The Girl with the Wounded Foot
Getting the chance to make up a religion has been supremely fulfilling! As an agnostic who wasn’t raised in any faith, I get to pick and choose what I like from all of them. For the gals at the House of the Ladies, my priestess who I’ve decided ran the pre-volcanic island community of Santorini/Thera, I worked with a lot of variables.
There are some fantastic frescoes they left behind that are so unlike any stories I knew off the top of my head, they have to mean something. I am a research nerd, so I love this stuff. The Girl with the Wounded Foot was the most intriguing to me as a religious figure. She sits with her head in her hands, blood dripping from her foot that turns into crocuses. There is a lot of speculation that this signifies menstrual blood, which seems absurd to me. Why would we assume they would pick a foot to symbolize a vagina?
The oldest surviving bits of Greek religion focused on the Eleusinian Mysteries, which lasted until Emperor Theodosius closed down the last temple in 392 BC. Since it is a pre-Mycanean ritual, scholars believe, it makes sense that it has been around forever (just about) and can be linked to the stories of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld. We don’t know much about the Eleusinian Mysteries, but we do know they had to do with the story of Demeter and Persephone (or Kore, the Maid). Persephone is abducted from a meadow or hill where she is gathering flowers and taken to the Underworld where she is told she will be the bride of the King, and never return aboveground to her mother. She refuses and the gods intervene. Demeter, the goddess of the grain and planting refuses to grow things until she gets her daughter back, people starve, yada yada. Zeus intervenes and says as long as Persephone didn’t eat while she was visiting, she can come back. But the girl was hungry and nibbled on a few pomegranate seeds. Because of that, she had to spend some months every year in the Underworld, and the rest with her mother. When she is gone, Demeter causes everything to wither; i.e. Winter.
First, I removed Zeus and his brother Hades (King of the UW) because I think they are an addition by the Greeks. So, why would Kore go underground? Why did initiates of the Mysteries testify they weren’t frightened to die after the Mystery rituals? I’m less scared to die than most people I know because I don’t have the heaven or hell hang-up, or the dark void of eternity. I am lucky enough to believe in reincarnation, so when I die, I can come back. It’s the least scary scenario of all the religions I’ve ever studied. If the Mysteries explained that a soul is reborn, it would fit the few bits we know about them. Therefore, my Ladies of Akrotiri also go through a Mystery ritual, which is a coming-of-age ritual. They go to a cave, spend the night drinking hallucinogenic spiked wine (those Therans like to depict poppies, and the naysayers about the Eleusinian Mysteries sure liked to harp on the initiates and their drugs), and are mentally killed and reborn. Voila. Anyone whose dabbled with hallucinogens knows you aren’t exactly the same on the other side.
So why the wounded foot? My version: the Maid is gathering crocus (there will be a blog post on the significance of that, but rest assured, it is of super duper importance to the Therans), cuts her foot and sits down. The picture shows a rocky formation, so why not outside of a cave? Why can’t this be the inciting incident that brings the Maid into the Mysteries? (It’s certainly not any crazier than half the stuff from religions modern people follow, let’s be serious). The crocus spring from the blood of her feet. The entire story came to me after a dream of a vision of priestesses slicing their palms to bleed over ritually planted seeds because; blood is a great fertilizer. Looking at other frescoes from Akrotiri, also in Xeste 3, they are covered in a large picture of young girls picking crocuses that grow haphazardly among rocks. So, my coming-of-age ritual deals with girls getting their feet cut, drinking poppy wine, spending the night outside and having crazy visions of demons and death. When they wake up, after surviving a mini-death, they are still alive, or re-born. And a few months later, the place where they walked with their bleeding feet grows the crocus that help Akrotiri.
It makes a little more sense than a foot confused as a vagina, doesn’t it?
