3.3 Infertility – ex votos of sexual parts
If a girl grew up, married, but did not become pregnant, her status as a full woman was threatened. Models of both male and female reproductive organs are among the objects dedicated at sanctuaries of gods and goddesses associated with health; places which – as you saw in Week 1 Health and the gods [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] – were found all over the ancient world.
In Video 3, Professor Helen King speaks to Dr Jessica Hughes about why people would offer these objects to the gods.
Download this video clip.Video player: Video 3
Transcript: Video 3 Infertility - ex votos of sexual parts
HELEN KING
Hello, I’m Helen King. I’m Professor of Classical Studies at The Open University, and I’m joined today by Jessica Hughes, my colleague from classical studies, who’s an expert on votives.
JESSICA HUGHES
Hello.
HELEN KING
So we’re talking about votives and fertility today and in particular, I’d like to start with thinking about what fertility is and about what sorts of parts associated with fertility, sex, childbirth you find that are dedicated to the gods in the ancient world.
JESSICA HUGHES
In votive deposits all over the ancient world, you do find bits that we might conventionally link with sexuality or healing or a generation. So we have the male bits. It’s generally the non erect penis with the scrotum that gets dedicated.
You also get the female vulva and that’s often shown as a little triangle with a line in it. And those are marble reliefs generally. But then you find wombs, uteri often made from terracotta that are generally found in Italy, and breasts as well, singly or represented in pairs.
HELEN KING
So what are the breasts doing there? Do we think that they count as sexual parts?
JESSICA HUGHES
They could be about healing like many of the other votive body parts, our arms and legs and things. We generally ascribe those with a healing function. And, actually, the same goes for the genitalia as well, but we have very little hard evidence about what these are about. So I think we just have to keep an open mind and think breasts could be to do with lactation. They could be to do with problems, tumours, mastitis. But whatever they’re about, there were an awful lot of them.
HELEN KING
Right. So why are people doing this? Why are people dedicating bits of their bodies that we regard as quite private?
JESSICA HUGHES
Well, it links into this very sacred type of healing where you go to a god or a goddess and you’d ask them to intervene in bodily matters. We do have a very rare literary text. We don’t have very many of them about votives. But in a later text by Saint Augustine, City of God, he does describe people going into temples and hanging models of their genitalia, female and male, and dedicating these to the gods, Liber or the goddess Libera.
He’s seeing this as a very strange pagan practice, but he says it’s to do with the successful liberation of the seed or ejaculation or female equivalent. So, again, that’s putting them very firmly in the sexuality realm rather than necessarily the healing one. But it’s an interesting perspective from late antiquity on what was happening earlier.
HELEN KING
Yeah, as you say, it’s Augustine who’s got a bit of a thing about pagans who are all obsessed with sex so you can see where he’s coming from with that. So do you actually go to the sanctuary yourself with your bits or do you just send one along?
JESSICA HUGHES
You can do either and we do have evidence that people did sometimes send votives with a relative or perhaps that the relative themselves took the initiative and bought a votive for an ailing relative a bit like you might light a candle for someone in a church today. There are inscriptions on some of the votives. For instance, at the Asclepeion in Athens which say a man has dedicated something on behalf of his wife although that is a face rather than a breast or genitalia.
HELEN KING
So we can say that people do it on each other’s behalf as well as going--
JESSICA HUGHES
Oh absolutely.
HELEN KING
--on their own.
JESSICA HUGHES
Absolutely and even beyond the strict sphere of votives, we have the miracle inscriptions from the sites of Epidaurus which talk about people going to the sanctuary of Asclepeios and sleeping there on behalf of someone else and then having dreams about this other person then being healed at home.
HELEN KING
So back on those bits of fertility or possibly fertility or gynaecological problems or whatever, these wombs, how do you know that that’s a womb? It doesn’t say womb on it.
JESSICA HUGHES
No and it’s a good question because a lot of them don’t really look very much like wombs as we know them.
HELEN KING
I wasn’t going to say that. But, actually, yes, you’re right.
JESSICA HUGHES
I think it’s because they’re found in with other body parts and of all the body parts, they probably look most like a womb. Some of them have striations on them, so lines, curvy lines. This has been interpreted as the muscle contracting during childbirth. I’m not sure how much you agree with that interpretation.
HELEN KING
Well, yes, you see my dubious expression here. So that’s tricky because the literary sources talk about the child being active in the process of birth, not about the womb being active. So that becomes problematic because you’ve got literary sources that really don’t fit that interpretation. But then that doesn’t mean everyone thought the way that those literary sources do.
JESSICA HUGHES
No and I think that’s one of the things that make these votives such a valuable source of evidence because they can often provide a counter-narrative, an unexpected narrative to what you get in the literary sources. The fact that there are these male and female body parts dedicated in what we assume is the realm of fertility and sexuality also gives a really interesting perspective on this idea of both men and women being responsible in a way for procreation.
HELEN KING
So, what about some of the weirder wombs? There’s some which have got little stones in them.
JESSICA HUGHES
Yes, there are quite a few of those from Italy, and sometimes they rattle around. They’re like little pellets. There’s one or two in there, and people have x-rayed these wombs and seen some of them are also fixed.
HELEN KING
The idea of going around x-raying a terracotta womb is quite weird. But it’s the only way to find out, I suppose.
JESSICA HUGHES
Yes because you can rattle them and you can hear them, but I think that by x-raying them you get a better sense of the diameter, which is generally like one or two centimetres.
HELEN KING
Right. What on earth are those about?
JESSICA HUGHES
People have looked at these and thought, well, it must be something to do with childbirth and procreation and perhaps it’s an embryo, a fertilised egg, or perhaps it’s a thank offering for somebody, a couple who’s got pregnant. What do you think?
HELEN KING
I don’t know. This is a tricky one, isn’t it? To me, the idea of stones in the womb sounds more like something like bladder stones, which we know they knew a lot about in the ancient world and which they could treat. So maybe those stones are sort of seen as bad things, disease that’s in the womb that needs to be got out rather than an embryo. But it’s impossible. We can’t say because there’s no text to help us.
JESSICA HUGHES
Yes, it’s very difficult and I think that’s a really good example of how we always need to approach these objects with an open mind and not make assumptions that are perhaps based on our own cultural expectations about the body.
HELEN KING
Clearly, there’s a lot there to think about, and it’s not somewhere where we’ve got definite answers that we can come up with. So, yeah, it’s over to you. What do you think?
Video 3 Infertility - ex votos of sexual parts
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