"The first temple to be built after the dark age was Hera's temple on the island of Samos, off the coast of Asia Minor. Her cult there showed that she was an uncanny, unreliable goddess who could disappear at a moment's notice and take all the good things of life with her. On the eve of her festival each year, her effigy - a shapeless plank- mysteriously vanished from the shrine. It's loss was discovered at daybreak, and all the people of Samos turned out to search for her. When they found the cult image, they purified it, and tied it up with willow twigs to prevent her from escaping again - but she always did. Hera was the mother of life, the origin of all that existed. Her disappearance threatened the whole natural order."
Over time and/or geography, the goddess Demeter represents the same hide-and-seek nature of the feminine embodied in icon:
"Each year during the ancient festival of Thesmophoria, the Greeks reenacted this disturbing drama. For three days, all the married women of the community left their husbands and disappeared like Demeter. They fasted and slept on the ground, as primitive people had done before the advent of civilisation. They ceremonially cursed their menfolk, and there are hints at some form of ritual obscenity. In memory of the pigs that were swallowed up by the earth when Hades abducted Persephone, the women sacrificed piglets, threw their bodies into a pit, and left them to rot. .....The city had been turned upside down; family life, on which the society depended, was disrupted; and the Greeks were forced to contemplate the destruction of civilisation, the profound antipathy of the sexes, and the cosmic catastrophe that threatened the world when Demeter withdrew her favour. .....The ritual compelled the Greeks to live through their fear, and to face it, and then showed them that it was possible to come through safely to the other side."
Ref: Ritual, The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong, pg 58-59
The news on ABC National this afternoon included as one of it's stories the movement of Italian women to restrict the ritualised behaviour of their menfolk, who apparently every New Year's get a bit heavy handed with the explosives in the name of celebration. There's a petition going, and apparently the local councils have been involved, in a protest that has as it's catchcry: "Explosions? Then no fireworks" (the women are choosing to abstain from sex if the men go ahead and set off the gunpowder). I had read these paragraphs from Karen Armstrong about the ancient Greeks only yesterday, and I've gotta say, those European women certainly don't seem to lack for gumph.
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