Penthesilea's Wish [Vol.2]

Chapter Thirty-five

Staring into the laptop screen while sitting alone in the professor's living room, Daniela held her breath and awaited her next glimpse into a world she could not have imagined only weeks before. Suddenly a website opened, presenting the following text:

The Penthesilea Sisterhood

VADE MECUM

(for Anaea_4356)

[Note: This document upon closing will self-delete. Its encryption will not permit copying or printing.]

Illumination I: The Naming of Our Ancient Sisters

In their own tongue, the ancient Greeks had imported a foreign name for our very independent female ancestors. They encountered these women in their explorations of the 'uncivilized' world to the east. Their fascination for Aμαζóνες-"Amazons" is evident through their inclusion of them into their own rich mythology. Unfortunately, there was a similar-sounding word in ancient Greek: αμáζος- "a-mazos," which literally meant "without a breast." This misnomer caused an original misconception about the Amazon culture which has been perpetuated throughout history. The disturbing mental image of a clan of women without one of their breasts, gave rise to other false notions about this warring, nomadic tribe, which wandered freely on horseback at the fringes of the Black Sea.

The truth was, there was never a custom of breast removal among this break away clan of female warriors. Yet, this indication of a brutal tribal practice remained throughout history for some three-thousand years. The belief was further misconstrued as it was thought the practice was thought to better enable the proficiency of the women as archers in battle. It was even further fanaticized that Amazon women would remove a breast from all the young members of their clan while still in infancy or early childhood in order to perpetuate these skills of war. Today, after much research into the matter, there are other etymological derivatives for the name "Amazon" which leave the mastectomy notion obviously false and the most unlikely.

As contemporary females today, and coming from many societies, our organization has devoted much study and contemplation to the research and preservation of our ancient sisterhood-the original Amazons. We are now quite certain that an explanation for this name remains outside this early and faulty hypotheses. In fact, as to any truth of the practice at all, there are no known images in Greek or other formative art depicting Amazons which support it. Existing artifacts where Amazon women appear in representative form, some three millennia ago until today, show no signs of this process or its effects. There are simply no known historical records featuring our warring women as the victims of mastectomy.

On the contrary, instead of mutilated women, images of the Amazons in Classical Greek and Hellenistic art represented popularly in vase paintings, bas relief stone carvings, statuary or bronze castings, are beautifully rendered and show no such mutilation. They show the young women as healthy warriors, sporting two youthful and often bare breasts. These women are sometimes erotically featured in their combative positioning with men and their bodies give a robust, graceful, even heroic impression rather than any marred image the Greek phrase "a-mazos" would imply.

A more plausible theory behind the name, suggested for our equestrian sisters who would ride across the plains cohesively wielding deadly weapons, comes from the language of the Greeks' own archenemies, the Persians. In their more Asian vernacular, "ha-mazon" denoted the concept of an "enemy warrior." It is not hard to believe, then, that this phonetic representation could have been adopted by the Greeks when they encountered the warlike women in these northeastern, remote territories they were reported to occupy.