ABSTRACT
My starting-point is such patterns of male fantasies about women, and of male strategies for controlling women in social life and cult, as we can conceivably attribute to fifth-century BC Athenians. Behind these patterns, I shall suggest, is a sense that women contain an inner space and inner darkness, which together interact with, and provide one model for, traditional popular thinking about that inner space belonging to all normal, i.e. male, human beings, in which the Greeks located the organs of what we call the mind. That relationship of metaphorical interaction is part of the background to Greek notions of daemonic possession, especially to the image of possession as erotic entry.
