Hera's Revenge

What mythology can tell us about what was important

Myths tell us what was important in the culture from which that myth emerged. As a child, one of my favorite books was Famous Myths of the Golden Age. It told and illustrated a few of the myriad stories from the ancient Greeks. But I enjoyed Bible stories just as much, as well as fairy tales, and fables.

I use the term ‘myth’ with some tension. ‘Myths’ weren’t supposed to be real. Not true in the sense that history was true and there was always the low-grade contempt that ancient people thought the season existed because Hades kidnapped Persephone. Myths were like Kipling’s Just-So Stories, a naive way of describing how the universe worked.

But when I read them, they felt real. Not simply in the sense that I wanted to live in a world where strange things could happen at any time, but in that something about them felt true in the most primal sense. Those aren’t the words I would have used then, but I read those stories over and over, even the dark ones, and I remember the feelings.

It turns out those feelings were accurate. Joseph Campbell began studying myths from different cultures at a time when such things weren’t taken seriously. He was mocked and dissuaded from following that persistent curiosity. His work and others’ have allowed us to understand that myths are maps of how to best live our lives. They illustrate primal human traits and what goes wrong if we let them run wild in the culture in which they were written.

Surrendering to desire could start a war [Troy/Ilium]. Too much pride or not enough conscientiousness will bring us crashing to the ground, as with the stories of Icarus, Phaeton, or Bellerophon. Greed can turn what matters to us into something cold and hard, as happened to Midas. Stories are like tiny ethical dilemmas where we can feel the consequences of the wrong choice without having to live them and maybe wreck our lives in the process.

It’s good to start that thought process when a child is young.

There are a lot of ancient myths with female characters who appear, from a modern perspective, to have very confusing motivations. Hera’s behavior, for example, is obsessively and unpleasantly vengeful, and there are no obvious consequences for her. Hera is cruel even toward women whom Zeus literally rapes. The queen of the gods prevents Alcmene, the mother of Heracles from giving birth, then sends poisonous snakes to kill the child, and drives the future hero to madness. Hera also prevented Leto from giving birth, and killed Lamia’s children.

Why not just leave the bastard for cheating? To the modern eye, Hera is an unappealing role model. Writers who have attempted to reclaim her as a model haven’t done a convincing job. [At least not to me.]

For her veneration and mythology to make sense, we need to consider what life was like four thousand years ago. The likelihood that any person died by violence was statistically very high. Children died in very high numbers, and monogamy wasn’t considered important religiously until Christianity made it so. The ancient monument-building cities were mostly constructed with slave labor. Evidence for this is shown in the extensive list of booty brought back by various kings. This included females of childbearing age who were classified as livestock.

Women were exceptionally vulnerable to violence, [we still are] with our greater physical investment in child-rearing. Until recently, there was little or no option to leave one’s husband, and having a good husband greatly increased the likelihood that children would survive to adulthood. The more resources a man was able to accumulate, the more likely it was that his offspring would survive. This gave women an incentive to choose a mate who was as far up on the heap as possible. [Assuming they were allowed any choice at all. Which is a pretty big assumption.] A women who was married to a man with resources always had competition.

Hera modeled what women must have wished to do to that competition.

The urge for vengeful behavior in women isn’t something feminist ideology would like us to think about. In the feminist framework, women are better than men, and certainly more moral and ethical. I don’t buy it. That’s not even a good fairy tale. Women are different from men. We struggle with different drives and urges than men. And everyone knows this. [Denial is not a river in Egypt.] Women can’t afford a physical fight. There’s too much risk of harming a child in the womb or on the arm. So we engage in reputation destruction instead. A goddess would have no such limitations. Surely women of that time enjoyed hearing about the humbling of any rivals.

I don’t think things have changed that much. In the last season of Yellowstone, a woman at a bar tries to pick up Rip. Knowing the character of Rip’s wife, the ensuing violence is not only predictable but embarrassingly satisfying. Most women don’t choose physical aggression for the reasons above. But we are still capable of getting as angry as Hera if another woman tries to impose on what is ours.

In the historical record, There seems to be little commentary on what women wanted or needed. But why would those doing the writing have any idea? Women didn’t have agency in the ancient world. They didn’t have the rights or freedoms that men did. [Women in less densely populated areas often had more agency, but they also had more risk.] Therefore, women used the tools they had at their disposal that worked for them to further their goals: Physical attractiveness, emotional savvy, sex, status, and reputation destruction. And poison when they were sufficiently motivated.

Evolutionary biologists Heather Heying, Ph.D., and Brett Weinstein, Ph.D. [I’m a fan of their podcast.]believe humans are evolving toward monogamy, and there’s literature to support that. Even in the ancient world, monogamy existed. The story of Baucis and Philemon tells of an elderly couple who are so devoted to each other that Zeus turns them into a pair of intertwining trees so they never need to be parted.

But Baucis and Philemon were poor. No doubt, the more resources a man had, the more temptation a woman had to try and claim some of them. Zeus was a notorious horn dog and the king of the gods. Hera didn’t have a chance of corralling him. But she kept trying. She always forgave him. Eventually.

Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. She has direct communication with her gods and they’ve always given her answers when she asks. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. Be warned.