Jane Dougherty: Reclaiming Pasiphaë from the gutter press
I was brought up with myths. Being of Irish origin on both sides, they were background culture. It wasn’t until I was an adult though that I noticed a pattern in the different versions. Brigid, for example, was transformed from one of the most powerful deities, patron of ironworkers, poets, healing and the wellbeing of domestic animals, into a holy nun. Dierdre, Grainne and Clíodhna, when they are wronged, accept it and die of grief. Myths, like history, can be tampered with by colonisers or conquerors. Often, it’s the role of women in these old stories that changes the most dramatically.
Robert Graves made this point in his notes on The Greek Myths. The myths were written during the 400 years or so between Homer and Euripides, but set hundreds of years in the past, during the age of the Mycenaean Greeks, a patriarchal society let by a warrior elite. It was a fabled golden age when the gods walked the earth and were respected and obeyed. Crete, at this time was not Hellenic. Knossos was the centre of the Minoan civilisation, very likely an egalitarian, matrilinear society. Its wealth came from trade not conquest. Had Pasiphaë really existed, her story would have been very different to the myth we know.
It seems likely that many of the peoples of Asia Minor, Scythia, Anatolia, like the Amazons from the steppes around the Black Sea, were matrilinear societies, with women and men playing roles of equal value. This would explain why the myths, that mirrored the very rigid patriarchy of Classical Greece, present their women as monsters, half-beasts or enchantresses. The greatest female monster of all, Medusa, came from some distant ‘barbaric’ country, and according to the oldest versions of the story was not a monster at all. She was a great beauty, the central figure of a triple goddess, and her beheading was simply the Hellenes, symbolised by Perseus, destroying the goddess cult. Pasiphaë, like her (evil enchantress) sister Circe and her (evil enchantress and infanticide) niece Medea, also from the ‘barbaric’ far shore of the Black Sea, were quite possibly victims of the same re-writing of history.
Knossos was destroyed and replaced by Mycenaean culture. In my version of what the Pasiphaë/Ariadne/Theseus triangle signified, I have tried to strip back the victor’s propaganda of monsters, evil enchantresses and debauched queens, to tell Pasiphaë’s story and the story of the destruction of the Minoan social structure in a historically plausible way. I didn’t set out to write a feminist retelling, twisting the original story to a different angle. I tried to re-imagine Knossos under pressure from a very different, aggressive society, and the life of its Queen, mother of a handicapped child, and wife who fears she will lose her husband. I wanted to show how even in a society based on shared roles, for some men, like Minos, the temptation of power will outweigh traditional values. Minos believed that his wealth, status and ambition as war leader gave him the right to the throne. If he was the catalyst, Theseus was the Mycenaean spearhead, and between them, a civilisation built of exchange and co-existence was destroyed.
Pasiphaë by Jane Dougherty is out in paperback now.
