Savage Breast Book Excerpts

From Chapter 7: The Cult of Abundance: Artemis Of Ephesus

In the Ephesus museum an entire hall is devoted to three life-sized statues of Artemis recovered from her temple. I sat on the cool marble floor of this hall and gazed up at her, my best shot at that ‘ineffable pleasure’ Apulieus described. The room is dim. Soft lights play on the idols’ curves. Her face is impassive, her posture rigid. Her skirts flow down, making a single column of her legs. In the crooks of her outstretched arms she cradles two lions, reminiscent of the twin leopards from the Çatalhöyük goddess’ throne, sculpted some 6,000 years earlier. Her hands reach out to her adorers as if to fold them into her. On her chest, beneath a zodiac necklace, she has rows and rows of breasts. Twenty, thirty, it’s hard to count them all. They hang from her like clusters of grapes. She takes my breath away. It strikes me suddenly as so wrongheaded, the claim of scholars that she is a goddess of fertility. This Artemis does not remind me of birth. She’s a goddess of abundance, of breasts overflowing, enough for all humanity to suckle.

To see them clustered there between her arms intoxicates me. It is the thing we were born to ache for. If Jung is right and there are archetypes hardwired into the brain, then the breast must be the most important: to press against it, latch, suck and gulp is the most primal human instinct next to drawing our first breath. Artemis of Ephesus, she opens it up in me, and I feel the need like a pang. I remember that the Spartans used to put male babies on a mountain top for seven days after birth, then weaned survivors early. It made better soldiers, so they said. It gave them a kind of anger. If we are made to long for the breast, does not having it twist something in us, create an anger and a craving we must carry all of our lives? Especially men like me, born of a bottle-nursed generation, suckled with the taste of a rubber nipple. Is this the root of our culture’s grand obsession with the real thing?

At age eleven I was flipping though catalogues in search of brassier ads. I tore out pages of Life Magazine featuring topless Las Vegas showgirls or half-naked African tribeswomen and hid them in my closet. At thirteen, I was thumbing through Playboy magazines in the back of the local variety store, terrified I was going to be discovered in my depravity, touching only the edges of the pages so as not to leave a sweaty fingerprint—was somebody going to dust for fingerprints? I still remember the first time I softly placed my hand on the front of a girl’s blouse. The ecstasy shivered in me that short instant until she gently returned my fingers to her shoulders. In a crowd, my eyes still find the woman in a low cut top. My head swivels on the beach. I feel the thrill to see the swell of them, the bounce of them, the gorgeous raspberry tips of them though a light summer dress. I think of pornography, strippers, advertising, the breasts pushed in our faces in the rush to get our cash. I remember sitting in strip bars, watching girl after girl expose her breasts for all to see, and me soaking it in like a drunk at his liquor, each pair revealed leaving me wanting to see the next pair and the next and the next, though almost all were pumped and artificially rounded, an identical army of Barbie dolls. In the raw magazines, women’s breasts are distended until they are grotesque, and it seems there is no limit to the flesh men crave. Imagine if Artemis of Ephesus could be our centerfold, if multiple breast enhancements became the newest fashion, each woman sporting a dozen, twenty, thirty breasts. Would that assuage this need we have, for more, more, more?

Strange how all the breasts we see today never fill us up. They leave us wasted, yet still wanting. What happened that we turned them into a commodity, silicon pillows to be devoured with our eyes? In the act, we lost them, or they somehow eluded us, because what they provided was never in the breasts themselves. Artemis of Ephesus symbolizes a kind of giving we no longer understand. Not an exchange, not love returned for love or money, but a flooding forth from her abundance. This is the goddess that Lucius turned to, a goddess so full that our need, our “depraved and sinful nature,” is not an obstacle to her blessing. She gives because she is that giving. And what was my life, but a longing for this abundance, coupled with the belief that it doesn’t exist?

It makes me want to push those breasts away. At the feet of Artemis, I realized I am a member of the cult of scarcity, that tribe that believes there is never enough to go around: not enough food, not enough money, sex, or love. I grew up in a prosperous middle class family. I have a job, a child, a lover, a hundred times more security than any other human generation has ever known. And yet I fear that it will all be snatched away someday. So I better not to take too much, want too much. Luxury is abhorrent to me. I call it thrift, but it is fear. Sometimes I envy members of that other tribe, the cult of abundance for whom life is overflowing, and they can easily reach out and grab that teat, and suck, and trust that there will always be milk...

The Ephesus guidebooks say that these days most archaeologists don’t think the lumps on Artemis’ chest are really breasts, but rather the severed testicles of sacrificial bulls—fertility offerings that were part of her sacred rites. Historically, severed testicles were intimately associated with both Artemis and Anatolian Cybele; her priests cut off their genitals to honor her, and only a man thus unmanned could preside over her temple rites. Some scholars believe these eunuch priests originally conned their way into an earlier hierarchy of priestesses, eventually gaining power and taking over. The robes of Christian priests and the vow of celibacy which they take may be relics of this revolution. Others interpret ritual emasculation as a rite of gender-change: men so drawn to the goddess that they rend themselves to attain her image. The Romans called these self-castrators Galli, and their cult flourished in the heart of Rome. During Cybele’s festivals there, scores of men in frenzies of devotion would slice their manhood off, and throw the severed organs in a great bloody heap. This gruesome rite appears again and again in the Near Eastern myths of Attis, Adonis, Tammuz and Osiris, the severed penis a fertile agent of rebirth. In this way the priests of Artemis re-enacted, bloodily, the sacred sacrifice of the ancient kings, whose death brought new life to the land, and in this they earned their role as counterpart, and eunuch consort to the Goddess of all abundance. Which is it, breasts or testicles? An icon may have many meanings. At least one statue of Artemis of Ephesus has clearly defined nipples. But now I see the goddess with a disturbing double vision: with both breasts and swinging testicles around her neck. The gift of abundance and the brutal price that gift demands.

To receive that breast, did one have to become her eunuch slave? I had to laugh. Too many of my past relationships had been with the likes of Artemis. Sooner or later, I would be cutting off my balls so she could sling them around her neck. I believed with each relationship that this act was necessary, and would lead to some epiphany. Instead I just lay there bleeding. Eventually I hardened my heart to Artemis’ kind. Her offer of the breast took too much from me. I wonder if Paul hit a chord with the Ephesians of his day when he wrote to them, “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” Once the woman submits, once she is property, then her husband owns those breasts, those clusters of abundance. No need to slice of your balls to get them. And yet it has not worked out well for men these past 2,000 years. Those breasts still hang before us, a promise and a torment, ours to possess in marriage or the marketplace, and yet strangely out of reach.