Breasts are very important to the understanding of Amazons: the name 'Amazon' means 'breastless' in Greek, and some versions of the myth claim that the women seared off one of their breasts in childhood, to allow them the better to pull back the bow. However, in art, Amazons are always shown with two firm round breasts, one of them often artfully exposed. These erect thrust-forward breasts are also seen in statues of the Hindu goddesses, and in the little snake-priestess figurines found in Minoan Crete, and each case we find that the figures are embodying what the Hindus call the 'Shakti', the female divine power, a power which is earthy, sexual and arousing, not 'spiritual' in an ethereal sense at all. Amazons are also the bearers of this primordial energy, though it is normally hidden under their implacable aggressiveness.
The hero Hercules, tackling his ninth labour, comes to the Amazon city of Themiscyra to demand the girdle of Queen Hippolyta. She refuses and her women warriors engage the Greeks in battle, only to be humiliated in a bloody defeat which sees the girdle snatched and the princess Antiope taken back to Athens as the slave-concubine of Theseus. The snake-like girdle is a 'Shakti' symbol too, and the tale marks the turning point when the numen of spiritual power was wrested away from the Great Goddess and her priestesses by male warriors who served the father gods.
So... where are the Amazons, the women warriors today? It is not satisfying to me to simply say "well look there are lots of female soldiers, in the Israeli army and elsewhere; women are strong and independent and free - we are all Amazons now." Well...maybe. But the feeling I was left with at the end of my research into the source of the Amazon myth was that the warrior women were actually a memory of a kind of spiritual power which we can barely grasp today. It wasn't an ethereal, wispy kind of thing, but fully embodied, earthy and vigorous. If we are to find today's Amazons, I would suggest we look to the spiritual traditions, for women who are trying to bring out once again this lost female power - not to conquer or suppress men, but to work with them, in polarity. The battle of the sexes doesn't need to end in violence and death: it can build up a real charge of creative energy which can be used to build inconceivable things, an inconceivable future for both men and women.
To become a woman warrior is to enter a sisterhood which has existed since the beginnings of organised human society. It is to know that there is more to being female than mating, giving birth and bringing up children. It is to believe that women have a specific job to do, in relation to the evolution of humankind.
What that job might be is a big question, which cannot be lightly or glibly answered. If you are interested you may like to read my most recent book , Becoming the Enchanter which is about my own initiation as a woman warrior on a spiritual path.
