markings offer protection through the containment of pollution. These signs separate
the household from others in the city. They are sufficiently clear that those who are
afraid of ritual pollution can avoid the homes where birth or death is taking place
(Theophrastus,Characters16.9).
The family and its women withdraw into their separated and marked house.
Attention now focuses on the individual in transition. The women wash and adorn
the central body. The corpse is crowned and wrapped, the bride dressed, and the
woman in labor protected with charms. This washing purifies the central individual. It
offers them protection and separates them from the family around them in a visual
and metaphysical sense: their purity contrasts with the family’s pollution. The attend-
ant women form a ritual circle around the individual in the same manner as a chorus
(Lonsdale 1993:250). They chant and move in a ritual manner. The bride is sur-
rounded by thenympheutriai, the girls whose company she leaves behind to become a
wife (Llewellyn-Jones 2003:219; Oakley and Sinos 1993:16–21). The woman in
labor is surrounded and helped by other mothers, who sing and chant to exhort
the goddess to come. Their actions create a ritual space suitable for her arrival in the
household, bringing the baby (Aristophanes,Thesmophoriazusae507–9; Euripides,
Hippolytus166–8). Women of the family encircle the corpse and mourn (Boardman
1955). In each case, the movement of the women creates a ritual space, enclosing and
protecting the vulnerable individual. Despite the fact that they are withdrawn from
the community at this stage of the process and located within the house, the women
continue to write the family changes into the social landscape of the community as the
noise of lamenting and singing fills the streets.
Ritual pollution arises when persons or things are out of their proper context. The
dead are out of place in a house with the living, the bride no longer belongs in
her natal home, and the baby needs to be born. The next stage in the ritual process
requires that the individual must be placed in their new context. This is a time
of danger; the individual is separated and vulnerable. As the corpse begins its
journey to the grave, the women of the family come out of the house, accompanying
the procession and lamenting as the procession traverses the streets of the city.
The bride travels from old home to new home, from hearth to hearth under the
protection of torches and song. At birth, the movement comes from the birth
goddess as she is called to the house, enters, and brings the baby. The participation
and visibility of women at rites of transition is a feature of their unique ability to create
ritual boundaries, separating individual from city and protecting both at a time
of danger.
As the individual is rehoused, the ritual process reverses to restore the community
and take into account the changes to the household (Goff 2004:27). The family
returns to its house. There is a ritual feast which acknowledges the changes that have
taken place in the family, and after a suitable period of time the family rejoins the city.
The ritual process ends as it begins: gifts are left at public sanctuaries by or on behalf
of bride and mother. Gifts are also taken to the corpse at the grave; images on white-
figurele ̄kythoi, the flasks used to carry oil or perfume to the grave, show that women
played an important part in placing these gifts (Shapiro 1991). As the symbol of
house and family, women may become visible at the graves of deceased relatives.
The visibility of women at rites of transition reinforces their role as symbol of the
household and their ability to change the meaning of space. They come out of
Women, Religion, and the Home 307