[Zeus speaks] Son of Iapetus [Prometheus], you who know counsels beyond all others, you are pleased that you have stolen fire and beguiled my mind – a great grief for you yourself, and for men to come. To them I shall give in exchange for fire an evil in which they may all take pleasure in their spirit, embracing their own evil.
Hesiod, Theogony: Works & Days, 54-59
In this myth, Zeus’ anger over Prometheus stealing fire, caused him to curse men with Pandora, the first woman. The very creation of women was explained, in patriarchal mythology, as a punishment to men for something they didn’t even do. Through this foundational myth, ancient Greece became a culture so patriarchal that women weren’t citizens, had no control over whom they would marry, didn’t vote, couldn’t go to the theater, and couldn’t be abroad by themselves or even live in the same parts of the house as men.
How did that culture square itself with the fact that priestesses at the temples were not under the control of a father or husband? They made their own money and often became wealthy. Their sexuality was under their own control, as were their children. The grounds of temples like Eleusis held many statues that priestesses had commissioned of themselves because they had the money to do so. In such a misogynistic culture, it seemed that priestesses were a whole different class of woman, and their children, seen as fathered by gods, were a whole different class of child.
Since there clearly was a very powerful mother god in the millennia before monotheistic patriarchal religion, it stands to reason that some cultures were at least egalitarian if not completely matriarchal – in fact we know they were. Since it was obvious who gave birth, many ancient cultures traced the line of descent through the mother (matrilineal). And many cultures were also matri-local, meaning that a new husband joined his wife’s family. The children belonged to her, and the land and house belonged to the her as well. He was little more than a guest who was expected to work.
There was no moment of sudden change when we became patriarchal. Instead, cultures change at a glacial rate. Both styles of culture existed side by side for a very long time.
How did the priestesses of the ancient Hellenistic world come by so much power? Perhaps they never let go of it in the first place. Perhaps, the old system of powerful women and the new system of oppressed women existed side by side, much as progressives and conservatives do today – with all kinds of middle ground between the ends of the poles.
Look at our own political divides. The sides seem like completely different cultures, and yet we exist together, however uneasily. Perhaps the Christian’s destruction of the old temples and libraries also obliterated any remaining vestiges of this other way of seeing the world - through the eyes of women - a way of being which privileged the importance of motherhood. Perhaps, attempting to destroy the historical record was a way of promoting a father god as part of a centuries-long battle to remove all traces of worship of a mother god or any political power for her representatives on earth – women.