Even to modern eyes, the terracotta statuettes are bizarre. Found in 1896 in the remains of a 5th-century BCE temple at the ancient Greek city of Priene, each figurine is different, but all feature a woman’s face, bedecked with an elaborate hairdo, situated directly atop a pair of chubby, childlike legs. In place of a chin, there is the well-defined cleft of a hairless vulva. But for one of the German archeologists working on the dig, the figures looked familiar.
Like an actor whose tiny role on stage or screen makes such a deep connection with the audience that she is catapulted to fame, Baubo’s cameo in the story of Demeter and Persephone is small but transformative. In an agrarian culture like ancient Greece, a ruined harvest could lead to starvation, disease, and death. By making Demeter laugh, and giving her renewed strength to find Persephone, Baubo essentially helped end a famine in the human world, saving countless lives.
Only married women were allowed to attend the fall festival known as Thesmorphoria, which took place in October. At night, they slept in tents. During the day, attendees portrayed events from the story of Demeter and Persephone in rituals thought to increase both human and agricultural fertility. They ate pomegranates and perhaps let the red juice drip into the earth, just as the proto Baubo offered up her menstrual blood.
#cf_5 .cf-btn:after { border-radius: 0px } .cf-content-wrap, .cf-form-wrap{ padding:5px; } div#cf_5 { margin-bottom: 20px; } .cf-content-text.cf-col { padding-left: 20px;padding-right:20px; } convertforms.cf-success .cf-response { background-color: #e9007b; display: block; } The image of a vulva-flashing goddess was so popular in Egypt that artwork of her in one or another of her guises, but always unashamedly displaying her bits, appears to have been mass produced.
A Sheela na gig carving on one of the 85 corbels around the Kilpeck Church in England, built circa 1140
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