Nevertheless, whenever we mention women’s rituals, we inevitably talk
about bodily movement, especially that of female bodies. Various female rituals
have different meanings. I will take two examples, the Greek rituals and the witches’
Sabbat, to elaborate the gender issue reflected in these rituals. One of Greek rituals
aims at celebrating the resurrection of Dionysus. Tradition has it that Dionysus is the
son of the god Zeus and the woman Semele. Zeus’ wife Hera, after discovering the
truth, throws Dionysus into a fire. Fortunately, he is rescued by a nymph. The dying
and rebirth Dionysus has gone through represent a lifecycle of birth, growth, decay,
death, and regeneration, and the four seasons, spring, summer, fall and winter. In
addition, Dionysus is the god of wine, fertility and agriculture. During the ritual
worshiping Dionysus, the dances and singing seem to symbolize the Dionysiac spirit
of enthusiasm and passion. Ritual taboos and preparations have endowed people
with the restraint of morality and the individual’s value. As the proceedings go on,
the power of the gathering and the strength of contagion deepen their collective
consciousness, and the ethnicity can be more closed and cohesive.
From this perspective, rituals tend more to religious belief, the divine, and it is
apparent that most participants are women. Generally speaking, the ritual is the only
avenue to enter public space from the oikos (house) and it is the only space to be
seen. In Citizen Bacchae. Women’s Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece, Barbara Goff
elaborates how women’s role in rituals is often related to their outstanding
contributions in the realm of the domestic, and owing to their particular ‘works’,
women play distinctive parts in birth, weddings and especially funerals.21
21 Barbara Goff. Citizen Bacchae. Women’s Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece, p25-p30.
This is
the tricky aspect. Men consider that childbirth and death are both polluted and dark.
An infant comes from the mother’s womb, the dark space, and a corpse goes back to
the complete darkness. It seems that men are not willing to share this sort of ‘bodily
disorder,’ or that women, in essence, are uncanny in men’s eyes. Does ritual become
the medium of an intangible constraint on women’s activities in patriarchal society?
Does it imply that men, in fact, have the authority to control women’s matters of life
and death by emphasizing their subjectivity?
In some ways, ritual is a sort of demonstration. Through religious and official
sanctions in public, it demonstrates that the authority or the patriarchy has the
absolute power to control the corporal sphere, including, of course, women’s bodies
and desires. But from another perspective it could induce an effect of women’s
autonomy in a patriarchal/men’s world. “The roles women played in ritual also
taught them their identity in society.”22 Yet Barbara Goff explores her thoughts
about the funeral part with the statement, “True, women are prominent in such
important roles as mourning the dead but this prominence not only recognizes their
presence, agency, and cultural vale but also rehearses the justifications of their
marginal status.”23
If we consider the gender aspect of the rituals, the subject is complex and hard
to simplify. “In the delegation of real ritual responsibilities gender was often a
consideration; but gender is never a simple category, and the relationship between
22 http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2005/2005-04-12.html.
23 Barbara Goff. Citizen Bacchae. Women’s Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece, p.35.
gender and ritual is not always transparent”.24 Greek convention meant that women
and men could not share the same space, for example, the incubation of the
Amphiareion at Oropos. The dormitory was divided into two regions. Women had to
sleep in the space to the west and men to the east of the altar. The distinction
between east and west signifies the dawn and the evening, the light and the darkness,
and life and death. Susan Guettel Cole writes that “women naturally belong to the
propitious place. In some rituals, women had no place at all” What is more, the
imagery of evening, darkness and death in some senses refer to the moon, the lunar
goddess, which is an emblem of metamorphic obscurity. The moon is linked to the
cosmic cycles and such correlation is most established in the field of nurture,
agriculture and fertility, times of birth and women’s menstrual cycles. Because of the
cycle of the moon, the menstrual periodicity of women is often considered to be part
of the lunar goddess. Women are the earthly moon. The moon goddess has three
aspects: as she waxes, she is the Maiden; full, she is the Mother; as she wanes, she is
the Crone.25
Another notable example is the witches’ Sabbat or the “witchcraft rituals” and
it is also one of the key features of demonology. Sabbat is a secret gathering for Women’s mystic power comes from the periodical change.
Sabbat
24 Susan Guettel Cole. Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: the Ancient Greek Experience, pp.94-95.
25 Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, p.104.
witches who ride on broomsticks, flying at night to worship demons or Satan and
indulging in diabolism, for example, eating roasted or boiled infants. The sites are
always located in quiet, secluded forests where they do what witches are supposed to
do, and they congregate around the bonfire in order to wait for the ritual’s coming.
In the course of the ritual, the covens drink, sing and dance naked and with curly
tresses. Here, the cycle or circle has a meaning of “between the worlds”. In theory, a
circle is a boundary to keep and concentrate the power within and to protect the
magician from any evil without.26
Has anyone ever witnessed the rituals of the witches’ Sabbat? The answer is
largely no, and most of the descriptions come from artists’ and historians’
fabrications. Baldung Grien Hans, a German painter before the Reformation,
produced thirteen paintings of witches between 1512 and 1517. One painting, the