INTRODUCTION

The connection between the feminine and divine spheres of life and thought was, then, a particularly rich one. The purpose of this book, originating in a series of papers presented at the Institute of Classical Studies in London in 1993, is to examine some of the multifarious links involved. We shall be considering not only the ways in which reallife women related, or were thought to relate, to divine beings, but also the cultural constructions shaping the categories of the feminine and of the divine. Thus, these essays are concerned with goddesses and heroines as well as with human females, and even with rituals involving gender inversion by male participants.