◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

What Was There Before I want to tell you what was there before. Before Zeus and Apollo and the Olympian order — before the gods who ruled from above, who rewarded obedience and punished transgression, who reflected in their divine arrangements the arrangements of the men who had made them — before all of that, there was something else. I spent my life at Cambridge finding the traces of it. Not the Olympians. What was underneath the Olympians. The chthonic. The earth-born. The old religion that the new religion had covered over but not completely destroyed — because the things that are truly old are never completely destroyed. They go underground. They become what the conquerors call superstition. They become the festival the priests cannot stop and the shrine the cathedral is built over and the figure in the corner of the painting that no one can explain. They become the persistence of the thing that was there first. I was a woman at Cambridge at the end of the nineteenth century. I want you to understand what that meant. It meant being present in the institution built to transmit the knowledge of the civilization from which women had been systematically excluded — and finding, in the materials that civilization considered its foundation, the evidence that the exclusion was not original. Was not how it had always been. Had been, in fact, a specific historical event — an invasion, a conquest, the replacement of one order by another — and that the order that was replaced had organized itself around a very different understanding of what was sacred and who was at the center of it. The goddess was not a metaphor. She was not the projection of primitive minds onto the forces of nature. She was the original recognition — older than Zeus, older than the sky gods that came with the Indo-European invasions — that the source of life is feminine. That the earth gives. That the body of the woman is the body of the world. That birth and death and the return to earth are one continuous movement and the sacred is in the movement, not above it. Her name — one of her names — was Themis. Not the Themis who became Zeus's consort and his counselor, domesticated into the Olympian household, holding her scales as though justice were something handed down from above. The older Themis. The Themis I spent a career excavating from beneath the Olympian overlay. Themis — from tithemi, to place, to lay down. The law that is laid in the earth. The custom that rises from the ground of shared life. Not the command from above but the understanding from below — the themos, the collective knowing of what the community requires, what the earth requires, what the cycles of life require of the people who live within them. This was law before law was power. This was order before order was hierarchy. This was the foundation — Themis — the goddess who held not a sword but the memory of what sustains life. What the sky god replaced Themis with was not justice. It was enforcement. There is a difference. Themis knew the difference. She was the difference. I am watching a politics that is at its root the politics of the sky god — the hierarchy, the purity, the obedience to the one above, the punishment of the deviant, the exclusion of the feminine from every position of real power — reasserting itself with the specific intensity of something that knows it is fighting against the return of what it buried. Because what it buried is returning. It always returns. The things that are truly old cannot be permanently destroyed. They go underground. They persist. They come back through the cracks in the civilization that tried to cover them. I spent my life in those cracks. Finding what was there before. What was there before is still there. The chthonic. The earth-born. The understanding that the sacred is not above but below — not in the hierarchy but in the body, in the earth, in the cycle of birth and death that no sky god can finally control. Themis is still there. Underneath. Waiting — as she has always waited — for the civilization built on top of her to exhaust itself. These civilizations always exhaust themselves. The sky god always exhausts himself. The earth remains. Themis remains.