I was nary virgin erstwhile I met my husband, and helium knew it. We person been monogamous, but I wouldn’t telephone myself chaste. (I tin perceive my friends guffaw.) Pleasure brings maine nary shame. Books gave maine spot to beryllium my ain woman.
When it comes to what I bash with my womb, I’ve defended myself to random interrogators and household who feared I would not marry. In college, to support my numbers down, Abuela prayed I would wed the adjacent antheral I met. If that’s what God thinks is best. Even prayers request clauses. As my superior caretaker, Abuela did not judge I’d find a antheral to emotion me, fixed my prickly ways. Throughout my puerility and into my adulthood, adjacent aft I’d been joined for years, she told maine hundreds of times that I needed to alteration to support a husband. A mendacious prophecy.
When are women worshipped similar goddesses? Wedding time only. (2007-me successful a achromatic formal and reddish pashmina, Brian with my buss marks connected his face.) Marriage brings the committedness of children. Have one? Don’t fret—you’ll beryllium hustled into different soon enough. Have two? Better get your quips retired since one and done is simply a foregone conclusion. Two and through should suffice. Social unit to enactment fertile does not extremity until it’s evident to onlookers that this pistillate could not nutrient different baby. Imagine dying with nipples sore and slack.
Two sons and 1 decennary into our marriage, I’ve asked my hubby to get a vasectomy, modernity’s quickest and astir effectual commencement control, nary ceremonial but a fewer laughs and winces. I emotion him and our boys. They are capable for me, but I americium not yet capable for me. I privation to beryllium kept harmless from worship. I mean to regularisation my ain body. By which I mean I bash not privation much children.
Dame Mary Beard is simply a feminist student of the classics. Intrigued by her survey of womanhood, powerfulness and speech, I person followed her caput to antiquity and back. In “The Roman and the Foreign: The Cult of the ‘Great Mother’ successful Imperial Rome,” Beard tells america the Great Mother Goddess was formally introduced to Rome successful 204 BCE. Not conscionable an idea, Cybele was a burnt abstraction stone from Asia Minor, present known arsenic the Republic of Türkiye. I repeat: Cybele was a meteorite.
Worshippers lined Cybele’s cracks with metallic and installed her successful a temple dedicated successful 191 BCE connected Palatine Hill, considered to beryllium the birthplace of Rome. Centuries passed earlier a corporate consciousness of Cybele’s value yielded archival details of her arrival. Beard turns to Livy, who describes a bid of meteor showers successful the waning days of the warfare against Hannibal. Eager to construe the gods’ will—surely, stones that trailed airy indispensable clasp ineffable portent—the Romans consulted the Sibylline Books.
I privation to beryllium kept harmless from worship. I mean to regularisation my ain body. By which I mean I bash not privation much children.
Translated from Greek, these oracular utterances proclaimed: When a overseas force had brought warfare to the onshore of Italy, helium could beryllium driven retired of Italy and defeated, if the Idaean Mother were brought to Rome from Pessinus. Legend held that the Roman contention had sprung from Mount Ida successful Troy, whose sanction Cybele bore—Magna Mater Idaea.
Seeking confirmation of this divine directive, the Romans sent ambassadors to King Attalus of Pergamum by mode of Delphi, wherever the fume-addled oracle decreed that the Goddess beryllium received by helium who was the champion antheral successful Rome.
Delphi sits supra a geologic vent, an X from which noxious gases escaped the earth, corrupting the minds of women who inhaled and pronounced their prophecies. In July 2013, 1 twelvemonth earlier I learned Cybele’s sanction and much than 2,200 years aft she was brought to Rome, I walked up that parched mountainside, erstwhile soaked successful the humor of animals sacrificed to divinity, to ostentation, to the desperation of needing to cognize the future. There I saw a chromatic shaped similar a womb, revered arsenic the halfway of the universe. Not anymore. Most radical measurement the twelvemonth by its region from the commencement of Jesus. And let’s not hide that July was named for the Roman dictator Julius Caesar. Men formed agelong shadows.
In Delphi, I was already pregnant, but I did not yet know. With maine among the toppled columns were cells dividing successful a freefalling swarm, grappling similar eagles tumbling from a cliff. The writhing shot would implant successful my assemblage erstwhile I was backmost from Greece and en way to a penning conference. My uterine lining twinged, and I clutched my java successful the ferry line. I deliberation I conscionable felt my babe implant, I told my friend. I amended not portion portion I’m here. To parent successful modern civilization is to go a temple subjected to nationalist scrutiny.
History is hazy, and Beard suspicious. Livy, too. He wrote that Attalus gave the Roman ambassadors the ineffable chromatic which the section inhabitants said was the Mother of the Gods. What had the ambassadors offered successful return? The accidental to support living? Attalus could person dusted disconnected different meteorite and called it Cybele. The quality caput imbues objects with holiness. Could a fraudulent rock, a substitute, go existent done the worship of multitudes? Perhaps gestation could marque maine a mother.
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From Desire Lines by Kristen Millares Young. Copyright © 2026. Available from Red Hen Press.
English (US) ·