At the origins of women’s herbal skills. From myth to the medical treatises of antiquity

In the Greek world, the origin of female pharmacological skills is connected to the distinction among the biological, anthropological, political, and social identities of men and women. Consequently, this is a gender issue. Hesiod (7th century BCE) the poet who, after Homer, continued and consolidated the sapiential tradition of Greek literature, places woman in a different γένος (“race”) from that of man, in perfect coherence with a context of strong perception of the biological otherness of the female with respect to the male. On the socio-political level, the predominantly androcratic approach of the Greek πόλεις led to a process of marginalization that made the woman like liminal creatures like Chiron. Chiron, the centaur who knew herbs instinctively because of his animal half, rationalized the therapeutic use of herbs, thanks to the reasoning of his human half. Women, being excluded from the sharing of the meat of sacrifice and the knowledge of the animal parts,1 founded plant-based materia medica, through the substitution of the areas of prohibition reserved for men, namely, the altar, flesh, and blood.2 Women counterposed the areas reserved for men with wilderness, outside the sacred enclosure of the temple, with the plants and their juices in a process of biopolitical identification deeper and more powerful than what happened to men. It was no coincidence that Dionysus, a foreign divinity and an alternative to the Olympic religion, invited women (Maenads) to follow him ritually, leading them through the alpine solitude of the mountains away from the rational space of the πόλις. Here, due to the effect of the vine, the Maenads were abandoned to the non-ritualized dismemberment of the meat (σπαραγμός) and the crude compulsion (ὠμοφαγία): no fat burned to feed the gods.