Arkteia At Brauron

Brauron’s strange and intriguing practices have always held a place of interest; however, through a close reading of the Bacchae, one cannot help but link the two as the maenads mirror the hounds of Artemis from a generation earlier that turned against Actaeon. For my research paper, I will explore the relationship between women in Greek antiquity and the social function of the wild in religious rituals, proposing that the wild acts as a pharmakos to adapt young girls to the domesticated life of wives. As case studies, I will be gesturing to both the Arkteia at Brauron, as well as the Bacchic maenads found in Euripides’ Bacchae. As a result, I hope to investigate the role of the initiatory rites at Brauron and connect female maturation with
Perhaps by investigating the correlations between the female followers of both Artemis and Dionysus, some insight may be gained concerning of the possible social conditioning women were put through, and the ways rituals allowed them to confront their function in society. As a prefatory remark and a general note, there is a disparity of sources provided from female authors of antiquity. Due to this, many of the rituals and practices I gesture to are reconstructed from either an incomplete male perspective or satirical plays. After all, the vast majority of evidence left to us concerning women is constructed by and geared towards the male imagination of the feminine sphere (Gould, 38), and much of the following will rely on conjecture drawn from impressions and implications drawn from the sources considered. In Athens, the patriarchal organization of society left little room for women in the public sphere. Instead, women found themselves excluded from the legal system and synonymous with domestic space (Gould 45). As such, women were conditioned to accommodate marriage, motherhood, and household duties over public life (Cole 238). To be a
As an aside, identification of ritual objects at other sites in Attica denote that similar rites were performed throughout the Greek landscape (Cole 242). Our current understanding of the Athenian Arkteia is that during adolescence, and before they reached a marrying age, young girls would follow a cursus honorum of duties (Walbank 280) until they could participate as arktoi, adorning bear pelts—or yellow dresses—to mimic a bear through dance (Cole 240). For the duration of the ritual, just as animals were safe from hunters in sanctuaries to Artemis (Hughes 192), so were young girls from the soon to be trauma of marriage. However, a key stage of the ritual was the shedding of the literal—or symbolic—bear skin, marking a return from the inversion of the normative female role and a re-embrace of limitations beyond the limits of the sanctuary at Brauron (Stinton 11). As for the pedagogical function, in general, female ritual performance enacted an internalization of temperance and passivity by means of choral education (Ingalls 3). Although physical evidence is lacking to attest to the use of a chorus at Brauron, fragments from the works of Sappho and Corinna concerning the choral education of