Whether there have been Amazon states or no, there have been Amazon
queens--warrior women who knew how to lead and whom men were willing to
follow. The portrait gallery of history has set aside its more spacious
halls for women of another kind, for Helen, Cleopatra, Messalina,
Theodora, and their sisters of blandishment. But women militant have
also a place. Tomyris, queen of the Massagetæ, defeated and slew
Cyrus the Great. Semiramis, legendary queen of Assyria, matched her
adulteries with her victories in arms, won all her campaigns except the
Indian, and, in the words of Strabo, left her monuments in “earthworks,
walls, and strongholds, aqueducts, bridges, and stair-like roads over
mountains.” Boadicea led the Britons in momentarily successful revolt
against Nero. Zenobia, Arab queen, established the Palmyrene power over
the trade routes of the east and swayed Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and
part of Asia Minor, until the arms and gold of Aurelian encompassed
her downfall. Under the poetess Telesilla the women of Argos repelled
a Spartan attack. Joan of Arc led the armies of France as a girl of
nineteen.
Women have gone to war as single soldiers or in troops, in disguise,
or with husbands, brothers, and lovers. When the Goths crossed the
Roman frontiers their families came with them in ponderous wagons,
and their yellow-haired wives figured in the Roman triumphs. American
Indian women, as the Spaniards found, were able to use the bow, and
defended their homes when their husbands were away, and sometimes went
with them in battle. The aftermath of a victory among various tribes
of North American Indians--the scalping of the dead, the torture of
the living--was intrusted to the women. They bear their part in the
Mexican revolutions. Thus Ibanez puts it: “The army is composed of men
and women. No one has ever decided which of the sexes makes the better
soldier.”
To count the women, the Spanish author says, is to count the Mexican
soldiers, for every one has a wife along, and more often than not
a string of children. The woman is called a “soldierette” or a
“hard-tack,” and if her man is tiring of her, “the Indian”; and
generals have their “generalettes.” Women constitute the commissary
of the army. Each carries bedding for herself and man, a basket, and
perhaps a parrot. With her sisters she forms an advance guard several
miles ahead of the main force when the troops are on the march. When
the latter reach camp they find the fires burning and a stew in the
pot. The stew comes out of the basket and the basket is filled by
foraging along the way. The Mexican hard-tack does this thoroughly,
Ibanez thinks: “She passes over the country like a scourge of God.
Along her path not a tree remains with a piece of fruit, not a garden
with a turnip, not a coop with a chicken, not a barnyard with a pig.”
When a soldier dies his companion passes to another through the swift
courtship of circumstance; and sometimes she seizes the rifle of her
fallen mate and uses it in his stead.
Among nomad peoples women have always shared the activities of the
men; the seclusion of the harem is for settled folk. The chronicles
and legends of High Asia have their instances of feminine prowess in
arms. Marco Polo devotes a chapter to Aigiarm, daughter of Kaidu,
king of Great Turkey and nephew to the Grand Khan. She would marry no
man, she said, who could not overcome her by force. Suitors came from
other lands and wrestled with her before the court. Her hand was the
prize of success and a hundred horses were the forfeit of failure. “In
this manner,” says Marco, “the damsel gained more than ten thousand
horses, which was no wonder, for she was so well made in all her limbs,
and so tall and strongly built, that she might almost be taken for a
giantess.” In war she fought beside her father.
From Usbeck ambassadors at Delhi François Bernier heard vaunts of the
Amazonian ferocity of the Tartar women. One of their stories was of
the campaign of Aurungzebe against the Khan of Samarcand. A score of
Mogul horsemen had plundered a village and were binding its people to
sell them as slaves, when an old woman said: “My children, be not so
cruel. My daughter, who is not greatly addicted to mercy, will be here
presently. Should she meet with you, you are undone.” With a laugh the
horsemen tied her up also, and started with their captives across the
plain. The old woman kept looking behind her, and at last uttered a
scream of joy.
The raiders turned and beheld a cloud of dust, and in the midst of
it a young woman furiously riding. Raising her great voice, like the
heroines of Russian epic, she bade them loose their captives and she
would spare them. The horsemen heeding not, her bowstring twanged and
twanged again. Four men tumbled from the saddle, shot at a range beyond
their own arrows. The young Amazon galloped in among the others, slew
the greater part with her unerring bow, and with her saber cut down the
rest.
There may be an element of romantic exaggeration in each of these
stories. But they make the point that the women of the Asiatic
highlands knew the bow as well as the distaff, and they bring the
tradition of female warriors into the region where Greek fable placed
the Amazons. There are continued references to women bearing arms
in Armenia, in Kurdistan, and in the early wars of Islam in Arabia.
Women in armor fought with Miltiades of Pontus against the Romans. The
seventeenth-century traveler, Sir John Chardin, had adventure with a
ragamuffin and lewd-tongued queen of the Mingrelians. The Prince of
Georgia said the women of the Caucasus rode as well as the men, and
he accepted the Amazon legend. When Father Angelo Lamberti was in
Mingrelia in 1654, word came that among the dead in a raiding force
from the Caucasus were a large number of women. They wore complete
coats of armor over bright-red woolen skirts. Their half-boots were
adorned with brass disks and their gilded arrow-shafts bore heads
shaped like the new moon.
As late as the Crimean war “the Black Virgin,” a Kurdish woman, paraded
at the head of a thousand horsemen before the palace of the Sultan in
Constantinople, and led them away to the campaign on the Danube.
The outlines of a veritable woman’s state almost take shape in Bohemian
chronicle and legend of the eighth century. There was a Slavic queen
named Libussa who is supposed to have founded Prague and built its
imperial palace. She exercised her sovereign will by marrying a
peasant, instituting a Council of Virgins, and giving women preference
in the posts of state. When she died in 838 and affairs returned to the
old footing, Valasca, her chief woman counselor, undertook to found a
female commonwealth. Thus far more or less authentic history; legend
adds that for a while the commonwealth really was, and that under it
girls were trained to arms, while boys lost their right eyes and thumbs.
St. Bernard organized the Female Crusade in 1147, in which bodies of
armed women marched. The tradition of fighting women was kept alive
in western Europe in the Middle Ages by girls who accompanied their
knightly lovers as pages, and with them entered the chants of balladry.
It was nurtured by the romances of chivalry, in which disguised female
warriors like Bradamante, “in prowess equal to the best of knights,”
figured. But when, for the first time in the modern era, the Amazonian
impulse seized upon masses of women, there was needed, not the
modulated voice of the _trouvères_, but the Gothic accent of a Carlyle
to tell of it. The phenomenon is known as the Insurrection of Women,
the march on Versailles of October, 1789.
This was the sudden inspiration of perhaps ten thousand women drawn
from the Central Markets and other rallying places--“robust dames of
the Halle, slim mantua-makers, ancient virginity tripping to matins,
the housemaid with early broom.” The mob, continues Carlyle, storms
tumultuous, wild-shrilling, toward the Hôtel de Ville. There Theroigne
de Mericourt leaps astride a cannon, her chariot on to Versailles.
Mænads clamor behind. It is the cause of all Eve’s daughters, mothers
that are or that ought to be. “Paris is marching on us,” exclaims
Mirabeau in the National Assembly as the sinister murmurs come from
afar. Soon the esplanade is covered with “groups of squalid, dripping
women, of lank-haired male rascality.” They break into the assembly,
they compel the king and queen to show themselves, and they bring them
back to Paris, leaving the monarchy in ruins behind them. The return,
says Carlyle, is “one boundless, inarticulate ha-ha--transcendent
world-laughter, comparable to the saturnalia of the ancients.”
[Illustration: THUSNELDA AT THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY OF GERMANICUS INTO ROME
_By_ C. T. von Piloty]
Not as idealized figures of the Greek friezes, but as turbulent,
blood-hungry corybantes of earlier Greek story the Amazons of France
emerged, almost on the threshold of the nineteenth century--vanguard of
the Revolution. Later the market women were enrolled in a brigade which
wore the Phrygian cap, the tricolor, a baldric, a short skirt of red,
white, and blue, and sabots. With pike and cutlass, it was their task
to escort the carts which bore condemned royalists to the guillotine.
There were also armed battalions of women and girls in the provinces.
In the external wars of the Revolution about half a hundred women are
known to have fought, young girls in the infantry, middle-aged women in
the cavalry.
French Amazonism was partly portrayed, partly parodied in the person of
Theroigne de Mericourt. She was a popular actress, in Carlyle’s phrase
“brown-locked, light-behaved, fire-hearted,” who had “only the limited
earnings of her profession of unfortunate female.” At Versailles she
cajoled the guard, “crushing down musketoons with soft arms.” This
woman rose high, and fell far. Suspected of being a Girondist, “the
extreme she-patriots” seized, stripped, and chastised her on the
terrace of the Tuileries, with Paris looking on agrin. Theroigne lost
her wits from brooding over it, and passed out of the Revolution into a
mad-house.
Olympe de Gonges, widow at sixteen, blue stocking, pretended natural
daughter of Louis XV, entered the Revolution at middle age and
countervailed the declaration of the Rights of Man with a declaration
of the Rights of Woman. She tried the patience of Robespierre and he
sent her to the guillotine, after a jury of matrons had found against
her plea that she was “about to give the Republic a citizen.”
Younger women aped men’s attire and men’s ways. _Les Merveilleuses_
indecently imitated Roman costumes, going about in sandals with rings
on their bare toes. When a man clad only in a loin-cloth paraded
between two stark-naked women, the lurking sense of propriety, or
of humor, was affronted, and the group was mobbed. La Maillard, the
opera-singer, who was Goddess of Liberty at the Feast of Reason, wore
trousers, fought duels, and with her female followers went about the
streets to compel other women to dress as she did. This provoked
reaction and the Committee of Safety decreed that women’s political
clubs should disband and no woman henceforth have part in government.
Thus disappear the Amazons of France.
In domestic insurrections and in the defense of besieged cities, women,
as might be expected, figure more largely than in field operations.
Plutarch had told of the women of Argos who defended their city with
such courage that a public decree gave to them the right to dedicate
a statue to Mars, and to their daughters henceforth the singular
privilege of wearing false beards on their wedding day. The Feast
of the Valiant Women is celebrated in Majorca to commemorate the
part taken by two women in repelling a pirate attack upon an island
town. Spanish women manned the walls of Barcelona during the War of
Succession and provided most of the soldiers that held Saragossa
against the lieutenants of Napoleon. On the maid Agostina was conferred
the honor of bearing the name and arms of Saragossa.
The most remarkable woman in the Amazon story and, save Joan of Arc,
perhaps the most dramatic figure in the whole story of her sex, was
born in July, 1889, in the Russian province of Novgorod. The attempt
of Maria Botchkareva to prevent the suicide of her country in 1917,
by taking the field with a force of women soldiers--the Battalion of
Death--who were pledged to obey and not to debate, to shoot the foe and
not to embrace him, has the romance of a lost cause and more. It is
related in _Yashka_, her utterly frank autobiography, transcribed for
her by Isaac Don Levine.
Out of her old life as misused peasant girl and misused wife this
daughter of Russia marched away into another world where she could
strike as well as be stricken. In the Tsar’s uniform she seemed just
a tall, powerfully built, round-cheeked young soldier. But under the
hoyden of the surface there were commanding qualities; and it would
almost seem that Yashka, as the soldiers nicknamed her, could see
straighter than any man in the empire.
Her early experiences as a woman soldier in a men’s regiment were such
as perhaps might have been anticipated. She describes her first night’s
slumber in barracks and the blows and kicks she had to administer to
the men on either side. “All night long,” she says, “my nerves were
taut and my fists busy.” Soon, however, she won the respect and then
the affection of her comrades, and a corner of the regimental bathhouse
was reserved for her ablutions. She joined in trench raids, herself
bayoneted a German, killed several more with handgrenades, was captured
and escaped, was wounded and shell-shocked, repeatedly was commended
for acts of bravery or mercy; and kisses greeted her when she returned
from hospital.
Then came the revolution, committee rule in the army, incessant
soldiers’ meetings, refusal to attack. With Russia dying before her
eyes, Yashka proposed to Rodzianko, president of the Duma, a desperate
expedient--the formation of the Battalion of Death. Let the women
organize a small command free from committees and subject to full
military discipline. The men would neither fight nor take orders, but
perhaps if their women attacked the enemy, the men might be shamed into
moving forward behind them.
Rodzianko saw a gleam of hope in the project; Brusilov,
commander-in-chief, approved; Kerensky set his seal on it; and Maria
Botchkareva found herself at the head of two thousand women of all
classes from princesses to peasant girls and domestic servants. “Who
will guarantee,” asked a delegate at the meeting that authorized this
step, “that the presence of women soldiers at the front will not yield
little soldiers there?” “I will hold myself responsible for every
member of the command,” was Yashka’s spirited reply. “Only discipline
can save the Russian army. In my battalion I shall have it.” And she
did, although the securing it reduced the command she led to the front
to three hundred girls.
“I had a vision,” she said. “I saw millions of Russian soldiers rise in
an invincible advance, after I and my women had disappeared in No Man’s
Land on the way to the German trenches.”
There was a day in July, 1917, when it looked as if the vision was
to become fact. Artillery had prepared the way for a general attack.
Then the committees began to debate, precious hours passed, the day
declined. Into the Battalion of Death came nearly a hundred men
officers, followed by soldiers who would rather fight behind a woman
than not at all.
Rifles were placed in the officers’ hands, and, a thousand strong,
the detachment formed its battle line, every girl flanked by two men.
Coarse jests rose around them, but the laughter died in men’s throats
when the little command leaped the trenches and went swiftly forward,
alone, as it seemed. “Suddenly,” says Yashka, “we caught the sound of
a great commotion in the rear. In a few moments the front to the right
and left of us became a swaying mass of soldiers. First our regiment
poured out, and then, on both sides, the contagion spread, so that
almost the entire corps was on the move.”
The German first line was overwhelmed and the second, and the third,
Yashka’s regiment alone taking two thousand prisoners. Then word came
that the Ninth Corps, which was to relieve the attacking troops and
continue pursuit, was debating instead of advancing!
They must needs run for it, for the German counter-attack was forming.
Back over all the trenches they had won at such cost fled the Russians,
the enemy reoccupying them without a fight. Yashka, shell-shocked, was
carried in on the shoulders of her adjutant.
Thus the great moment of the Battalion of Death came--and went. Russian
manhood was still capable of a heroic thing. But the chaos which it had
made its world could not resolve into order even at the poignant drama
of Russian women marching alone.
What went before and was to come after was all in keeping. The tread of
the little battalion resounds through scene after scene of delirium.
Behind the lines one hears agitators haranguing the women. One beholds
Kerensky banging his table and, forgetful he has just abolished
capital punishment, threatening to have Yashka shot because she will
not tolerate committee rule in her command. One glimpses snipers in
Petrograd firing on her women as they leave for the front. Her own
angry scorn flashes out in a violent scene when she reviews the Moscow
Woman’s Battalion--committee ruled--and notes the rouge, the slippers,
the fancy stockings, the evidences of a dubious familiarity with the
men.
There was worse at the front--the men killing their officers and
embracing the enemy; No Man’s Land “a boulevard for promenading
agitators and drunkards.” Resolved that there should be some real
fighting, Yashka shot a German in the leg as nonchalantly he approached
the lines. Real fighting did follow; the Russian soldiers turned their
machine guns on their own women. The latter were sent to another
sector, and when the men heard that Lenin and Trotzky had seized
control they celebrated; they tried to lynch the little command. Twenty
girls were killed, the rest fled into the woods.
It was the end. The Battalion of Death disbanded and Yashka was seized
and brought before the duumvirs. They bade her join them in “bringing
happiness to Russia,” and laughed at her fierce scorn. But they let her
go, and she follows her command out of these pages. One salutes with
pride and pain.
About four hundred other Russian women, most of them Siberians,
served in men’s regiments, and the colonel of the Sixth Ural Cossack
Regiment was a woman. There was a smaller number of female fighters in
the Austrian armies, a few in the German. Women figured also in the
conflicts that followed the World War. The Vilna unit of girl soldiers,
about a thousand strong, suffered heavy losses in the defense of Poland
against Soviet Russia. “Their heads thrown back, they seemed the very
spirit of Poland,” said one who saw them in action.
These were Amazon volunteers. Until yesterday there were professional
Amazons at many of the courts of Asia. The Celestial King of the
Tae-Pings had a regiment of fighting women. For centuries Indian
princes, notably of Hyderabad and the Deccan, had female guards called
Urdu-begani, or “camp-followers,” on whose loyalty they could rely
utterly. A body-guard of one hundred and fifty girl archers, the
loveliest that could be found in Cashmere, Persia, and the Punjab, rode
milk-white steeds in the service of Ranjeet Singh of Lahore. There were
female sepoys in the palace at Lucknow, female guards at Bangkok and
in Bantam. With their slender bodies incased in tunics and trousers of
rich Eastern colors, with plumed caps on their small dark heads, and
with their erect and slightly swaggering carriage, these palace troops
gave an added effect of theatricalism to the lesser courts of the
Orient. The Amazon march of the modern stage mimics a reality of Ind.
The _Chronicle of the Cid_ may provide a prologue for the motley
spectacle of Africa’s warrior women which follows here. Six-and-thirty
kings of the Moors and one Moorish queen attacked Valencia. The queen
was a negress, and two hundred mounted negresses rode behind her, all
with hair shorn save a tuft on the top. They wore coats of mail and
wielded Turkish bows, and their queen drew hers so skillfully that
they called her the Star of the Archers. The Christians centered their
attack on this female cavalry, slew the leader, and dispersed her force.
Through legend and doubtful chronicle of enterprises Amazonian, one
moves in Africa to a basis of fact as completely documented as the
recent deeds of warrior women in Russia and Poland. Father Alvares, who
went with the Portuguese ambassador to the Abyssinian court (1520-27),
gives it on hearsay that to the south of the kingdom is a country where
the women have husbands but dispense them from fighting. Their queen
has “no special husband, but withal does not omit having sons and
daughters.” “They say,” says this traveler, “that they are women of
a very warlike disposition and they fight riding on certain animals,
light, strong, and agile, like cows, and are great archers.”
In his history of Ethiopia, Father Giovanni Cavazzi has two stories
of negro Amazons in the Congo country of the seventeenth century. One
is of the Princess Lliuga, who refused to submit to the Portuguese
and fought until she won a favorable peace. Her garb was skins; her
weapons were the bow, the ax, and the sword; her battle custom was to
sacrifice a man--cutting off his head and drinking his blood--before
attacking the enemy. The other story is of Tembandumba, a royal negress
who must have known the Amazonian tradition and who sought to establish
the Amazon state. Like Semiramis, she had a procession of lovers, and
slew them as she tired of them. She ruled her state through women. All
male infants, all twins, and all village-born babies were killed by
her orders, and a magic ointment was made from their macerated bodies
mingled with herbs. The queen set the example by destroying her own
boy baby. She told the young girls that their temporary matrimonial
alliances should be marriages by capture, they to do the capturing in
war. The turbulent career of this one-eyed queen of a cannibal tribe
was ended by a husband who poisoned her before she had quite reached
the point of doing for him.
Until, in some instances, less than a generation ago, the courts of
Negroland maintained palace troops and other fighting forces of women.
Burton and Rothery have collected their stories. In the Congo empire
of Monomotapa, Lopez found in 1680 battalions of women, armed members
of the royal harem. A generation before, Jinga, queen of Angola,
maintained a harem of half a hundred young men. The monarch of Yoruba
boasted that if the members of his female bodyguard clasped hands,
they could span his kingdom. In the time of the traveler Bosman the
king of Whydah on the Slave Coast had four thousand armed wives. On
the Gle’ lagoon of the Ivory Coast rumor placed a community of fetish
women ruled by a queen who was able with herbs to develop artificial
elephantiasis. These women put their male infants to death. Dahomey,
which lies back of Whydah, and which became a French protectorate in
1894, was the best known of African kingdoms--and known for two related
things, its annual Customs of blood sacrifice and its army of Amazons.
Sir Richard Burton, who went on mission to King Gélélé in 1863, bearing
Queen Victoria’s urgent request that he abolish the slave trade and
human sacrifice in his dominions, has written the account of this
nearest modern approach to the Amazon state. It is a veracious report
and it reads like an evil dream. The _Thousand and One Nights_ has been
called a blend of blood, musk, and hasheesh. The Dahomey story is an
African _Arabian Nights_, with native beer and trader’s rum in place of
hasheesh, with blood flowing in more turbid torrents than at Bagdad,
and with a ranker musk--and under the musk the overpowering reek of the
body odors of Negroland.
In this nightmare state, half hid behind the swamps and forests of
the coast, one senses the controlling and corrupting presence of some
primitive and abominable religion. Africans, says Burton, worship
everything except their Creator. Those of Dahomey worshiped, among
other things, their ancestors. The Dahoman sovereign must enter
Deadland in royal state, with a ghostly retinue of leopard wives, head
wives, birthday wives, eunuchs, singers, drummers, bards, soldiers.
The retinue was swollen yearly at Customs time when criminals and
prisoners of war, publicly sacrificed under the king’s eye, went
drunken and giggling to their doom, while at the same hour the palace
Amazons dispatched female victims to the land of shades. Throughout the
year, whenever the king would send a message to his deceased father,
he killed a subject and forwarded his soul with it. If he had invented
a new drum, or received a visit from a white man, or even removed from
one palace to another, the soul of some man or woman, slain for the
purpose, must carry the news to the paternal ghost.
It was impossible, says Lady Burton, to venture from one’s hut without
seeing something appalling--skulls on posts, living victims impaled,
evidences of cannibal feasts, animals tied in every agonizing position
and left to die. Burton himself figured that there was an annual
slaughter of at least five hundred persons, and during the year of
the Grand Customs perhaps a thousand. The institution was strenuously
upheld by a powerful and interested priesthood; “to abolish human
sacrifice was to abolish Dahomey.”
This was the woman’s state, somewhat as early Greek legend pictured the
Amazon commonwealth of the Black Sea, before art and song refined the
fable. Women in Dahomey took precedence over men and the warrior women
called themselves men. When one of the king’s Amazons walked abroad, a
slave girl with a bell went ahead, and men had to get out of the way.
It seemed to Burton, when he went up from the coast to the capital
city of Abomey, that the older and uglier the slave girl the louder
she rang the bell, and the more she enjoyed the ignoble scamper of his
interpreters and hammock men. The popular name of these women was Our
Mothers. Their official name was The King’s Wives, a title of courtesy
only, for the monarch had his own harem and these other women were
supposed to be a kind of fighting nuns.
The Amazon army consisted of the Fanto company of the king’s bodyguard,
and the right and left wings, comprising five arms. The former were
distinguished by a headdress in the form of a narrow white fillet on
which was the figure of a crocodile in blue, and their hair was cropped
instead of shaven. The body of the force was composed of blunderbus
women, elephant hunters, razor women carrying eighteen-inch blades
attached to a two-foot handle, archers with poisoned arrows, and
infantry with tower muskets. The archers were little more than heavily
tattooed, lightly clad camp followers with knives lashed to their
wrists. The elephant hunters were the élite. They wore knickers under
short skirts, their breasts were bound with linen strips, and antlers
were attached to their caps. Other Amazons had the same uniform, but
wore on their shaven heads small caps on which were blue tortoise
figures.
Travelers of two centuries ago computed the female army as about ten
thousand strong. The court may have deceived them by having the women
march like a stage army across the parade ground, slip around, and come
back again; or the kingdom may have been depopulated by its incessant
wars, its blood sacrifices, the slave trade, and the dedication of a
fourth of the females to the celibacy of arms. When Burton was there
in 1863 he figured the total number of Amazons at about twenty-five
hundred, of whom one-third were unarmed.
The nature of this force seems to have varied from generation to
generation. Travelers report in turn that the Amazons are cadets of
the leading families; that they are slaves made in war; that they
are criminals, common scolds, and women taken in adultery; that they
are loose in morals and that they are celibates; and that the custom
of permitting those no longer young enough to bear arms to marry was
a thrifty substitute for a state pension. Burton recites the common
belief that two-thirds of them are maidens, the remainder unfaithful
wives condemned to soldiering. He thinks pretty well of their morals,
which were protected by tabu, although while he was in Dahomey the
king had to judge the cases of more than a hundred Amazons about to
become mothers. The crime was lèse majesté, for in theory these were
royal brides, but the punishment was moderate--a few beheadings, and
imprisonment, banishment, or pardon for the rest.
Dahomans themselves supposed that their peculiar institution was of
their own time, had forgotten, what Europe knew, that women guarded
their court two centuries before, did not dream that back to an
unfathomed antiquity, it may be, theirs had been a woman state.
Burton was present at the annual saturnalia of the Customs, and to his
sometimes sardonic vision all was invested in African grotesqueness.
He noted the immense thighs of the women officers and found it hard to
reconcile celibacy and corpulency. He described their dances, for also
they danced before the king, “clapping palms on thighs, or on something
fleshier.” The women stamped, wriggled, kicked the dust, and ended with
a violent movement of the shoulders, hips, and loins--an anticipation
of the most modern of popular terpsichorean contortions. One captain
is pictured in terms that approach admiration--a fine, tall woman with
glittering teeth and a gait that was partly a military swagger and
partly a sensuous dance. But the costumes of all had a phantasmagoric
quality--Amazons with beards of monkey skin, with men’s nightcaps, with
red liberty caps, with fools’ caps, with human skulls, or the lower jaw
of a skull, dangling at the waist.
These women paraded past the king while Burton looked on. It may be he
tried to take notes and tired at the task. His narrative reads as if
his own head whirled with the dancers, until he could no longer frame
complete sentences. He concludes that it was something like a pawnshop,
for the King’s Valuables went by with his women.
About in his own words and manner, but condensed, this is the picture:
“Sixteen brilliant banners held horizontally, preceding a wheelbarrow
with a fancy red-and-blue flag. Five huge fans, followed by razor
women. Eight images, of which three were apparently ships’ figureheads
whitewashed, and the rest very hideous efforts of native art.
Sixty-seven women with brown faces and bead mittens. Twenty-one girls
carrying cylinders of red and white beads. Seventeen women with
silver plates fastened to the sides of their skulls, habited in red
clothes and handling bead cat-ó-nine tails. Twelve women, also in red.
Seventeen fetish pots, three jars, one silver plated urn, attended
by singing women. Twenty casque women with red tunics and plumes and
black horse tails. Eight helmet girls with red plumes, dark coats, and
white loin cloths. Six pieces of plate, a tree, a crane, a monkey.
After singers and dancers, a huge drum carried by a woman porter. Three
large chairs, preceding about fifty heavily armed elephant huntresses,
clad in chocolate and dark blue, with bustles of talismans behind
and strings of cowries before. Four pots. A bullock trunk. Fourteen
fetish women in white caps and tunics and bright yellow grass cloth.
Five black girls dressed in blue. A line of 703 women and girls with
country pots of native beer and bottles of trade rum and gin. A motley
group surrounding two women in big felt hats. A band and a troop
of bardesses. Two girls with serpent flags. Seven troubadour women
dancing. Two warming pans. An escort of bayonet women. Royal equipages
hauled by men harnessed with ropes. A body of armed women preceding
seven umbrellas and drinking rum. A troop of girls with jugs, ewers,
and jars. Twenty blunderbus women in red caps. Six kettledrum girls in
scarlet caps and bodices and blue skirts. A calabash with a pyramid of
four skulls. Two dancing women with long switching tails. Fifty captive
female dancers. An old cut-glass chandelier. Living representatives of
the mothers of the Dahoman dynasty. A company of singers commanded by
an old woman in a broad-brimmed hat. A stunning salute of blunderbuses.
Good night after seven mortal hours.”
Yet there was no doubt that these fantastic women could fight.
Their frames were as powerful as those of the men, whose military
organization their own paralleled; and their hearts were higher. They
were the king’s own troops with his favor to vindicate and a tradition
to sustain. They had greater ferocity as well as greater courage than
the men--“savage as wounded gorillas,” Burton called them, and he laid
this to their enforced chastity. With them, two centuries ago, Dahomey
conquered the joint forces of Whydah and Popos, and the women fought
bravely against the French. Travelers who saw them in maneuver at the
annual Customs tell how they charged barefoot and half naked through
barriers of thorny acacia, and emerging, torn and bleeding, but with
impassive faces, passed in review before their sovereign.
Out of one passage in the history of Dahomey a ray of light streams.
When a king died at Abomey a wild orgy began among the Amazons of the
palace. They took their own lives and they slew one another. When
Sinmenkpen passed to his fathers, five hundred and ninety-five Amazons
died with him; only by extorting a solemn fetish oath did Gezo end
this custom. There were similar practices elsewhere. Among the Behrs
of the White Nile, Rawlinson reports, a woman’s guard prevented any
man from approaching the king, except the ministers who came to
strangle him when his end was near. Megasthenes, Greek ambassador to
the court of Sandrokotos at about B.C. 300, says that the Indian king
was surrounded by armed women who guarded his chamber and attended his
hunts in chariots or upon horses and elephants. Sometimes it was their
right to kill their lord, and the slayer married his successor. In
Bantam half a century ago the king was escorted by a girlish cavalry
that rode astride and carried muskets and lances; it was said that if
he died without issue the custom was for them to meet and elect a new
sovereign.
When kings died, their women guards functioned. It was the function of
priestesses of death. This is the secret of the Amazon legend and the
key to practises of human sacrifice and periodic and indiscriminate
sexual intercourse with which, alike in Asia, Africa and America, the
legend is associated.
Before fitting the key into the lock of legend it will be well to
let the rule of reason say its word. That large bodies of women
should withdraw themselves from the state, abjure the society of men
altogether or except at stated intervals, live their own lives and
develop their own social tradition, has seemed to skeptical opinion in
all ages a thing not to be believed because against nature. Yet in all
ages women have done before the eyes of men something very like this.
Thousands of them have gathered in great convents, or as temple harlots
have served at the vast shrines of the Farther East, or as armed
priestesses of the Nearer East have loosed the leash of fable. Their
periodic withdrawals from society for the performance of the Eleusinian
and other mysteries were a routine of the classic civilizations.
There have been times when the woman state was a fact of a season,
or of a year, or more--as when the men of an island were fishing
elsewhere, or the able-bodied members of a tribe were away on the
annual hunt, or the warriors were on a long campaign; and the traveler,
seeing none but women, might misread what he saw. Doubtless there have
been instances where the men of a tribe were exterminated in war, and
their women, retiring to inaccessible retreats, maintained their
independence for a while. Time was when everywhere the women commanded
and the men obeyed. It is not beyond imagination that, sometimes and
in some places, with the memory of the matriarchate to inspire them,
women have revolted against the cruel lot which was theirs in primitive
society, and set up for themselves; for they were the daughters as well
as the wives of the hard-headed men of the caves. This is perhaps as
plausible as the conjecture that savage man merely concocted the story
to dramatize the natural antipathy of the sexes, to account for the
deep groove of division which this sentiment had run through primitive
society and to justify the fact that society gave men so much the
better of it.
The roots of the Amazon tradition, however, lie deeper than what may be
called the politics of sex. The truth underlying the several legends
is to be found where, according to report, the fighting women had
their commonwealth. The descendants of the Cappadocian Amazons who
came to the aid of Troy are to be found in the Armenian highlands. The
descendants of the West African Amazons, on whom, as Diodorus fables,
the vengeance of Hercules fell, are to be found in Dahomey and near-by
negro states. The secret of the Brazilian Amazons is to be sought,
among other places, in Mexico.
With a single word out of the Old Testament the door of legend opens.
Of the Hittites the Hebrew writers seemed to know only that they
occupied mountainous districts in the land flowing with milk and honey;
that for a space the Jews dwelt with them and “served Baalim and the
groves”; and that Solomon put a tribute upon them. From the rock
carvings of Asia Minor and from Assyrian and Egyptian inscriptions the
present age has learned more. The discovery by Sayce and other modern
scholars of the important place once held by the Hittites has been
called the romance of ancient history.
That place may be likened to the place held by the Ottoman Empire in
its strength. Like the Turks, the Hittites were a Turanian people who
planted themselves across the great roads of Asia Minor and absorbed
and crudely reproduced the culture of more civilized neighbor peoples.
Their capitals were at Carchemish, where they commanded the fords of
the Euphrates, and at Kadesh on the Orontes, whence they ruled Syria
and the cities of the Ægean. They were mountaineers from the Taurus,
with olive skins, mongoloid features, and the Chinese cue. Their
double-headed eagle passed through the Turkomans and the Crusaders into
the imperial arms of Russia, Austria, and Germany; the Phrygian cap of
their successors has become the headgear of revolutionary woman, and
the Turks still wear their peaked shoes.
The Hittite Empire flourished in the Bronze Age, when it met Egypt,
Babylon and afterward Assyria on equal terms. It began to loom in the
sixteenth century B.C. and it was a power to be reckoned with until
well into the first millennium before Christ. On its ruins arose
Cappadocia, Phrygia, Lydia, and later Pontus. The rock carvings that
proclaimed its sway, and that Herodotus described but misread, still
look down on the Pass of Karabel along an old road of empire.
The Amazons of Greek legend, according to the convincing scholarship of
Sayce, were the armed priestesses of the Hittites. Their fabled capital
of Themiscyra is the ruined city of Boghaz Keui in Asiatic Turkey not
far from the Black Sea. The authentic likenesses of the warrior women
are to be found, not in the temple friezes of Attica, but in the rock
carvings on the hills that overlook this ancient ruin. Yet Greek art
reflects correct observation or trustworthy report, for its warrior
maidens wear the kilt of the mountain-dwelling Hittites and carry the
same double-headed ax that is seen in their crude sculptures.
In the service of the Asiatic goddess, known variously as Astarte,
Derceto, Cybele, the Great Mother, and Diana of the Ephesians, was a
multitude of armed priestesses so numerous that to the Greeks they
seemed not a cult but a nation. Whole cities were in effect mere temple
precincts populated by these women and by eunuch priests; the high
priestess of the temple ruled the city and the surrounding country,
and had some claim, therefore, to the title of Amazon queen. At Komana
were six thousand of these armed maidens of the shrine. At Ephesus vast
throngs of them served a high priestess who called herself the Queen
Bee.
These Hittite women worshiped the Asiatic goddess with orgiastic
frenzies that simulated, or literally repeated, the primal processes
of dissolution and reproduction. It was easy for the Greek mariners
who saw them dancing to the goddess and flourishing their weapons on
the shores of the Black Sea to infer that a woman’s capital lay a
short distance inland. It was natural, also, to attribute to them the
actual feats of the Hittite armies, and fable that the cities founded
or subjugated by that empire on the Ægean--Ephesus, Smyrna, Cyme,
Myrina--were colonies of Amazonian origin.
The Amazon legends of Africa and South America and the customs of the
female palace troops of Africa and Asia are made clear if one goes
behind the cult of the Asiatic goddess to the domain of primitive
magic whence it arose. There one finds beliefs that belt the earth and
are reflected not only in ancient tradition, but in modern practises
associated with May day and Midsummer Eve, with sowing and harvest,
with the summer and winter solstices. Frazer’s examination of these in
the _Golden Bough_ is deeply illuminating.
Following the laws of sympathetic magic, men believed that in order
to make the grain flourish and the grass renew itself in the annual
death and resurrection of nature, it was necessary by some drama of
their own to repeat the phenomena of decay and of new life. There must
be a noteworthy human death and a resurrection. Sometimes men killed
a scapegoat, sometimes a divine animal, sometimes a divine man--a
god-king, as he was called--such an impersonation of divinity, for
example, as the Grand Lama of Tibet. The killing of the god-king was
preferred as a magic more constraining than any other upon the forces
of nature.
There were several means of simulating the phenomena of resurrection.
This might be done by having two couples appear in the annual
drama--two sets of divine and royal mates. Frazer suggests that the
book of _Esther_, names and all, is based on a Babylonian religious
festival of this kind--that the gentle Esther is none other than the
lustful Astarte, that Mordecai is the god Merodach, that Haman is
Hannum the Aramite god, and Vashti a goddess unidentified. The triumph
of one set of characters and the humiliation and death of the other are
supposed to represent the bourgeoning of spring after the long death of
winter.
The common means of symbolizing and constraining the reproduction
of new life in nature was through a period of promiscuous sexual
intercourse in which designated persons or whole populations took part.
It was deemed necessary to set an example to the woods and fields, and
in the woods and fields it was set. The saturnalia, the carnivals,
the May Days and St. John’s Eves of old time were not, in intent,
excursions into debauchery; they were exercises in sympathetic magic.
So it befell that in savage vision the withered leaf and the green
shoot, winter and spring, death and resurrection, came to mean two
things--periodic murder and lust.
After a while the priest-kings sought escape from the custom that
gave them only a year of life upon their throne of grace. They chose
substitutes--a son, a slave, a malefactor--who for a few days reigned
in their stead, and as a sign of kingship were made free of their
harems, as Absalom went in unto King David’s concubines in the sight
of Israel. The king, or the mock-king, devoted to death but attended
by beautiful women, crowned with flowers and worshiped as a god--this
spectacle, as profoundly ironical as life itself, was staged in Mexico
when Cortez came; and when Huc visited Lhasa in 1846 he found the
Tibetans electing a monarch of misrule to carouse and suffer in place
of the pope of Buddhism, God’s vicar for Asia.
The bacchic procession of the doomed king and his women, this dance of
death that went around the world, was the real Amazon march. It was the
part of the warrior women to kill the man-god whose last days they had
beguiled. It was their part, also, to co-operate with a multitude of
men in a lustful drama, so that every acorn and grass root and grain of
corn might heed the command to bring forth and multiply; back of the
myth of annual Amazon matings with neighbor tribes was this reality of
the saturnalia. In places the legend has suffered confusing changes, as
in the Dahoman Customs, where the king kills instead of being killed.
But the same meaning underlies the Phrygian worship of the Great
Mother, the lethal privileges of the female palace guards in Hindostan,
the self-slaughter of the warrior women when a king died at Abomey, the
going of women into the hills of Brazil with one old man as companion,
and the recurrent tragedy of the god-man of Mexico, who dismissed the
fair partners of his revelry, snapped the strings of his harp, flung
away his chaplet of flowers, and ascended the altar where an Aztec with
a knife awaited him.
The meaning is death and life in nature, and the Amazon as priestess of
both.