Hestia the Asexual

Hestia is the Goddess of the Hearth. 

She was the first born child of Kronos and Rheia, and the first to be eaten by the Crooked Kronos. Once Zeus claimed the celestial throne for himself, she and the other Kronian Gods were regurgitated and took up their new roles on Olympus. 

Rather than be married to anyone, Hestia strongly declared her refusal to marry, and Zeus granted her the 'opposite of marriage'. 

So Hestia became the Goddess of the Hearth, who tends the hearth on Olympus as well as overseeing the sacred eternal flame in every Greek and Roman town, and the fires of each individual household.

So this asexual deity became one of the most present of all of the Olympian Gods.

Hestia (called Vesta in Latin) flourished at Rome under the watchful eyes of the Vestal Virgins. Academic studies of this iconic order of priestesses often reflect scholars attempts to understand the early Roman Kingdom. Yet each of these interpretations were inadequate to actually understand the multiple social roles played by the Vestals. Eventually scholars understood that the liminal queerness of the order was the actual source of their power. 

Hestia shows that Asexuality is just about as old as erotic love. 

Asexuality is as ancient as Erotic love!

Transcript

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Hello everybody and welcome to Lambda, the LGBT and Antiquity podcast, your home for all things LGBT in the ancient world. I'm your host, Dominica Raven, episode 17, Hestia the Asexual. In the dawn of time, Kronos the Titan god defeated Uranus, his father, the original sky god. Kronos then married his own sister Rea. It was all right for the gods to do that sort of thing, and they had a total of six children together, called the Cronians, or the children of Kronos. The firstborn was a daughter named Hestia, then Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, then Hera, the future cosmic queen. Next they had Hades, god of the underworld, and Poseidon, god of the sea, before finally Zeus. Due to the prophecy that eventually Kronos would have a child strong enough to usurp his own rule and establish dominion over the universe, Kronos ate these children in sequence immediately after they were born. Rhea was heartbroken each time, but there really was nothing she could do about it. Finally, she used a trick after Zeus was born, where instead of giving Kronos their newborn son, she passed him a stone swaddled to look like a child, which Kronos ate. When Zeus grew up and eventually did defeat Kronos, the other five children and the stone too were all vomited up in the reverse sequence they were born in. So Hestia, the firstborn of all the gods, was actually the last to be reborn from the gullet of Kronos. Zeus became the king of the universe, and the whole of the natural world was ordered. Hera married Zeus. Demeter had Persephone with Zeus as a consort, and they may have actually been married before Zeus's final marriage to Hera. Demeter also married a mortal hero named Eason, and they had the son Plutus, the god of wealth. Hades married Persephone, and Poseidon married Amphitrite. So all five of the other Cronian gods either got married or were symbolically married as consorts of Zeus. That just left the eldest of their number, Hestia, who never got married. The story goes that Hestia was wooed by Poseidon and Apollo, but she was exceedingly unwilling to marry either. She strongly declared her refusal to marry. Eventually, Hestia went to Zeus and asked her brother to swear a mighty oath. Hestia would be granted the opposite of marriage. Therein lies her great power. Instead of tending to the domestic work in her husband's house, Hestia tends the hearth on Olympus. She maintains the sacred fires within every shrine of every Greek and Roman city, village, or hamlet. Hestia tends the hearth in all human households. Hestia is therefore among the most present of all the Olympian gods. In fact, the Orphic hymn to Hestia calls Hestia the strongest supporter of mankind. These are the very first literary references to Hestia from the Greek corpus. Later authors would add this idea that Hestia was actually a great peacemaker. When she refused marriage to Apollo or Poseidon, she was a mild-mannered peacekeeper who would rather forsake sexuality entirely than see her own family ripped apart. This ties back into her role as an ideal image of a matron whose actions are wholly dictated by filial piety. But as we just saw, there is nothing in the Homeric or Hesiodic versions which indicate any such intention behind her actions. Instead, Hestia declared her refusal to marry, and was granted the opposite of marriage, which are the literal phrases from the Greek original texts. This representation of Hestia actually gets to the heart of asexuality as perceived by outsiders even to this day. If a person is asexual, then there must be either something admirable, such as filial or religious piety, or else something confusing going on. Most people, even other queer people, tend to view asexually through a lens of cause and effect. If somebody is asexual, it is because of an extreme vow of chastity. If somebody is asexual, there must be something wrong with their bodies. They could have some crazy virility problem, or have some intersex condition, or even have some sexual trauma, which resulted in them forsaking sex entirely. But these ideas are as inaccurate as they are damaging to asexuals alive or in the ancient world. When we look at asexuality in the ancient world, this is exactly what we find. Some people are asexual because of trauma, like Electra, and others are asexual because of something admirable, like Hestia refusing marriage, to prevent a war. As for cases like Artemis, it's something internal, like the desire not to be tamed by marriage, and in Athena, it is actually something social as Athena was not properly born, but rather created a full adult figure, and therefore not properly socialized, so Athena has a deeper social problem at work. But Hestia provides the example of asexuality reflecting an individual's internal identity first and foremost. Though few ancient authors would use the phrase asexual itself, there is something decided queer about these people, because it defies explanation to the ancient imagination. Though Hestia is not a deity with a lot of representations in myth or in the epic tradition, Hestia is one of the most ubiquitous gods in antiquity. Whenever Greek or Romans offered sacrifice, Hestia, as the eldest god, was given that first portion. Whenever Greeks or Romans founded a new colony in foreign parts, one of the very first things they did was establish a shrine to Hestia containing the village hearth, which often contained the sacred flames which could not be allowed to be extinguished. Whenever councils or later democratic assemblies and governments or parliaments were set up, Hestia was invoked as the guardian of these democratic councils. This is why shrines to Hestia were some of the most significant religious sites in any given town. The famous second century AD travelogue by Pausanias lists multiple shrines to Hesti throughout the Greek world. Some were simple, like the shrine at Hermione in southern Greece. This was simply an altar near the city center. Others were far more elaborate, like the Pritanian in Athens, which was in the center of the agora. The building contained the city's hearth surrounded by statues to Irene, peace, and Hestia. The Pritanian also contained Hestia's sacred fire, which was kept burning at all times. Hestia's gifts to humanity were quintessential for all civilized life. In addition to fire and the hearth, Hestia actually invented cooking and was invoked by all chefs, as well as inventing the abstract concept of houses. These two remain the most important, for they meet the human needs, as we rely on cooking to make our food palatable, and houses to protect us from the elements. Hestia showed humanity how to build houses, which is precisely why every house has a shrine to Hestia, usually located near the hearth. Hestia was also associated with granting peace and prosperity to cities as well as to homes. No man or community was ever made wealthy except by Hestia's grace. So Hestia is fundamentally important to all human lives. Later, Plato tried to derive the name of Hestia from the word essence, as in the fabric of reality itself. He says that Hestia is in fact the goddess of reality. He concludes that Hestia must be the greatest of all the gods. These are the reasons that that orphic hymn called Hestia the strongest supporter of mankind. The most significant and best attested religion of Hestia was the one established at Rome. The Romans held the priestesses of Vesta, the Latin name for Hestia, in particularly high regard. The Roman king Numa, the second of the Roman kings, and the direct heir to Romulus, the founder of Rome, established the temple to Vesta at Rome. Numa was known as a particularly pious ruler, more interested in honoring the gods than in traditional Roman warmongering. This first temple was built of wickerwork walls and a straw roof. The symbolism is very clear. This is a thatched roof house, more than it is a glorious temple. If we remember Hestia's association with the home, this is appropriate. This old temple was burned in 241 BC, and the relics were saved by the heroic actions of the Pontifect Maximus himself. From here the temple was rebuilt in glorious bronze. The temple was rounded and designed to model the entire cosmos. Hestia was seen as a manifestation of the earth. Though the Romans knew the earth was not flat, they still kept the earth at the center of all things. The world was called the focus, which we still use to describe the center points of an ellipse, and it was derived from the Latin word fovet, meaning warmth. So in the temple there's a model of the earth, a great ball suspended in the center as a globe. From here, a model of the universe spreads out across the temple. Finally, there was a great sacred flame in the temple. Most temples would have had images of the god and their associated heroes, but not in the temple to Vesta. Since Vesta is a manifestation of flames, it makes sense that they were not represented in human form, but in the fire itself. Thus, in the temple of Vesta, the sacred flames are the only representations of the goddess. The temple was managed and overseen by the Vestal Virgins, a hyper-elite group of four to six ultra-chast women. They oversaw the festival of Vestalia in June, where the temple was purified and ritually cleansed. These Vestal Virgins were among the most revered religious officials anywhere in the Roman Empire, which is a little strange given their unusual relation to the standard Roman social order. Most powerful religious leaders are tasked with maintaining social order. The priests and temples are designed to reflect and reinforce an idealized image of societal expectations. This is fundamentally the role of all organized religious officials, but the Vestal Virgins neither reflected nor reinforced the established Roman order. They were wholly asexual, never engaging in sexual activity, thus they challenged rather than reinforced all gendered expectations. So the question is, why are these figures who actively challenged the Roman social order so universally revered? For a long time scholars looked at the figure of Vesta and the Vestal Virgins in her service through the lens of acceptable social roles. Some focused on an ideal Roman matron, choosing to interpret the Vestal Virgins as mother figures. They were, after all, tasked with overseeing the sacred flames and the sacred hearth, just as the average Roman matron was tasked with overseeing their household's flames and hearth. If the city is just an extended household, then the Vestal Virgins are actually playing this same role for everyone in Rome. But there is one key issue with this interpretation. The Vestal Virgins are in fact virgins. This makes the interpretation that they were actually playing matronly roles, i.e., married women whose societal roles were directly tied to their husbands and descendants, a lot less straightforward. Is it even possible for one who does not have husbands or descendants to actually play the role of matron? Some other scholars focused on the role of the Vestal Virgins as an idealized image of a daughter. The idea follows that the Vestals were actually the pious daughters of the city, manifested as the household. However, this suffers from the exact opposite problem. The ceremony by which a Vestal Virgin was invested into the priestesshood was an overt marriage to the goddess. All of the societal motions of the ceremony reflected a standard secular marriage. If they were meant to be interpreted principally as the daughters of the city, then why are the Vestal Virgins invested with a marriage and given matronly duties, such as keeping the flames in the household? Ultimately, both of these interpretations are drawn out of an attempt to understand the origins of the Vestal religion. King Numa is from a period so long ago that no Roman author actually knew whether he even existed at all. Numa was the one who established all of the important civic rites and rituals, but we can be no more certain that Numa existed than that Romulus was a foundling suckled by a she-wolf in the forest. So the idea behind this scholarship is that the early Roman citizens living in that early kingdom would have established their social custom based around their own social norms, and that is the stuff by which the later religion was founded. This speculative inquiry is based on an assumption that the Romans reflected their own lives into the religious rites they were setting up, therefore making an idealized image of the matron or of their daughter in their own social context. This is not an unreasonable assumption, however, we don't have a ton of information about that social context either. Of course, academic speculations into the social fabric of the early Roman kingdom are absolutely as speculative as the Romans' own about King Numa. So the question remained why would they bother to set up a ritual and a whole priesthood which encompassed both images of an idealized young woman and an idealized older matron? Some tried to synthesis into an interpretation that melded the female life cycle, where there would be important ritual roles for the Vestal Virgins as they served in the priestesshood for a net total of thirty years. Even if they were selected as young women, they would eventually become post-menopausal women while still in office. What separated them from the average Roman life cycle was the very asexuality that separated Hestia herself from the average Greek or Roman god. More recent scholarship into the Vestal Virgins is based around the interpretation that it is precisely their sexual status which granted them such an exalted position. The rituals surrounding the Vestal Virgins definitely do include key matronly duties like cleaning out the temple, as well as a ritual marriage symbolically connecting them to the goddess. Even their clothing and headdresses very closely resemble those of the average married Roman woman. We can add to this interpretation an idea that in terms of legal rights and privileges, Vestal Virgil reflect masculinity more than is immediately clear. They have rights, for example, to present evidence in court, and rights to move freely through the city. Critically, the Vestal Virgins were allowed to play a role of lictor, a civil servant who is an attendant to a Roman magistrate or visiting dignitary. In the cases of Vestal Virgins, these were almost always religious appointments. Standard lictors might actually be physical protectors, but generally speaking, the role of a lictor is an almost exclusively male office. So there is an important ritual role here where Vestal Virgins are playing young unwed women, ritually playing adult matrons, and playing male roles as well. Yet, through it all they remain sexually aloof and wholly asexual from social expectations in the Roman world. One way to interpret these apparent contradictions is through the role of ritual liminality. The Vestal Virgins occupied multiple social roles and multiple sexual categories precisely so they could emphasize the sexual ambiguity in their roles themselves. This sexual ambivalence reflects what might have been interpreted as a potentially scary attack on the Roman social order, but in this context was actually woven into it. When rituals emphasize liminality of state over explicit reflection of societal rules, it is often done to draw authority or power directly from the mixed status they're representing. There is a power in existing between categories. Those of us who live between categories often provide insights into the categories themselves, as well as some insight into how those categories were constructed. In truth, every single category is a man-made interpretation based on their own understandings of natural facts. Existing between categories is also a man-made interpretation of traits and characteristics. For example, we define fish as living exclusively in the water, so when we identify those fish that are able to move on land, it impacts the very way we constructed that category. We can find something powerfully magical about these liminal creatures, or we can question the way we constructed the category of fish in the first place. So for the Vestals to play both young women and old women is allowing them to stand between key categories. That they also have some masculinity thrown in only further augments this queerness of them. The authority in the Vestal Virgins is specifically derived from that existence between these key categories. In fact, you might even argue that by standing between these three categories, the Vestal Virgins are actually playing the role of a mediator for those who live only in one or the other. So Hestia and her religion is essential to the study of queer scholarship. While few of these authors would have used the word queer per se, they are in fact describing an innate queerness within the character and the historical religion based around this. Interpreting the ability for these queer spaces to exist through the lens of liminality in a ritual state provides an interpretive framework for understanding queer lives and rituals in antiquity. The trouble is that the Vestal Virgins derive their power from their innate queerness could be thought of as an academic cul-de-sac where the queerness is the objective or the end result instead of as the interpretive framework. If the entire goal of the scholarship is to simply say Hestia and the religion that developed around it, was asexual and queer, then do we actually gain anything? I hope what we've discussed here is not just to note the presence of Hestia as an asexual, but to make a wider argument about the way asexuality is described in antiquity up to the present. Very rarely do we get somebody who just is asexual, and there isn't a clear explanation or justification given for it. So when we do see a character like Hestia who just is asexual, it's a powerful reminder not to make assumptions about an asexual in the service of explaining why. Using their asexuality to help us better understand what's actually going on is the argument. Hestia and the Vestal Virgins were asexual. Where others might have interpreted why, the key is that asexual beings, both human and divine, found a space in the ancient world where they were able to live and even be part of society. The Greeks and the Romans had a concept of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Eros, the god the Romans called Cupid. The narrative usually goes that Aphrodite's son is Cupid, but there's another version that goes that Eros is a universal cosmic fact. This is most clearly told in the Orphic traditions, where we have a very clear manifestation who is one of the most primordial of all the gods. The attraction between people in an erotic way is one of the first things in the entire universe. So when the sky god and the earth god met, they had Kronos and Rea and the other Titan gods, and Eros was present even if the tiny winged imp Cupid had. Been born yet. Several early Greek poets, including Sappho of Lesbos, imply that this is not a later addition, but an understanding of the apparent juxtaposition between early gods and goddesses having sex for many generations before Eros or Aphrodite was born. In the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite mentioned above, Homer takes the time to mention that there are a handful of people in the universe like Athena, Artemis, and Hestia, who remain untouched by the love of Aphrodite. Even Zeus is susceptible to Eros' abilities, but these few people are not. But when we step back and remember Eros and Aphrodite are abstractions of romance and sexuality, we also see an abstraction of asexuality nearly as old. Hestia, the asexual. Next week we're going to explore Año, the abstraction of warfare. Like Hestia, she was never formally married to anybody, however, we know she was not asexual. Año had a fling with Ares and bore the child in Yalios, whose name literally means warlike. Though Año did have sex at a few points, this is not a defining characteristic of her life. Rather, Año was never defined by her relationship to other gods or goddesses. Anyo was a warlike goddess who delighted in violence and strife. Not exactly ideal marriage material. So if we interpret the surviving references to Anyo, we get an image of an aromantic deity. We'll see you in two weeks. Notes and comments. I wanted to take a minute and dispel a piece of modern misinformation about the relationship between Hestia and Dionysus. There are twelve principal Olympian deities and innumerable other gods who dwell on Olympus. Most of these important twelve are consistent across the retellings. They include Poseidon, Zeus, Hera, Demeter, Aphrodite, Athena, Artemis, Apollo, Ares, Hephaestus, and Hermes. But the twelfth member is sometimes given as Hestia, and some other times given as Dionysus. This never seemed to bother anybody in antiquity, but some modern authors have tried to make sense of why, sometimes Dionysus, and sometimes Hestia. The idea was that Hestia was the original Olympian, but when Dionysus ascended to Olympus, they supplanted Hestia from the role as one of the chief twelve deities. This hypothesis apparently accounts for the discrepancy and allows the traditional feminist argument that a man pushed a woman out of her role. You may find this idea in a lot of modern summary accounts online, especially after Robert Graves popularized the idea in his 1955 book, The Greek Myths. But it is not actually backed up by anything from antiquity. Dionysus actually brings up a ton of other goddesses and gods, including their mother Semele, their human nurses like Mistis, who became the goddess of initiation, and their aunt Aino with their son Palamon, as well as Dionysus' loves, such as Ampelos and Ariadne, far from overturning anybody's divinity, Dionysus brought up a lot of other deities to Olympus, building the Pantheon, rather than posing a threat to anyone's role within it. The proper way to understand this discrepancy is that there was no official canonical list of the twelve Olympians. Dionysus is often reflected as an earthy agricultural deity, listed among Pan and the other natural deities, and then ascending to Olympus only after traveling the world and interacting with human beings as an agricultural reformer and mystic initiator. Meanwhile, Hestia was a cronian and an heir to Olympus from the very beginning. Basically, the two lists show different ways of thinking about Dionysus' divinity and not necessarily a single canonical list of the twelve. I just wanted to dispel a piece of fake news. Now on to the actual notes. The birth of the Cronian gods is found in Hesiod's Theogony, verse 453 through 500. Hesiod is an 8th century BC theologian. Hestia being granted the opposite of marriage is in Homeric hymn number 5 to Aphrodite, verse 21 through 33. Hestia is the keeper of the fire in all houses, is drawn from Homeric hymn number 29 to Hestia. The Homeric hymns were written in the 6th and 7th centuries BC. Many of them recited as short invocations prior to the recitation of the Homeric epics at religious festivals. Most of the Homeric hymns were written by the Homeridae, Homer's direct descendants, who performed his works ritually. Pindar's Nemean Ode No. 11 mentions Hestia as the deity presiding over all parliaments and assemblies of the government. Pindar lived in the 5th century BC. His Nemean odes are poetry honoring the winning athletes in the Nemean Games, held every other year at the Sanctuary of Zeus at Namia on the Peloponnese, a little north of Argos. Pausanias describes Hestia's shrine in Athens in the description of Greece, Book I, chapter 18, Section III. He describes the much simpler shrine at Hermione in Book II, chapter 35, section one. Pausanius was the second-century geographer whose description of Greece was a travel guide to Roman tourists desiring to see the sites of ancient Greece. Deodorus of Sicily describes Hestia as the inventor of the house and the deity who gave homes to humanity in the Library of History, Book V, Chapter 31, Section 1. Deodorus of Sicily lived in the first century BC and wrote a Greek history of the world, trying to incorporate a general history of everywhere and everything, from the travels of Dionysus and Hercules to his own day. Bacchalides fragment 148 mentions Hestia as the purveyor of all wealth and prosperity. Bacchylides was a lyric poet who lived in the 5th century BC. Plato's Critalus, sections 400D through 401b, contains the portion where Plato advances the derivation of Hestia's name from the word essence. The derivation is more of a philosophical exercise and not meant to be taken too literally, but it clearly shows Hestia's significance in antiquity. Orphic hymn number 84 to Hestia references Hestia as the strongest supporter of humanity at line 5. The description of the Temple of Vesta at Rome comes from Ovid's Fasti, Book 6, describing the rituals on June 9th, called the Vestalia. Ovid was a Roman poet born in 43 BC and died in 17 AD. His Fasti is a documentation of the Roman festival calendar in poetic form. We have to be a bit careful when using poetry to describe ritual, but it is often a great source for the mythic origins of festivals as the Romans understood and discussed their own heritage. The seminal article relating the Vestal Virgins' asexuality to their liminality and power is from Mary Beard, The Sexual Status of the Vestal Virgins, in the Journal of Roman Studies, 1980. The idea that asexuality was actually turned from an interpretive framework to the end point of the research was drawn from Mary Beard's critique of her own argument in Rereading Vestal Virginity in the book Women in Antiquity, New Assessments, published by Rotledge in 1995. That's all for this week, folks. We'll see you in two weeks for our discussion of Ano the Aromantic.