Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Ancient Goddesses of Sex and War

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Sex and death are often intertwined: one is the start of creation, the other is the end.And as we’ll learn in today’s episode, ancient battlefields were the setting of intimate acts, too. One on one, heart pounding, adrenaline pumping and picking out a partner to…engage with.And so it makes sense that the Ancient world would have gods that meet both needs - sex and death.Joining Kate today is returning friend of Betwixt, Ronald Hutton, to introduce us to some of the fantastic goddesses of yore. Who was the original rock chick? Who was punching above their weight with one goddess? And why don’t religions such as Christianity sexualise their deity?Let’s go Betwixt the Sheets to find out.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts.Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code BETWIXTTHESHEETS1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. It's my, Kate Lister, you're here, I'm here, we're all here. But before we can go any further together, I think you know what's coming your way. Take a seat. Here is your fair do's warning. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about dulty things in an adulty way, about a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too.

And now if you hang around and you get offended, well, tough tits. I don't know what to tell you. Because, fair do's, we did warn you. Thank you for joining me here on the Cypriot shoreline in ancient Grecian times, betwixters. Lay down your beach towel and enjoy the view with me, why don't you? I'd say buy yourself an ice cream, but they haven't been invented yet, so maybe we can have some frozen olives.

But what's that emerging from the water? No time for olives. It's Aphrodite. And as legend has it, she was created from seafone by Cronus castrated. his father Uranus and throwing his genitals into the water. That's quite an origin story, really. So it should be no surprise that Aphrodite will go on to become the ancient goddess of sex and war.

But did you know that she started out as the god of seafaring? Not quite as charismatic, I think you'll agree, but we've all got to start somewhere. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss. by just turning it up and pushing the fun.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Welcome back to Betwixta Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, with me, Kailister. On today's episode, we are in fantastic company, Betwixters. There is, of course, Aphrodite, but we have her Roman equivalent Venus and a whole host of other powerful, beautiful goddesses. And joining us for a return visit is the one the only, the absolute amazing, Ronald Hutton,

who's taken us back to ancient times to introduce us to these magnificent goddesses of sex and war. What were their origin stories? Why, unlike the Christian equivalent, were God so sexualized in the ancient world? And how was it their stories evolved so dramatically? Well, I am ready to find out if you are. Welcome back again! To Ronald Hutton, who is joining me, butwixt the sheet. I couldn't be more excited that he's here.

How are you doing? How are you doing, Kate? Kate, where's your accent from? It's distinctively northern. But I'm not going to put my foot in it by suggesting from which side of the penines you come. I'm born and raised in Cumbria, and I've lived in Leeds since I was 18. So I'm a kind of a bit of a mix mash. Yeah, that's the blend.

That's why I was confused. I've got different twang. on different words. I never thought I had an accent until I started doing this podcast, and then I got people emailing me saying, oh, I'll really like your accent. And now I'm like, oh, okay. But we're not here to talk about accents, although I'd love to get you back to talk about accents. We're talking ancient goddesses of sex, which is right up my street. What brought you to this research and ancient sex goddesses? They're not just sex goddesses. This is the crucial thing. Yeah, we should say that. It's specifically ancient goddesses of sex.

and war, or sex and violence, or as I'm more coyly tend to put it, love and war. Now to a lot of modern people, not least hippies, the idea that love and war should be associated seems very counterintuitive. But right across the ancient world, you find this set of goddesses all the way from Ireland and Scandinavia, right across to Iraq, who combined these two roles. And when you think about it a bit more, which I was forced to do, it actually makes a lot more sense because really what both passionate love and violence do is stir the blood. True. They're really about vital fluids. They're about blood and sweat and semen and the juices

of love when you are revving yourself up to fight somebody or you're being revved up to make love with somebody then your heart's pounding your throat's tightening adrenaline is surfing through you it's actually much the same sensation and in traditional warfare ancient warfare war is very much a one-to-one business as armies clash together warriors pair up and fight each other. Yes. So it's a bit like pairing up for love, except it's pairing up for death.

I'd never thought of it like that. Yeah, you put those things together and you see the association. So goddesses who are rapaciously, magnificently sexual and voracious in that respect were also goddesses who love a fight. I'd never thought of battles before as being like that.

But I've often thought that it's kind of mad that so much of our history is come down to battlefields, fighting, where it's just basically, we'll get as many blocs as we can in a field, and then we'll just hit each other, and whoever's got the most left at the end wins. But I'd never thought of it as being that intimate,

as in it's one-on-one people are dying. That's going to stay with me for a while, Ronald. I need to think about that one, about that being, like, oddly erotic. I'll tell you how I came by this insight, incidentally, or how it came to me strongly. And that is that as retribution for some of the stuff I've done, having written about some wars, particularly the English Civil War, I am patron of a couple of big reenactment events or societies. And in the case of the Civil War, the sealed

not, the oldest and biggest reenactment society in Europe, which reenacts cavaliers and roundheads. And having been made its vice president for life, there's always a historian, a well-known one until me, who's the vice president. And I felt I needed after some years, actually, to go on the battlefield with the people with whom I was associate to see what it was like. And it was quite fun. The combats are quite real. You've got 17th century weapons. You try not hurt each other at all. But if you can touch the torso of the person against whom you're pitted, then they're dead. And it's often quite a matter of skills, rather like boxing or fencing. And as the two armies close together, as you come closer and closer, what you're doing

is selecting the person opposite, whom you're going to fight. And it really is quite intimate. Yeah. Honestly, I'd never thought of that before, but that's absolutely. true. And I've always thought sex and death as being very intimately linked in our psyche because one can be the start of creation, the other one is the end of it. So they're sort of the two halves of the same kind. But that's fascinating. Sex and death are also both obliterating experiences, although the obliteration of sex, the little death, is mild and transitory. That's right. So if you're coming from a Christian perspective, it can be very strange to think that there would be gods and goddesses of sex and death,

because, you know, you've just got the one big guy. And what peoples and cultures would have these kind of beliefs? Who are the sort of the major ones that you have researched? Well, most ancient European and near eastern cultures. Really? Yeah, they're all warlike. Wow. And every human group has sex.

True. So it's widespread. Yeah, the Syrians, the... Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Sumerians, the ancient Egyptians initially, the Romans, the Irish, the Scandinavians, there are probably more people out there, but their ancient deities are less well recorded. Are they always women? Do you get men who are gods of sex and love and death? No, you get lots of war gods. And you do have gods associated with sex, and the sense of fertility of making babies.

But this combination of both in one is distinctively female. I love that. Tell me about the goddess. I'm going to pronounce this horribly, but is it Inana? Yeah. She's the oldest and best recorded of them. And in many ways she's the mother of a lot of the others, in that she influences how people see them.

Inana is really old. She's Sumerian. and they're one of the first civilizations in the world, they seem to have invented writing. Wow. And they probably invented cities. So they're right there at the beginning of civilized life. And Nana is one of their goddesses.

By far the most colorful and striking. She is incredibly highly sexed. She has got an incredible temper. She's incredibly inquisitive. brave, reckless, rash, exploratory. And she really fulfills every female role, except that of a mother or a loyal wife. Her sexual appetite's amazing.

There's a Sumerian story about how a new city asks her to be its patroness, look after it. And she says, yes, on condition that all the adult men line up and have sex with me one by one. Oh, well played, Anna. Wow. And they do this. And when she's worked her way through them, she's preparing to start again.

And they beg her to stop because she's warmed them out totally. And rather grudgingly, she says, OK, the deal has been made. She remains the patroness of that city. Wow. More famously, on another occasion, she wants to go down to the underworld

to see what's there. and overworld goddesses and gods do not go to the underworld. It's breaching a law of nature. But she wants to see what it's like, and she goes down and gets stuck there, technically dead. And that, of course, throws the entire cosmos into chaos, having one of its main deities out of action. And she has to be rescued by this deal whereby her faithless husband replaces her in the underworld for a certain amount of the year. That sounds like the story of Hades and Pesophony. Is that where they get the seasons from?

Yeah, it's exactly the Middle Eastern equivalent. And in fact, the story of Inana and her husband, Amuzi, who becomes Tarmus in Syria, who becomes Adonis in Greece, is probably the origins of the myth of Hades and Pesophany. So was Anana, was she associated with agriculture at all? Or was her remit strictly love and war, and that was her thing? No, she's got a very wide remit. And she starts as a barn goddess.

She's a goddess of the agricultural storehouse. She's married to the god of the palm trees and the farmlands. And so it's an actual alliance. He grows the crops, and she stores them and looks after them. Never forget that storing your food is incredibly vital and perilous. If rodents, rust, damp disease get into your foodstock, you're going to die. You've got nothing for the winter. That makes a, yeah, so a goddess is important.

She's vital. And then later she extends to becoming a goddess of the rain that helps the crops grow. And then thunderstorms. And through thunderstorms of war and conflict. and with the association with the crops and growth, also sex and fertilisation. And then eventually the planet we call Venus, the morning and the evening start. She rises in the morning and calls warriors to arms. And she rises in the evening and calls lovers to each other's arms.

Oh, that's beautiful. And because Inana is associated with this planet, the Romans copy the idea for her. and associate it with their love and war goddess, Venus. And of course, we still call that planet Venus. Before we get on to Venus, I want to talk to you about her. But do we have visual iconography of anana surviving? Like, do we have any sense of what they thought she looked like, how they conceived of this goddess?

Very little. The Sumerians weren't very big upon statues, statues, carvings. What they did do were baked clay seals. and you can't get a great deal of fine detail on those. The kind of classic anana is this rather stick insect-looking lady in a robe. Later on, things get a bit more detailed. The famous relief in the British Museum called the Queen of the Night, showing a naked goddess with clawed feet, lions, holding up symbols of majesty,

is almost certainly anana, although under... the name she gets when speakers of a different language take over Sumeria, which is Ishtar. Ishtar, yes. Yeah, under that name, she becomes known right across the Middle East. And there's a whole area of quite fraught historical research about whether women in ancient Babylon worshipped the goddesses by selling sex in the temples, so-called sacred prostitution. Herodotus reckoned that they did. And there's some evidence that women worshipped Ishtar by having sex.

But it's very contentious, isn't it? Because we just can't fill in the blanks enough to say whether that definitely happened or not. I totally agree. You've summed up so well, I don't actually have to add nothing. I don't know if I want them to have been doing that. But it's had this huge legacy on sort of sex worker cultures to this very day about whether or not there was ever such a thing as sacred. prostitution, whether or not it was used in service of the gods, or whether people were just picking up clients around the temple, they just don't know. We actually don't know. The evidence is

really very bad. Here I'm persuaded by a charismatic American scholar, Stephanie Boudon, who's written quite a lot about this. And her arguments have convinced me. I don't have original ideas here. Stephanie is the one who's rooted out the text. It's very, very fraught that particular area, but one that's not is the legacy of Anana in other gods and goddesses that are more well known. So we touched briefly on Venus there. Is Venus a goddess of war as well? I'd only ever thought of her as a goddess of love. She's certainly a goddess of war.

The Romans give her different titles and aspects. And as Venus victrix, she's definitely a war goddess. She was the patron goddess of Julius Caesar. When the Roman legions Jack booted their way onto Britain, they were shouting her name as their war cry. She was particularly the patroness of the Second Legion, the Augusta, which ended up stationed at Chia Leon on the border of what's now Wales. So she's quite definitely a war goddess. She isn't originally. She starts as a cabbage patch goddess.

Sorry, that sounds really funny. She's the goddess of the market garden, or rather she's the spirit of the market garden. She doesn't have a sex originally, which is why this most rampantly feminine of Roman goddesses has a name which is a neutral noun, not a feminine one. And it's a really important job because growing your vegetables gives you your greens. It keeps you healthy. So the vegetable plot is vital, but also flowers. they're also grown in cultivated gardens like vegetables. So not just cabbages but runner beans and all the other things are Venus's produce.

When the Romans expand, they run into the Etruscans, a people to the north and they conquer them. And the Etruscans have a pretty young female goddess called Turin, whose goddess of flowers. And she gets merged with Venus because Venus looks after flowers as well as veg. And so Venus now becomes young and pretty and definitely female. And that and her connection with flowers really makes her the obvious contender when the Romans conquer South take in the Greek cities of southern Italy and need to twin somebody with Aphrodite, the Greek love goddess.

And Aphrodite loves roses as her favourite flowers. And so does Venus. So Venus now takes over Aphrodite's mythology and her iconography, the myths about Aphrodite simply get retold by the Roman Venus's name substituted, and the statues of Aphrodite simply get copied and given Venus's name. But she's not yet a war goddess. Aphrodite was in a few places in Greece, but not very widely. So it's when the Romans get to Syria and conquer there that they run into Ishtar, alias Inana,

old friend. And now Venus becomes a war goddess as well and associated with the morning and the evening star, the planet. And so in many ways Venus is the lost and greatest to Inama's daughters. I'll be back with Ronald and sex goddesses after this short break. They seem to have started their early career as goddesses in agriculture and storing things and plants. Do you see that elsewhere, that goddesses who started being associated, who started as associations with growing food and storing food, go on to become goddesses of love and war? Not quite that precise. It's more that deity start with rather mundane functions. Okay. And rather simple functions. And then they acquire much more human-like characteristics

and personalities and complex roles. When you look at Aphrodite, I don't think Aphrodite starts with any relation to agricultural vegetation. I think she's a rock chick. In other words, she's associated with the mineral-bearing rocks which makes Cyprus famous and rich copper. And indeed, Aphrodite's original icon at her original great temple at Parthos in Cyprus is a shapeless hunk of rock.

It wasn't destroyed at the Christian takeover because it didn't look like a human, didn't look like an idol, and it's still there. It's, of course, a good reason why traditionally she is married to the rather unattractive lame Smith god, Hephaistus. I'd always wondered that. Because she produces the metal and he then forges it. I'd always thought he was punching above his weight, and now that makes more sense. Yeah, just like Inana and Dumuzzi. or a perfect pairing of productivity and processing. So are Aphrodite and Hephaestus, but this time with minerals.

What about the figure of Lilith? I might be misremembering, but does Lilith have associations with Ishtar, or have I just jumbled things up in my recollection? She has absolutely no associations with Ishtar, other than the Bernie relief, that figure in the British Museum, which for many years was thought to be Lilith. and we've now rejected that idea completely, she's got the wrong headdress, basically. Right.

She's got lots of horns on her hat, and that means a megag goddess. Lilith is a demoness. Originally, she's the cot-death demoness, a figure found across the ancient world to explain the heartbreakingly high rate of infant mortality in traditional societies

with poor obstetrics, poorer nutrition, and poor sanitation, about half of all children die before the age of five. And a lot of them just die overnight mysteriously. And this is blamed right across the ancient world on a night flying child-hating demoness. And the Mesopotamian version of that is Lillitou, who's known as Lillith in Hebrew. The Hebrews ought to be more exact the Jewish people in the Middle Ages, develop this child-killing demoness into a much more charismatic figure by making her the first wife of Adam,

whose rebellious and disobedient and all the things that feminists would like feisty women to be quite understandably, and who is then banished by an angry Jehovah and goes off to kill children. So Lilith gradually evolves into something approaching a feminist icon, whereas she, begins as a very harsh and horrid medical reality. Could you tell me a bit about the Irish goddess of sex and love and death that you alluded to very briefly there? Because I'm fascinated by the evidence that we've got for Celtic deities. Yeah, she's the Morrigan, the Queen of Phantoms.

Ooh, that's a title. Yeah, yeah. It's the most likely current translation of her name. And she combines the two roles perfectly. she loves war and she incites it and she's one of a trio or quartet or quintet of Irish goddesses who do that. But out of all the others, she's the only one who also bestows a victory upon gods and heroes by having sex with them or offering sex to them. She seduces the dachda, the great god and enables his family of gods to take over Ireland. She gives them victory after he's.

had wonderful sex with her with the bank of a river. And she offers the same thing to Kuhlhulin, the most famous hero of Northern Ireland of the Ulster people. He turns her down and she then tries to take vengeance on him and he beats her off. He actually injures her three times when she's trying to take him out and he then is tricked by her into healing her magically. This incidentally is not probably a Christian spin on it as it might appear, because we only have this legend and a Christian era form. Because you get a very similar thing right back at the beginning in Sumeria, where the first great hero whose name is known to the world, Gilgamesh, is propositions royally by Ishtar, alia Sinana, who offers him the Sumerian equivalent of the Porsche Turbo, which is a,

a mega chariot drawn by winged demons and terrific prosperity and success as a king, providing that he becomes her lover or husband. And he actually repels her. He informs her that she treats men like dirt. She's got this long list of disposed of lovers, and he has no wish to become the next on the list. And she throws a tantrum. She goes to her father, the king of the gods,

and say, I want to nuke this guy. by letting this monster loose on the earth. And Daddy says, won't that create havoc? And she says, yeah, I like havoc. Wow. And she lets loose the monster and Gilgamesh actually kills it and thwarts her again. But his best buddy dies as a result. So he loses the great love of his life, who's actually a guy.

She is a demanding lady, isn't she? Yeah. Wow. And I've just remembered there's a story in the epic of Gilgamesh with the the wild man, Incadu, who is civilised by having sex with Gilgames's favourite cortis and shamhat. So it seems like good sex could work magic in the ancient world. Yeah, there's quite an impressive ancient near-eastern tradition. A, that sex is a good thing, and B, that women are very good at it.

Long before Masters and Johnson, the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, recognize the sheer power of the female libido. And this is, of course, projected onto goddesses. Of course. So how does this square with something like Christianity? Because obviously, nothing exists in a vacuum. They all feed into one another. And then we get this religion where one of the central iconographies

is the Virgin Mary, that we've moved very far away from, if you don't have sex with me, I'm going to get my dad to blow you up. And now we're not having sex at all. women do not have sex at all? Or is it more complicated than that? It's not a lot more complicated than that. Christianity is an immensely powerful religion and its message. It's a winning combination. It's the classic missionary world religion. And encouraged in turn, another one, Islam, which shares the same characteristics, drawing on really a very unusual tribal god, and that's the god of the Hebrews.

Jehovah is pretty well the only ancient God who doesn't have sex. He really is amazingly unusual in that respect. And there is a Puritanism in ancient Judaism which feeds through into Christianity. And then early Christianity, celibacy, virginity, was regarded as the best sexual state. There are plenty of ancient pagans around who have that opinion. But there are a minority. and it's not a dogma, it's a personal preference. Are there still cultures and people that have gods and goddesses of sex and death that are worshipped today?

Hindus. Ah, of course. How can I forget them? That was silly. We're going to Carly, aren't we? We are, yes. Carly Durga, drinker of blood. She's another in the same mould, but rather unhelpfully,

and with huge admiration and respect for oriental cultures. I'm drawing my boundary at the frontier between Iraq and Iran just because it's too big a job for me to go further and familiarise myself with languages and traditions which are completely new to me and texts which I don't know from the inside. Absolutely. Can I ask you a final question on this one?

And this might be a silly question, but do you have a favourite ancient goddess? Like the one that you're just drawn to me more than anything. Not necessarily one with sex and it can be the goddess of cabbages. I really like the sound of that. But who would you choose? Venus. I'm not sure why, actually. Just always been an attraction. It's not logical because somebody with my lifestyle and my profession ought to go for more austere intellectual goddesses of learning like Athene, Minerva, Bridget. But somehow Venus won my heart. It could just be that I read the Aeneid, the great ancient Roman poem at about the age of eight,

and Venus was just so impressive and so cute. She appears there as the ideal mother figure. She does, doesn't she? At the age of eight, a child turns more to a mother figure than a schoolmistress figure. True. That must have been quite a shock for you when you started doing research and you realised that she had other hats to be wearing, that she was a goddess of love and sex as well. Oh, I loved that. She just became ever more interesting and complex. And therefore, I honour goddess in my mind, you know, my sentiments.

I have a natural attraction to Venus-like goddesses in other cultures. So when I'm an island, I think of the Morrigan as the most obvious of the pantheon there. When in Scandinavia and Germany, a Freya, who is the northern equivalent. and when in the Middle East of Ishtar or Inana. I love the sound of Anana. She sounds like a girl that you would go for a drink with. Ronald, you have been incredible to talk to today. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

They find me every day. I have a post bag of about 50 letters every morning through which to try and work. I'm a sitting duck. I'm at the University of Bristol, England. People can find me there. But I don't really need to be found. I'll find everybody else just by keeping on writing. Don't go looking for Ronald.

He'll come and find you. It will be fine. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been wonderful. It's been lovely talking to you, Kate. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Ronald for joining me. And if you like what you heard,

please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or perhaps you just wanted to say hello, you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We have got episodes on everything from Napoleon's sex life to the affairs of JFK all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckworth. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.

Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.