Like a Virgin by Prasad, Aarathi (recommended reading txt) 📕

gods). Hera, the wife of Zeus and thus the queen of heaven, renewed her virginity every year at the holy waters of Kanathos. She spurned the unfaithful Zeus, and all mortal men, to conceive her son Hephaestus. Zeus impregnated Leto, who bore the twin gods Apollo and Artemis, just two of the many children he sired by virgins. Artemis and her half-sister Athena were said to be virgin mothers too. Kausalya gave birth to the king Rama, the seventh avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, after drinking nectar that had been made in offering to the gods. The virtuous Sita, Rama’s wife, was the offspring of the land itself. Kunti of the epic Mahabharata was impregnated by the sun, Surya, when she recited a mantra that summoned him to her for that purpose. Queen Maya of Nepal, who hadn’t become pregnant in twenty years of marriage, claimed she was spirited away in her sleep to a mystical lake, where a white elephant, holding a lotus in its trunk, circled her and then entered her womb, to later emerge on earth as the Buddha. The Aztec Coatlicue fell pregnant with Huitzilopochtli through the touch of a ball of feathers as she napped in a temple. In Babylonia, creation itself came about when a divine wind hovered over a female abyss called Tiamat; and Venus, the Roman goddess of love and fertility, has been perversely worshipped as a virgin.

Pre-dating them all was Isis, the sister and wife (and in some versions the mother) of Osiris, who was fabled in Egypt for having been deflowered in her own mother’s womb, a bit like Helen Spurway thought her guppies may have been. In the land of the pharaohs, there was also the queen Mautmes, who was visited by the ibis-headed Thoth, the messenger of the gods, and informed that she would bear a son, though she was a virgin. Carved on the wall of the temple of Luxor, there are scenes depicting Mautmes as she is escorted by the holy spirit Kneph and the goddess Hathor to the crux ansata, the cross that symbolizes life, through which she could be impregnated with a touch of her lips. Setting aside the need to hold her mouth to the cross, this story might sound quite familiar to anyone who has heard the tale of Mary, mother of Jesus (who was also one of many virgin mothers with a form of that name, including Myrrah, the mother of Adonis, and Maia, mother of Hermes).

Among the ancient peoples circling the Mediterranean, the idea of a mystical birth probably gathered popularity through the veneration of a scroll about a virgin mother goddess based at Sais, an ancient Egyptian town in the western Nile Delta. The patron deity of the town was Neith, a goddess that the Greeks, including Herodotus and Plato, would later identify with Athena, since Neith, like Athena, was both the goddess of war and the goddess of weaving and the domestic arts. Because of this, Neith was the protector of women and a guardian of marriage. But her original role, dating to around 3000 BCE, was probably as a symbol of creation and fertility.

Neith was a goddess praised as a virginal mother and nurse, a mysterious mixture of virgin female and fertile mother that had great resonance among those who imagined it. So that many of the great men – the saviours, philosophers, and conquerors – were cemented into a demi-godly status with reports that they had come into the world over which they had power through such a birth. These virgin birth celebrities included Confucius, Plato, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Genghis Khan.

The legends of virgin birth are a counterpoint to the ancient notions of how regular babies were made. Over the thousands of years during which doctors and scientists said that women were just a vessel for carrying babies, not a contributor in creating them, nearly anything seemed capable of making a woman pregnant. Things like exposure to the sun or the wind (as recounted in myth) or to a fire. Or perhaps you ate pomegranates or magical fish or licked salt, like Aristotle’s mouse. Or, you made a wish, stood under a shadow, happened upon a holy spot, or were breathed on by a god. These were all possible reasons why a woman might be pregnant, because no one understood then what was really going on.

In post-war Britain, however, there were few such illusions, and a virgin birth was, for the most part, held up as a rare, immaculate occasion, reserved for very special cases and very special storytelling. The Sunday Pictorial received complaints about the story’s effect on younger readers, who it was believed were being exposed to far too many particulars about the mechanics of sex and pregnancy. To that, one of the doctors advising the newspaper retorted that any children old enough to read the tabloid should know about childbirth.

Most of the angry letters, of course, came from people worried that a virgin birth involving an ordinary human would ‘undermine the character of Our Lady’s virginal conception’ and shake the foundational beliefs of people adhering to the Christian faith. The reaction from the Church was more deliberated. A Catholic publication, called Universe, carried a 450-word response, printed five days after the Pictorial’s front-page article, that drew on scientific evidence as well as matters of faith:

Parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, is not entirely unknown in the economy of nature... Now if God could have endowed such creatures with life, and then bestowed upon them this otherwise unknown method of propagation, would it have been difficult for Him to bring about the birth of his only begotten son in a parthenogenetic manner? He who can do the one can just as easily perform the other wonder. If it were true, as Dr Spurway has confidently asserted,