus and in the Mishnah, in terms of menstrual uncleanness: women must abstain from sex, take ritual baths, and, the Mishnah maintains, use “testing-rags” in the “depressions and folds” of the vagina to ensure they are free of blood after the menses, and before sex.12,13
But the vagina that is hateful even within marriage, and the ideal of female virginity as a sexual status, arose only in the four post-Pauline centuries, especially around North Africa. The Church Fathers, who were practicing very extreme forms of asceticism in all-male environments and abasing the flesh in various ways, sought to outdo one another in reviling the flesh of women as sexual beings in particular. Paul had written, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman . . . [I]f they have not constancy, let them marry, for it is better to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9). But Tertullian took this Pauline idea much further: now, intercourse was only for the begetting of children; and he cast women as seductresses luring men into a Satanic abyss of sexuality.14 To him the vagina was “a temple built over a sewer,” “the Devil’s gateway”: “And do you know that you are [each] an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that [forbidden] tree: you are the first deserter of the Divine law . . . on account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of Man had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself?”15
The imprint of the equation of a female “virgin” with someone who is “good” and “pure” is so deep we scarcely think about whether those terms have any actual relationship; we assume the equation is an ancient notion, but the idea of the “pure” Christian virgin is fairly recent. Biblical scholars generally agree that the ideology of Mary’s sacred virginity was a much belated construct of the Church, and that it cannot be confirmed in the original texts of the New Testament, which suggest that Mary had several children. The complex creed about Mary’s virginity that we inherit was accepted, indeed, only five centuries after the events described or narrated in the New Testament—officially only in 451 CE, at the Council of Chalcedon.16
Little evidence survives of how the vagina was portrayed or understood in the Dark Ages, and the little there is comes from medical texts. In spite of the Church Fathers, for the first fifteen hundred years CE, Western women were still seen as needing sexual satisfaction if reproduction was to take place. Sexual frustration in women was understood for a millennium and a half as causing disease and mental suffering; in Hippocrates’ era, doctors used genital massage on their female patients, or tasked a midwife with the therapy. The practice of prescribing medicinal genital massage to orgasm, as a remedy for “hysteria,” lasted until the Tudor and Stuart periods in England.
As noted earlier, Galen, whose influence resurfaced in the Middle Ages, had developed a model of the female genitals’ being an outside-in version of the male. The ancient Greeks had also maintained that women ejected semen, which contributed to conception. Since the uterus was understood to migrate around the body, women who had no sexual outlet were seen as being at risk of suffering from the unexpelled semen in their wombs corrupting their bodies, and sending “filthy vapors to the brain.”17
Well into the Middle Ages, informal affection alternated with official condemnation of the vagina. A fair amount of folklore and bawdry in the late Middle Ages treat the vagina with a kind of colloquial affection—as in the play on the word queynte in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales, which dates to the end of the fourteenth century. In “The Miller’s Tale,” at line 90, we read, “Pryvely he caughte hire by the queynte.”18 (In 1380, queynte was pronounced “cunt.”) In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer uses the word cunt not as an obscenity, but as it was used commonly in that era—in a simply lusty, descriptive manner.
This era, in spite of ideals of courtly love, also saw the beginnings of practices aimed at harming or constraining the vagina in new ways. The chastity belt, for instance, was invented in the early Middle Ages. Its use continued into the high Middle Ages. These were not delicate garments, but actual body locks made of metal. The device surrounded the wearer’s hips with two iron bands, and a third iron band went between her legs. That band was closed with a lock. A woman’s husband, if he wished to travel or was departing for a war, would literally lock up his wife’s vagina, and take the key with him. The device did not simply prevent intercourse; it also made hygiene difficult, caused severe abrasions, and is best seen as a domestic instrument of torture.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the “witch craze” swept through Europe. Its effect was to target female sexuality in multiple and terrifying new ways. In community after community, the women identified by inquisitors or by their fellow villagers as “witches” were often those who were seen as too sexual, or too free. And forms of torture focused on their sexuality. The “Pear of Anguish” was a torture device used on victims of all genders. It was a pear-shaped object made of iron that expanded inside the victim as the torturer turned screws. When it was inflicted on men, it was introduced into the mouth. But when it was used on women accused of witchcraft, or of inducing abortion, it was inserted into the vagina and expanded. During the witch craze in Europe in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, women’s vaginas were targeted in searches for the “witches’ mark” or “devil’s m
ark” sought in their body cavities. Inquisitors also had suspected heretical women’s vaginas mutilated.19
The Renaissance period in Europe saw the rise of the study of anatomy and, once again, the rediscovery of the clitoris. In this period, women were seen as sexually inexhaustible, and female sexuality was viewed as more overpowering than male sexual response—it was still taken for granted that women had to reach orgasm in order to conceive.
Dr. Emma Rees, a British literary scholar at the University of Chester who has written about the vagina in Elizabethan and Victorian literature, argues that Elizabethans intentionally elided the meanings of “lips” and “labia.” She shows the similarities between two technologies of control from that era—chastity belts and “scold’s bridles”—and she argues that Elizabethan audiences saw verbal and sexual license in women in similar ways. The chastity belt rigidly locked around the female pudenda, she argues, forcing a woman to be sexually inactive or “silent”; and, in the same way, the “scold’s bridle” was a similarly constructed device, made of iron and leather, that locked around a talkative or argumentative woman’s head, and gagged her mouth.20
Shakespeare, ever the neologist, innovated dozens of slang terms for the vagina, from “blackness” in Othello to “boat” in King Lear. Dr. Rees looks at all the vaginas in Shakespeare: she cites, for instance, the “detested, dark, blood-drinking pit” of Titus Andronicus. In this play, the heroine, Lavinia, is raped, and her rapists cut out her tongue. Dr. Rees argues that in this mutilation images of lips and labia collide: Lavinia’s mouth and vagina are both assaulted in repeated acts of silencing and control.21
