Women and Mythology

[Icarus]

Eve and Pandora. Very similar stories. Both blamed for the pains that plague humanity. Also shows the status of women. The very first of them were already cursed for being too curious. They were the beautiful evil.

So the place of women in the society can be gauged from the religious texts that the society follows.

What matriarchal societies are there/were there? And what religious beliefs do they follow? Are their myths different when it comes to perceiving the female gender.

Do we have equality amongst gender because we seem to have shifted our dependence on religion. Or are slowly moving towards a secular-rational society. Where religion is just a matter of convenience?

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by Icarus

Eve and Pandora. Very similar stories. Both blamed for the pains that plague humanity. Also shows the status of women. The very first of them were already cursed for being too curious. They were the beautiful evil.

So the place of women in the society can be gauged from the religious texts that the society follows.

I don't see any reason to accept the conclusion you draw in the last sentence underlined above. Nonetheless, your title and first sentences have had me scrambling all day to find a book that I read some years ago that seemed fitting. Never mind that I thought the gal was Calliope, & never mind I thought 'Death' was in the title, because I finally found it in spite of those errors.

The book is The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso. Here is a bit from a review blog to start you off. I recall that I enjoyed the read.

Originally Posted by Sara Maitland

At the same time we need to have them retold, remembered, revitalized for our own time and Calasso has done it. He has found a language so fabulous that it feels inevitable and a multilayered structure that perfectly reflects the sense of change, fluidity, uncertainty, metamorphosis which is the stuff of this body of tales. He has entered into a long tradition, paying proper debts to Ovid and Homer, without any subservience or loss of his own voice. What this book must be like in the Italian original I hardly dare think, but Calasso is, I must suspect, well served by his translator Tim Parks, for the whole book reads richly, sinuously, and naturally.

The book itself then is a delight, but more - it made me think. Why isn't contemporary Christianity producing texts like this? Our stories are as good and as culturally pervasive. Calasso says of his tales: "These things have never happened, but they are always." Why are we Christians so conspicuously failing to find a language, a grasp on our own tradition, which would enable us to say the same only better: "These things have happened and they are always"? Why are we rendered anxious and irritable by the psychological depths of imaginative and emotionally engaged faith? Why are we so patently terrified of Mary's virginity, of angels, and of miracles? ...

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. - book reviews | Commonweal | Find Articles at BNET