do not belong to the cult of a ‘‘Greek’’ deity. For the view that these immigrant
cults can be interpreted as ‘‘non-Greek’’ is no longer tenable: they are fully integrated
into the infrastructure of Greek religion, and cult reality is often just as Greek as in
the more traditional cults. There does exist, however, evidence which we can relate
to a traditional deity of the Greek pantheon. A cathartic law from Cyrene, in its
preserved form dating to the fourth century BC (and probably slightly older than
that) and allegedly given by the god Apollo himself, deals with instances of ritual
pollution similar to those in later cult regulations (LSS115; Parker 1983:332–51).
These instances include childbirth and contact therewith (the woman in childbed
pollutes the entire household as well as those entering, but the pollution does not
leave the house), miscarriage, sexual intercourse conducted by a male during the
day, the choice of an inappropriate sacrificial victim, obligations related to a tithe,
improper behavior of girls, of brides, and of wives during pregnancy, and finally
homicide.
How can we come to an understanding of the social relevance of these purity
regulations? In the anthropological literature on the topic, one can sense a tendency
to naturalize the boundaries between the ‘‘pure,’’ pollution and social normality. Or
there is a tendency simply to reify native classifications. Representative of these
approaches is Mary Douglas’Purity and Danger, which interprets purity regulations
as symbolic classifications reflective of the social classifications which prevail in society
at large. Her definition of dirt as ‘‘matter out of place’’ and as ‘‘disorder’’ interprets
ritual pollution – a property of the ‘‘betwixt and between’’ in Douglas’ famous
formulation – as the dialectical opposite of the orderly world of purity regulations
(1966:2–6, 42,passim). Her definition relates these purity regulations to the larger
realm of those categories that govern orderly behavior in the social world. In a
structuralist tradition fascinated with the dichotomy of the ‘‘pure’’ and the ‘‘im-
pure,’’ this hypothesis proposes that social control is maintained through purity
regulations, and that the latter are a natural extension of the former. Yet if that
were true, one would need to assume that the purity regulations are regarded as
natural categorizations by most and under all circumstances; otherwise they would
not make a sufficiently valid contribution to the maintenance of social control. But is
that really the case? Undoubtedly, the approach ofPurity and Dangeris not without
heuristic value. For instance, the structuralist approach may appear helpful when it
comes to the interpretation of childbirth or death in the family and the household:
here, purity regulations might be seen as structuring, and thereby possibly releasing
the stress exerted by, natural physical processes of the life-cycle such as childbed and
death. And the notion of social control can highlight the fact that Greek purity
regulations are far from innocent with regard to their addressing gender imbalances.
The focus of theleges sacraeon childbirth, miscarriage, or abortion – from the fourth
century, menstruation is also interpreted as a source of female pollution – entails that
the male regulators of cult practice regarded the female body as particularly suscep-
tible to pollution and hence in need of ritual regulation. Incidentally, this sentiment is
shared by the Hippocratic writers. It must remain debatable whether the emphasis on
childbirth, abortion, and menstruation reflects male concerns about increasing female
emancipation in the social realm, in particular in the hellenistic and Roman periods
(Dean-Jones 1995:225–53). It seems reasonable, however, to infer from these texts
that the religious notion of a particular female ritual impurity reflects – and ritually
182 Andreas Bendlin