Childbirth killed more Greek women than anything else. Eileithyia decided who lived. Without working medicine, as many as one woman in four might die over a lifetime of childbearing, and the Hippocratic doctors, out of answers, told their patients to pray. So they prayed to Eileithyia. The Greeks called her Eulochia, "of good delivery," and Mogostokos, "she who brings hard labour": the same goddess who eased the passage could hold it shut. Her worship is among the oldest anyone can trace. In a cave at Amnisos on Crete, running deep into darkness, women left offerings to her for thousands of years, from the Stone Age to the Roman Empire. One Bronze Age tablet from Knossos records a gift carried there: a single jar of honey. When Hera set out to stop the birth of Apollo, she did not curse Leto; she simply kept Eileithyia away, and Leto laboured nine days and nine nights until the other goddesses lured the birth-goddess from Olympus with a golden necklace. Without her, there was no birth at all. This book restores the goddess who stood at the most dangerous doorway a woman could pass, and reminds us how recently that danger was ordinary.
Childbirth killed more Greek women than anything else. Eileithyia decided who lived. Without working medicine, as many as one woman in four might die over a lifetime of childbearing, and the Hippocratic doctors, out of answers, told their patients to pray. So they prayed to Eileithyia. The Greeks called her Eulochia, "of good delivery," and Mogostokos, "she who brings hard labour": the same goddess who eased the passage could hold it shut. Her worship is among the oldest anyone can trace. In a cave at Amnisos on Crete, running deep into darkness, women left offerings to her for thousands of years, from the Stone Age to the Roman Empire. One Bronze Age tablet from Knossos records a gift carried there: a single jar of honey. When Hera set out to stop the birth of Apollo, she did not curse Leto; she simply kept Eileithyia away, and Leto laboured nine days and nine nights until the other goddesses lured the birth-goddess from Olympus with a golden necklace. Without her, there was no birth at all. This book restores the goddess who stood at the most dangerous doorway a woman could pass, and reminds us how recently that danger was ordinary.
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