The Seductress Archetype

Excerpted from
Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love
By Betsy Prioleau, Ph.D.

The seductress hadn't existed, she would have been imagined. Since the Ice Age men and women have envisioned goddesses of sexuality and worshiped them. These were no bloodless Madonnas with eyes cast heavenward, but creatures of flesh and appetite, adored for their erotic power. Their sacred insignia was the pubic triangle, like the cross in Christianity. Charity, fidelity, modesty, and selfless domestic service had nothing to do with their appeal. Female sexuality alone-in all its majesty and mystery-inspired these early cults.

The goddess religions, historians speculate, lasted for twenty-five thousand year, much longer than the reign of male belief systems. With the ascent of patriarchy, the female deities were demoted to supporting roles and specialized functions, and their powers co-opted by gods. The strongest were demonized. But the first sex goddesses still exert a strong pull on our psyches. They established the archetype of desirable womanhood that continues, with subterranean tenacity, to govern passion today. They defined the seductress persona.

Throughout history the women who've enchanted men resemble these ancient deities to an uncanny extent. Inconceivable as this may sound, it makes perfect sense to mythologists. Archetypes, they say, never vanish from a culture but work stealthily and subversively beneath the surface, especially on the libido. They "take hold of the human personality as a whole, arouse it and fascinate it," despite every precaution.

The early goddesses have usually been seen as simple Great Mothers whose birth-giving powers struck awe and terror in the primitive mind. But woman in toto was the true objet de culte, the almighty Lady of Everything: cosmic totality, death and rebirth, and the sex energy of existence. Women who echo these archaic images of desirability, however faintly, are the ones who send men over the moon. The deja vu sentiments in love may be only memory traces of the first prepotent goddess and all she incarnates.

Her archetype reveals not only the anatomy of the seductress but also the infrastructure of sexuality. The core themes of sexual desire evolved through goddess mythology. Out of those primordial beliefs and rituals arose the construction of the erotic-who and what excite us and why we mate as we do. It's the paradigmatic Seductive Way, incised in the human collective unconscious and resistant to change, despite fluctuations in sexual tastes and mores.

The Prehistoric Goddess

From the Pyrenees to Siberia archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of mysterious Stone Age (30,000-10,000 B.C.) female statuettes and carvings. Without any male ones to speak of-except diminutive stick figures-these Venus images have generated a storm of speculation. Some scholars contend they were fertility fetishes; some, porn toys; others, sacred relics of an aeons-old matriarchal religion. In the absence of written records, we'll never know for sure. But no one denies the sexual content of these busty, hippy figurines with their high-profile vulvas or discounts the possibility of their cultic significance. Historian Richard Rudgley, one of the most impartial investigators, thinks the female body almost certainly held for early man a mythological and "metaphorical" meaning suggestive of a primitive cosmology.

Through myth, the explanatory stories and dreams of the race, we can imagine the general drift of such a prehistoric cult. Most mythologic systems mention an earlier protomyth inherited from deep history, in which a creatrix formed the earth and heavens and ruled the cosmos. Given woman's miraculous sexual biology-her menses in rhythm with the moon, her inordinate orgasmic capacity, her ability to give birth and sustenance-it makes perfect symbolic sense.

This ur-divinity, by tradition, embodied the life force, contained opposites-male and female, change and changelessness - and regenerated the dead in the "great round of her being." The first peoples envisioned her as the moon, a dynamis in motion, cycling constantly through growth, decay, and rebirth. Female sexual power drove the wheels of the universe.

The Venus carvings, etched with strange signs and scattered throughout Eurasia, clue us to her multiple meanings for early man. Although they come in every shape and size, from rail thin to Rubenesque, none even approached the neo-Darwinists' gold standard of feminine sex appeal, the 0.70 waist-to-hip ratio. Yet they were sex incarnate. The famous Venus of Willendorf is swallowed up in mountains of femaleness. Her double D breasts flop on a monumental belly, and her saddlebag hips hold her prize feature in parenthesis, "the most carefully and exquisitely carved realistic vulva in the entire European Upper Paleolithic." To our ancestors the vulva was the holy of holies, carved on every surface as chevrons, triangles, and semicircles and symbolic not just of sexual desire but of maternity and divine creative energy.