fighting women of the Celts were in fact legendary for their power and ferocity – an awestruck Roman historian, Dio Cassius, describes Boudicca, queen of the Iceni, as she appeared in battle, ‘wielding a spear, huge of frame and terrifying of aspect’.31 The same belligerence was remarked in the female squaddies: another Roman chronicler who had seen active service warned his compatriots that a whole troop of Roman soldiers would not withstand a single Gaul if he called his wife to his aid, for ‘swelling her neck, gnashing her teeth, and brandishing sallow arms of enormous size she delivers blows and kicks like missiles from a catapult.’32
Stories of women fighters have always been most persistent around the Mediterranean and the Near East, and from earliest times written and oral accounts record the existence of a tribe of women warriors who have come down to history as the Amazons. The absence of any ‘hard’ historical data (archaeological remains of a city, or carved inscriptions detailing famous victories, for instance) means that these accounts have been treated as pure myth or legend, ‘nothing more than the common travellers’ tales of distant foreigners who do everything the wrong way about’, as the Oxford Classical Dictionary dismissively explains. Feminist historians of the twentieth century have also been uneasy with the Amazon story, finding it an all-too-convenient reinforcement of history’s insistence on the inevitability of male dominance, as the Amazon women were always finally defeated and raped/married by heroes like Theseus. Another problem lies in the evidently false and fanciful interpretation of the name ‘Amazon’, from Greek a (without) and mazos (breast). This is now known to be linguistically spurious as well as anatomically ridiculous – how many women have a right breast so large that they cannot swing their arm? – and consequently the whole idea of the tribe of women who amputated their breasts in order to fight has been discredited.
But wholesale dismissal of the subject is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The written accounts, ranging from the gossip of story-tellers to the work of otherwise reliable historians, are too numerous and coherent to be ignored; and anything which could engage the serious attention and belief of writers as diverse as Pliny, Strabo, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Diodorus and Plutarch holds a kernel of hard information that later generations have too readily discarded. The body of myth and legend also receives historical support from the numerous rituals, sacrifices, mock-battles and ceremonials of later ages confidently ascribed to Amazon origins by those who practised them, as commemorations of key episodes of their own past history.33
As with the wider question of matriarchy, to which the concept of a self-governing tribe of powerful women so clearly relates, the way forward lies in the synthesis of myth and legend with the incontrovertible events of ‘real’ history. Women fought, as war-leaders and in the ranks; women fought in troops, as regular soldiers; and the principal symbol of the Great Goddess, appearing widely throughout the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, was the double-headed battle axe or labrys. There are, besides, innumerable authenticated accounts like that of the Greek warrior-poet Telessilla, who in the fifth century B.C. rallied the women of Argos with war-hymns and chants when their city was besieged. The Argive Amazons took up arms, made a successful sally and after prolonged fighting, drove off the enemy, after which they dedicated a temple of Aphrodite to Telessilla, and she composed a victory hymn to honour the Great Mother of the gods.34 Marry this and the mass of similar evidence of Amazon activity among women, and it is clear that, as with matriarchy, there may have been no one Amazon tribe, but the historical reality of women fighting can no longer be doubted.
Women claimed the ultimate freedom.
The physical autonomy expressed by these women through sport and military activity speaks of a deeper freedom, and one that later ages found most difficult to tolerate or even adequately explain. Customs varied from country to country and tribe to tribe, but it is evident that women at the birth of civilization generally enjoyed a far greater freedom from restraint on their ‘modesty’ or even chastity than at any time afterwards. For many societies there was no shame in female nakedness, for instance, and this did not simply mean the unclothed body of a young girl athlete or gymnast. Adult women in fact practised regular cult-nakedness, frequetly disrobing for high ceremonials and important rituals either of a solemn or a joyful kind. The evidence of Attic vases dating from the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. shows that women mourners and usually the widow herself walked naked in the funeral cortège of any Athenian citizen.
With this physical freedom went certain key sexual freedoms of the sort one would expect to find in a matriarchal society. Where women rule, women woo; and of twenty erotic love-songs from the Egypt of the thirteenth century B.C., sixteen are by women. One shamelessly records, ‘I climbed through the window and found my brother in his bed – my heart was overwhelmed with happiness.’ Another is even more frank: ‘O my handsome darling! I am dying to marry you and become the mistress of all your property!’35 Customs elsewhere in the world were less flowery and more basic. When Julia Augusta, wife of the Roman Emperor Severus, quizzed a captive Scots woman about the sexual freedoms British women were reputed to enjoy, the Scot reproved her with, ‘We fulfil the demands of nature much better than do you Roman women, for we consort openly with the best man, while you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.’36 Fulfilling the demands of nature did not apply only to human beings, as Elise Boulding explains:
The free ways in which Celtic women utilized sex come out in the stories of Queen Maedb, who offered ‘thigh-friendship’ to the owner of a bull for the loan of it [to service her cows]. She also offered thigh-friendship in return for assistance in raids and battles. Apparently all parties, including her husband, considered these deals reasonable.37
Equally reasonable, apparently, were the rights and dues that women claimed not in pursuit of their own pleasure but for the honour of the Great Goddess. These were extensive, ranging from ritual self-exposure to far darker mysteries whose disclosure brought the risk of death to the betrayer. At the simplest level, the worship of the Goddess seems to have been conducted naked or only half-clothed: a cave painting from Cogul near Lerida in Catalonia shows nine women with full pendulous breasts clad only in caps and bell-shaped skirts performing a ritual fertility dance around a small male figure with an unpropitiously drooping penis, while Pliny describes the females of ancient Britain as ritually stripping, then staining themselves brown in preparation for their ceremonials.38 Sacred, often orgiastic, dancing was a crucial element of Goddess worship, and the use of intoxicants or hallucinogens to heighten the effect was standard practice: the Goddess demanded complete abandon.
The Goddess also demanded in some cultures a form of sexual service that has been deeply misunderstood by later historians, who as a consequence have misrepresented it under a frankly misleading label. Writing in the fifth century B.C., Herodotus described the ritual as follows:
The worst Babylonian custom is that which compels every woman of the land once in her life to sit in the Temple of Love and have intercourse with some stranger. The men pass by and make their choice, and the women will never refuse, for that would be a sin. After this act she has made herself holy in the sight of the goddess, and goes away to her home.39
This is the practice which wherever it occurs throughout the Near or Middle East is always described as ‘ritual prostitution’. Nothing could more comprehensively degrade the true function of the Gadishtu, the sacred women of the Goddess. For in the act of love these women were revered as the reincarnation of the Goddess herself, celebrating her gift of sex which was so powerful, so holy and precious that eternal thanks were due to her within her temple. To have intercourse with a stranger was the purest expression of the will of the Goddess, and carried no stigma. On the contrary the holy women were always known as ‘sacred ones’, ‘the undefiled’, or as at Urek in Sumeria, nu-gig, ‘the pure or spotless’.40
This unhistorical projection of anachronistic prejudice (sex is sin, and unmarried sex is prostitution) fails to take account
