Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 07:01:29 -0700 From: dwalter-AT-ucla.edu (don walter) Subject: Sacred prostitution Somebody on a French-Feminism list referred me appovingly to The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal aspect of the feminine, by Nancy Qualls-Corbett. While checking into that on our local library system, I also enountered Sacred Prostitution & Marriage by Capture, by G.S.Wake, privately printed 1929. The Wake thing is an amazing/amusing example of academic-language snickering and nudging among The Boys, about How You Can Find Smut in the Classics Curriculum--- a real throw-back! And yet it is helpful to read such naive stuff, to re-tune one's detectors, for noticing that kind of cloaking. The Q-C piece is a smallish paper-back by a Jungian analyst, in a _very_ jungian series; I had to get my Jung-filter out of the attic, and dust it off, it's been so long since I read anything in that specialized rhetoric. What the intructions of the filter reminded me was that I have always felt about those folks, rather like my feelings about Christ versus Christians: Old Jung was fairly valuable, at least early on, when he was trying to work through his own individuation; but most jungians seem to me little better than cheap sloganizers. Qualls-Corbett is a little better than that, but only a little: she adopts uncritically, for example, the inexpensive Whiggishness of Simone de Beauvoir, concerning the truth and trustworthiness of Frazer, Strabo, Herodotus and Michener (!). And even Old Jung himself seems to me not much more trustworthy than Freud, when either of them is writing about prehistory. Jane Harrison may be out of fashion these days, but I prefer her attempts to empathize with the Classical Greeks, and her version of the Great Goddess. And Page duBois is a post-modern contemporary of ours, who also struggles to feel/think into/along-with the Differentness of those Greeks, and the further differentness of Sappho in her time and culture. I find Qualls-Corbett's Sacred Prostitutes too much like Pretty Woman, whereas I feel/think that duBois' Sappho, and the equally difficult-to-grasp Virgins of Ita Sheres & Anne Kohn Blau (in their The Truth About the Virgin) are more helpful and worthwhile exercises for our imagination and empathy.
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