Portrait of a Priestess

"This is a lovely book which is beautifully produced and very detailed. It puts the priestesses in the classical world in their prehistoric context and then it looks ahead to Christianity . One of the sections which really appeals to me is the discussion about the priestesses who were the keepers of keys of the temples in ancient Athens. These keys were huge great things. You see them carved on the headstones of women when they are buried. They are probably slightly magnified to make an impressive picture but nonetheless they were big things. They were almost like the starter handles to crank up cars. Exactly, and what is important to remember is that this was a very important position to have because temples were really the banks of the city. That is where all the treasures were stored, so these women were in charge of protecting the material physical wealth of the community. I really loved the fact that Joan focused on that because it was very clever and visual. It really brought into focus an aspect of priestess culture that we might not automatically think of. When you say priestesses it sort of conjures up women wafting about in flowing robes, but I think there is something much earthier going on. It is something you could inherit so you could get these dynasties of priests and priestesses. Often it was the aristocrats, it is what noble women did. And if you look right back to Bronze Age texts you can see it was a way of becoming wealthy. There is this fantastic collection of texts from the Hittites in Turkey and they talk about the kind of wealth that the priestess could inherit, and we are talking about huge amounts of stuff – like 150 male slaves. Yes, you didn’t have to be celibate so they almost certainly had children."