Oxford Scholarship Online You are looking at 1-10 of 15 items for: keywords : stasis relwor Women Who Fly Item type: book DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195307887.001.0001 The desire to transcend the mundane and the terrestrial, and to reach new heights of spiritual experience, has been expressed through myths, folk tales, and the arts throughout the world and across centuries. Flight from both the captivity of earth s gravity and the mental constraints of time-bound desire are the backbone of myth-making. Women and goddesses have figured prominently in such myths, both as independent actors and as guides for men. Women Who Fly is a history of religious and social ideas about such aerial females as expressed in legends, myths, rituals, sacred narratives, and artistic productions. It is also about the varied symbolic uses of women in mythology, religion, and society that have shaped, and continue to shape, our social and psychological reality. The motif of the flying female is an intriguing and unstudied area of the history of both religion and iconography. It is a broad topic. Rather than place restrictions on this theme (or its imagery), or force it into the confines of any one discipline or cultural perspective, the goal here instead is to celebrate its thematic and cultural diversity, while highlighting commonalities and delineating the religious and social contexts in which it developed. Aerial women are surprisingly central to any full and accurate understanding of the similarities between various religious imaginations, through which these flying females have carved trajectories over time. Introduction DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195307887.003.0001 Page 1 of 6 in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 23
The famous statue of Nike of Samothrace is introduced as an illustrative example of the image of the winged female a figure that is found as far back as the Paleolithic era, and as recently as the twentieth century, across the world s geographical, religious, and cultural regions. Examples from these varied sources will be discussed in depth throughout the book. The motif of the flying female or winged woman, and the tales told about them, embody themes including heroism and womanhood; the conflict between freedom and domesticity; understandings of transcendence versus immanence; and ancient fears about shapeshifting, especially from animal to human and back again. Earth, Sky, Women, and Immortality DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195307887.003.0002 From pre-historic bird goddesses through the winged goddesses of the ancient world, the changing form of such female divinities is explored through the human understanding of and relationship with birds, the longing for magical flight, and the worship of the sky. Later religious ideas developed out of these early beliefs into human ascensions, assumptions and the longing for apotheosis the transformation of a human into a divinity. Many beliefs about aerial women were formulated in dreams of flying, or dreams of being visited by succubi women who had sex with men while they slept. Winged Goddesses of Sexuality, Death, and Immortality DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195307887.003.0003 The winged Egyptian goddess Isis is an ancient and complex deity, whose mythology presents her as bestower of fertility and immortality. This chapter follows up on these themes, and the linked relationship between fertility and immortality, by exploring the involvement of women with funeral rites, and concepts of the afterlife in the Ancient Near East and Ancient Greece involving goddesses, who combine sexuality and fertility, Page 2 of 6 in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 23
war and death, and the promise and hope of immortality. There is a further exploration of ancient bird goddesses demonized via the concept of the monstrous-feminine: furies, harpies, and sirens all of whom pose a particular danger to men, not women. The Fall of the Valkyries DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195307887.003.0004 An examination of the ancient sources for the Valkyrie Brunhilde, such as the Volsung Saga (a thirteenth-century Norse saga), in which she is wise and strong, and the medieval European Nibelungenleid, in which she is helpless, jealous, complaining, and scheming, reveals a marked decline in the status of flying females indeed, their humiliation through forced marriage. These shifting presentations of her character are reflective of changing understandings of gender, marriage, and family unity: to whom is a woman s loyalty due, her husband or her natal family? In Norse mythology, Valkyries carry fallen warriors to Valhalla, or the Norse heavens, continuing aerial women s connections to war, death, and immortality begun in earlier chapters. This is the history brought forward by Richard Wagner in his opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Swan Maidens: Captivity and Sexuality DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195307887.003.0005 The ancient Indian tale of Urvaśī, the earliest swan tale known to exist, underscores and highlights themes of female captivity, human shapeshifting in and out of animal forms, matrilocal versus patrilocal marriage, sexuality, fertility and the ability to grant immortality. This ancient folktale motif of the swan is known around the world in various forms. Its themes are repeated in two Middle Eastern tales, and continue in later, somewhat different versions of East Asian tales that reconciled the swan form into heavenly women who wear feather robes and perform magical Page 3 of 6 in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 23
dances. In northern Europe, the swan was reimagined in Tchaikovsky s misleading Swan Lake. Angels and Fairies: Male Flight and Contrary Females DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195307887.003.0006 Angels present an opportunity to explore the theme of male flight, in that all angels were originally male, and sometimes said to be androgynous, which is much the same thing. Once female angels became popular, the belief in angels was trivialized and domesticated. Fairies are mostly women, sometimes winged, who can be captured and who then bring their captors great wealth and happiness. Usually in these tales, the men who captured them fail to observe a taboo laid out by the fairy, thus allowing her to escape. All fairies are time- benders, so often in these tales, the men awake to discover that centuries have gone by in a few days. This is the case in both Western and Asian tales. In the West, fairies frequently appear in Arthurian legends, especially in the figure of the troublesome Morgan le Fay, half-sister to King Arthur. Apsarās: Enabling Male Immortality, Part 1 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195307887.003.0007 Apsarās are ancient Indian flying divinities. Although they are wingless, their iconography reveals their power of flight. They function in both Hinduism and Buddhism, although in distinct ways in each religion. Overall, they are under the power of the god Indra, who sends them out to seduce celibate ascetics who challenge his power. The ascetics are powerless against such ravishingly beautiful, sexual, and coquettish women. Like the valkyries, the apsarās carry fallen warriors to heaven, but in these Eastern traditions, they are given to the warriors. One sign of their pervasiveness was their imitation by devadāsīs, beautiful and talented dancers who danced before the gods in Hindu temples. Buddhists picked up on their themes as consummate seductresses; in Page 4 of 6 in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 23
an ancient Buddhist epic, the Buddha uses them to disillusion his halfbrother. Yoginīs and Ḍākinīs: Enabling Male Immortality, Part 2 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195307887.003.0008 The ancient Indian flying divinities called ḍākinīs do not have wings, but even so their iconography reveals their power of flight. Perhaps most interestingly, this power is revealed in the roofless, circular temples of yoginīs, Hindu deities who can confer the power of flight on their male adepts, along with other supernatural powers. The ḍākinīs of Buddhism are recognized by their flying forms in paintings and their rainbowcolored garments. Both yoginīs and ḍākinīs are goddesses who cross boundaries: they move between this earthly world and the heavenly or spiritual realm, thus implicitly promising adepts that they, too, can transcend earthly reality, gain supernatural powers, and thus achieve liberation from human, bodily limitations. Witches and Succubi: Male Sexual Fantasies DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195307887.003.0009 Witches, women believed to have supernatural powers, have been with us since ancient times. Often they were beautiful, highly sexual women whom men bedded at their own risk. They had magical powers (including that of flight), communed with the dead, and did not conform to patriarchal ideas of womanhood. Their sexuality led them to be classified as succubi, or female spirits who visited men at night and had sexual intercourse with them while they slept. In medieval Christian Europe, witches were refigured as ugly over time, and they became the face of evil. They were believed to fly to their unholy Sabbaths, where they participated in orgies with Satan and sacrificed babies. In truth, most people who were accused of being witches were women caught up in the changing mores and beliefs of the medieval Church, which Page 5 of 6 in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 23
began to view women as more susceptible to the demonic than men, a Church that needed evidence of their unholy activities, even if extracted by torture. Page 6 of 6 in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 23