We know they’re there, but not always where to look for them: women made invisible in traditional historical accounts. Sometimes their stories have not been passed on; sometimes stories about them have been actively erased, both during their own lifetimes and in the history books. We can sense it intuitively: these feminine deities, these eminent queens, women with power over what people thought and did, have been greater in number than we know. We suspect that they had other forces behind them than what the canon of history has led us to believe.

Sometimes we rediscover these goddesses, queens and other geniuses in unexpected ways. Such as an unremarkable TV programme, or the literary genre known as magical realism. In her debut essay for TWTxT, Louise Vanerell tells some of their stories.

There was an unremarkable documentary on SVT Play recently – the title was a poor Swedish translation of something in English like Who Was the Real Mary Magdalene, the sort of thing that usually heralds some quasi-scientific tales about religious or historical figures.Since my weaknesses include not only British costume dramas but also just about anything involving religious history, I had to take a closer look. Imagine my surprise when the presenter turned out to be my number one radio idol, Melvyn Bragg (BBC In Our Time). Bragg took the narrative to a level that was not only completely different from anything I could have suspected from the title, but also managed to identify my absolute favourite theme in all of religious history:

looking for past female deities and investigating the complete purging of those deities as the monotheistic religions mercilessly ravaged and conquered the West.

The documentary itself is not the focus of this text (although it certainly deserves a review that will dissociate it from the TV listings equivalent of those Swenglish blurbs you see on badly translated paperbacks). Instead, I intend to explore how the monotheistic religions advanced a patriarchal cultural and social power structure while covering up all existing traces of female power and divinity, inspired by my reading of Tom Robbins. In the documentary, Bragg sets out to portray Mary Magdalene in a way that would be earth-shattering in religious circles: Mary Magdalene was not (just?) a prostitute and part of a female entourage, but was Jesus’s foremost apostle and partner. Through historiography within the field of gender research, the phenomenon of hidden and forgotten women has become more and more heavily researched – by this point, it is almost public domain. I have therefore decided to build on the gender research that has become canon, through an excellent example of literary finesse, historical detail and female divinity.

Magical realism that recreates reality

The context (time in my life, sphere of thought, social context, recommended by the right person) in which I came into contact with Tom Robbins must have been a good one. Robbins tends to be regarded as some kind of “post-beat”. I’m not really sure what I think of that, but I assume there’s some point to it, besides the drugs. When I describe his style, I usually lean more towards magical realism, which, geographically speaking, is normally found in South America. Given that Tom Robbins is writing from North America, we’re not all that far off.

Individual, unusual main female characters with strong personalities are a theme throughout Robbins’s eight novels.

My first encounter with him was Still Life with Woodpecker, which can be summarised as “how do we get love to last?”. It’s like an adult fairy tale on hallucinogenic drugs: the two red-heads Leigh-Cheri and Woodpecker, brutally in love, in the dynamic company of moon and menstruation, champagne and Camel cigarette symbolism. There are few books that have filled me with such joy at discovering a literary treasure. Uh-oh, spaghetti-o.

Femininity, divinity and magical realism

To return to the main topic: femininity and divinity. In the book Skinny Legs and All, Robbins explores the much maligned myth of Jezebel. As companions – or rather guides – on the journey, we have Can o’ Beans, Dirty Sock, Spoon, Painted Stick and Conch Shell.Also central to the story are two men, one of Arab origins and the other of Jewish parentage. They run a restaurant together. Right across the street from the UN headquarters. And this is where the story’s main female character, Ellen Cherry, ends up, driven there in a car that has been welded into the shape of a turkey.

Cherry is an artist and has come to New York to develop her art. Not everything goes as planned. On the surface, Tom Robbins’s stories may seem like a jumble of characters, side stories and fragmentary associations, but the further one gets, the bigger the picture becomes. Jezebel, who went down in history as the painted prostitute, crops up fairly early on: first as a cautionary tale of the dangers of womanhood, then as something of a central obsession for our protagonist. Also along for the ride is the biblical figure of Salome, dancer of the Dance of the Seven Veils.

Writing a brief account of the impact that the monotheistic religions have had on our cultural life is probably impossible, other than noting that it has been a dominant one. This is not, therefore, an attempt at some all-encompassing account; instead, I want to convey the sense of joy mixed with fear that wells up in me when I start to look into it. By monotheistic religions, I refer mainly to Judaism, Christianity and Islam – there have been others, but none with the same large-scale impact. Earlier major belief systems invariably had both female and male gods, where the female ones largely represented vital fertility. With the arrival of the monotheistic religions, all examples of female deities/feminine power disappeared. Looking at figures from the earlier religious texts, particularly the Old Testament, from a historical viewpoint can provide interesting ideas about how powerful female figures have been vilified for over 2000 years through the Biblical texts.

Jezebel, Yahweh, Astarte and Asherah

Jezebel by J.L. Byam Shaw

Jezebel is a good example. In brief, her story in the Old Testament goes like this: as a Phoenician, her faith – according to the Biblical interpretation – is an idolatrous one centred around Baal and Asherah. When she marries Ahab, king of northern Israel, she tries to convince her husband to abandon Yahweh and instead make her own faith the dominant religion in the land. After she conspires against an innocent man and has him killed, the people and king find out the truth. Jezebel’s fate is sealed and she is put to a very violent death. Jezebel’s death itself is worthy of closer examination. In the time leading up to her death, she made sure she was dressed and painted as the queen she was – hence her reputation as the painted prostitute. A detail worth noting is that hers is also one of the first cases where we have historical evidence of a person being defenestrated – killed by being thrown out of a window – a course of action that has since then had a strong symbolic significance and has often been used specifically for political purposes. After throwing her out of the window, her killer sits down to eat and drink. After that, her body is ordered to be taken for burial, but only her skull and hands are found: the rest of her body has been eaten by stray dogs.

In a historical context, Jezebel came from a culture in which female divinity was firmly established. Asherah is a central figure who is found in a number of cultures under different forms of the name (similarly to the way Greek gods changed their names when the Romans took over). Another female god from early Mesopotamia (from the first millennium BCE) is Astarte, goddess of fertility, sexuality and war. The connection to Jezebel is that, in the Phoenecian culture, it was traditional for female royalty to be head of the temple of Astarte. This was a role that the kings of Israel had little place for. This could explain why she was unwilling to abandon her religious beliefs for the new ones that prevailed in the country she was now living in. In a context such as this, it is important to point out that a female figure who has gone down in history as a painted prostitute has a significantly more complicated and political history. Whatever the historical truth value of the specific story of Jezebel, it is nonetheless a telling example of how a woman with religious and political power has been decimated into a caricature of the Rousseauian, romanticised ignorant but seductive woman who acts only on her own manipulative feelings.

“Not naive,” Conch Shell had corrected him. “He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear.”

Where should this little story be placed, among forgotten goddesses and earthly women doomed to perpetual character assassination? Perhaps in the overall topic dealt with by the programme on Mary Magdalene, and central to Tom Robbins’s work: dusting off forgotten details, people, phenomena and histories that ignorant or unwilling people have kept from the world around them.

The respect for people in Tom Robbins’s books is something that has always struck me. Even the strangest characters, minor roles and antagonists are never decimated into being mere filler. They all have a purpose to fulfil. But perhaps that goes without saying when talking about an author who can make a painted stick, a shell, a sock, a spoon or a can of beans fill a novel with substance.