The Ritual Verbal Abuse Rite of the Cult of Demeter and the Modern Hen Party
No shit, there I was doing some top-secret research on early Greek theater when I somehow ended up learning about some really strange stuff. One thing led to another, and I was reading Guy Hedreen’s article “The Return of Hephaistos, Dionysiac Processional Ritual, and the Creation of a Visual Narrative” from The Journal of Hellenic Studies. The article is mainly about Dionysus’s role in getting Hephaistos drunk so that he would come back to Olympus after Hera banishes him for his lameness. What really struck me though is this tangent the article went on that described ritual insult abuse rites* held among ancient Greek women in honor of Demeter. During a certain time of the year, these ancient Greek women, mainly the cults of Demeter, would make cakes of honey and sesame in the shape of genitalia and make all manner of insulting, bodily, and sexual jokes toward each other. Hedreen explains that the type of language used, the kind of humor, was normally considered shameful and avoided, but in the rite honoring Demeter it served a positive function.
Demeter had been mourning across the face of the earth, causing an extended winter, due to Persephone’s disappearance. Demeter did not know that Hades had taken Persephone to the underworld, and so Demeter searched for her daughter. At a certain point, she ends up in the home of King Keleos in Eleusis, refusing all of the gestures of hospitality and remaining veiled in a state of sorrow. As her identity as a goddess was hidden, the people around her would have seen the behavior as a very awkward breach of the hospitality code, except that the incredibly strange behavior was an indicator that she could actually have been important in some sense, possibly a god or demi-god in disguise — an even more compelling reason to make her comfortable enough to accept hospitality. It is finally Iambe, a slave of the household, who gets Demeter to laugh by telling her jokes of a bodily nature, improper but not insulting and apparently incredibly funny. Once Demeter starts laughing, the hospitality code can then be better honored. Although her identity is disguised, for those who heard the myth and understood the context, her laughter is a critical sign of the beginning of the end of mourning, which is why her cult marked the event with a ritual that sounds extremely odd to the average modern person.
I was struck by ritual abuse rites of the Demeter cults because most women I know don’t really engage in that type of humor for more than a few minutes at a time. There are always exceptions, but of all the women I have known in my life, there were only a few who habitually made in-person insulting raunchy jokes toward other women. I notice men seem to communicate with their friends in that way, but with women it is different. Any insulting being done, humorous or not, toward another woman is often a more passive aggressive thing, like fervently complementing a bad pair of shoes or spreading rumors. In the context of the festival, however, the insidious aspect of feminine insult doesn’t seem to be a true factor because the insulting, sexually focused humor is in honor of Demeter. The goal isn’t to destroy the character of other women or to be petty and mean.** Instead, the insulting humor and language is a celebration of Demeter’s laughter after so much grief. The abusive language ritual honoring Demeter, as a social function, seems like a means to dispel feminine vitriol and create a bonding experience in order to prevent some of the cattiness associated with feminine dislike and combativeness. In a broader sense, it speaks to the importance of humans having some way to vent without the social shame that goes along with the breaking of codes.
The article also got me thinking about if there was a form of this type of feminine activity in modern culture, and I realized that, yes, in fact there is a parallel: the hen party. A hen party, also known as a bachelorette party, is a pre-marital event that is supposed to be fun. I say “supposed to be” here because the media usually portrays bachelorette parties as a bunch of barely clad women getting disgustingly drunk listening to bad club music while being surrounded by phallic imagery and maybe even getting bombarded by some type of stripper. While this might sound fun to some people, it sounds gross to me — believe it or not. I’ve always favored the more British hen party where the girls get together, drink, and have fun, but without the phallic vomitorium aspect of it. My preferences aside, the low brow, last chance to be crazy, bachelorette party of popular culture seems like a secular version of this ritual abuse rite held in honor of Demeter. There’s dirty talk and genitalia cake. Insults are thrown around, but in the sweetest, funniest way possible. The focus is feminine bonding and the celebration of fertility, or at least sex drive. It dispels the darkness with a bright blast of neon light as everyone dances and laughs at a club or wherever they decide to congregate. The bachelorette party, of course, isn’t a ritualistic abuse rite aimed at celebrating dispelled grief, but it is a celebration of an ending: the ending of the singleness of the bride to be.
- *Note added 1/13/2021: Please don’t think I am literally calling for or condoning actual verbal abuse. When I talk about ritual verbal abuse or abusive language in this article, I am talking about it in Hedreen’s terms in relation to actual ritual days where taboos against insulting language were lifted, and people engaged in that kind of humor. When I talk about it in the modern sense, I am applying the terminology and context from the article. I think this note diminishes the quality of the reading experience, but with the social climate being what it is, the clarification is needed.
- **Although I am writing about things I have noticed in my own experience, personality psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson discusses communication differences between men and women in more detail if you would like to learn more. A simple web search can also add more context about those communication differences.
