rose-owl:

dagny-hashtaggart:

mailadreapta:

boatiechat:

frislander:

moghedien:

Apollo: Sister, what are you the goddess of?

Artemis: *lounging by a spring on piles of deerskin surrounded by three dozen naked girls with a dead pan expression* Virginity.

“Heracles, they’re lesbians”.

Note that the concept of “virginity” in Ancient times merely meant “unmarried”, and had nothing to do with sexual activity. Some priestesses were “virgins” because they chose (or were committed to) a life of worship, but it was merely a question of social status, not of personal choice or practice. Of course, one can suppose that this lifestyle would be rather attractive for lesbians.

So when Artemis is said to be the Goddess of Virgins, it is meant to be understood as “Goddess of Unmarried Women”, or, quite possibly literally, of lesbians. 

(It’s only Christianity that reframed the concept of virginity to mean “never had sex”. Many ancient religions has “Virgin goddesses”, which symbolized feminine power, and in this case too it meant “untied to a man”, or “whole for herself”)

So, as is usual with Tumblr, this post is a lie based on a bit of half-remembered scholarship which has been twisted around for maximum wokeness.

First: I cannot find any evidence at all that the Vestal Virgins of the Roman religion were anything but completely celibate virgins. Since the Vestal Virgins are probably the #1 or #2 most famous religious virginal orders of the ancient world, that pretty much puts an end to the idea that Christianity invented the virgin in the modern sense.

I think what the above is referring to is something like this doctoral thesis, which examines the actual meaning of parthenia in ancient Greece. I have not yet had time to read the whole thing, but let’s start from here, which lays out the central thesis:

The consensus so far has been that παρθενία is the status of the
marriageable girl, which certainly implies sexual abstinence but without explicitly referring to it. Scholars working on early Greek poetry and maidens’ choruses (Calame 1977) or on the Greek early conflation of the nuptial and funerary rituals (Burkert 1972, Dowden 1989, Rehm
1994) emphasize the social meaning of παρθένος by consistently translating it as “maiden.” In Dowden’s (1989: 2) words, “although [a παρθένος] is expected not yet to have had sexual experience, parthenia does not directly refer to virginity or end with the rupture of the hymen…" Although parthenia was perceived as adversely affected by premature sexual experience (to deflower is to diapartheneuein), the real issue was marriageability and the real contrast was between parthenos and gyne, the married woman. A parthenos is a maiden, not a virgin.”

The idea that a parthenos is “a maiden, not a virgin” is what the above is referring to, but notice that the actual academic citation is quite clear that maidenhood implies virginity. That is, being sexually chaste is a necessary but not sufficient condition to be a parthenos.

So in conclusion, the Christians did not invent virginity as we currently understand it, the ancient Greeks and Romans definitely expected their daughters to be virginal before marriage, and don’t believe anything you read on Tumblr until you’ve checked the sources.

Yeah, often terms like “virgo” and “parthenos” meant more like “celibate” or “chaste”: the Vestals, e.g., did not technically have to be virgins in the modern sense of never having had sex, but they were expected to be celibate during their priestly tenure. Saying that the idea had no connection to sex seems dubious, and
“it was merely a question of social status, not choice or practice” is definitely wrong. (They were usually virgins in the modern sense, because most of them were committed to the priesthood while they were children, but there were cases of adult women being selected to replace Vestals who died, and they had to be celibate but not necessarily virginal.)

Also the concept of virgin births/conception without sexual intercourse is attested in various religious traditions that emerged around the same time as Christianity (e.g. Mithraism), and some that predated it (e.g. Zoroastrianism).

Moreover, the implication that the classical analogues of the term “virgin” were used euphemistically for lesbians seems odd because by and large the ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t have a problem with homosexuality per se. There were certainly forms and instances of same-gender romance and sex that were looked down on, but the notion that the simple fact of two people of the same sex being involved with one another would have to be danced around in the “spinster aunt” way common in some historical Christian and Muslim societies has no basis in fact as far as I’m aware. While sources on women in general are pretty rare in classical Greek texts, we do have historical evidence of relationships between Spartan women in a mold similar to the erastes-eromenos pattern found in much of ancient Greece, as well as mentions of women’s involvement with other women in Plato.

Hey wait didn’t Artemis have a boyfriend at one point? I think her bro even got jealous enough to have him killed.