Eileithyia

Eileithyia (eye-lih-THY-uh) is the Greek goddess of childbirth — the divine power a woman called on at the one hour when her life and her child's life hung in the balance. She is not a goddess of love, or of marriage, or even of motherhood in the wider sense; her domain is narrow and absolute, the labour and the delivery itself, the terrible, necessary passage by which a child is brought out of the dark and into the light. Her very name was understood to mean "she who comes to aid," because she was believed to come to the birthing-woman's side in her need; and when she came, the child could be born, and when she stayed away, it could not.

She is a daughter of Zeus and Hera, and full sister of Ares, Hebe, and Hephaestus — one of the true Olympian family, though a quiet one who keeps to her single office rather than contending for a wider rule. In the oldest poetry she is doubled or multiplied into the Eileithyiai (eye-lih-THY-eye), a plurality of birth-spirits, "the daughters of Hera who hold the bitter pains of childbirth"; only gradually does she settle into a single goddess. She works closely with, and is sometimes hard to tell apart from, Artemis, who also watches over the birthing-bed — but where Artemis presides more broadly over women and the newborn, Eileithyia's whole being is bent to the moment of delivery.

What makes her story unusually charged is her tie to her mother. Hera, queen of the gods and the jealous guardian of legitimate marriage, could use the childbirth-goddess as a weapon: because Eileithyia's coming was what allowed a birth to happen, Hera had only to keep her daughter away to hold a hated rival's labour open in agony. Twice the myths turn on exactly this — the delayed birth of Apollo, and the delayed birth of Heracles — and in both Eileithyia acts as her mother's agent. And yet none of this touched her worship. To every ordinary woman facing the pains of labour, in every town of Greece and in a Cretan cave older than Homer, Eileithyia was simply the goddess you prayed to, and thanked, when a child was safely born.

The goddess who lets a birth happen

(Content note: this section deals throughout with childbirth, and with the pain and danger of labour as the Greeks understood it — frankly, but without anything graphic.) To understand Eileithyia's myths, you have to understand the strange logic at their centre: among the Greeks, a birth was not thought to simply happen on its own, but to require the goddess's presence. Eileithyia's arrival is what opens the way for the child; while she withholds herself, or keeps her hands or knees crossed and closed, the labour cannot come to its end, and the woman stays trapped in her pains. This belief — that the goddess of birth can either loose a labour or bind it — is what makes her the one Olympian whose simple absence can be turned into a curse. Everything cruel in her stories, and everything tender in her worship, grows out of this single idea.

The delayed birth of Apollo on Delos

The clearest picture of her power comes from the story of how Apollo was born, told in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (lines 89–119). The goddess Leto, pregnant by Zeus, wandered the earth in labour, unable to find any land willing to let her give birth — for every place feared the anger of Hera. At last the little floating island of Delos agreed to receive her. But even there Leto could not deliver, because she lacked the one thing she needed: Eileithyia had not come. And Eileithyia had not come because Hera was keeping her away — holding her back on Olympus, hidden among golden clouds, so that the childbirth-goddess did not even know that Leto was in labour, and Leto's agony dragged on for nine days and nine nights.

The other goddesses gathered around Leto pitied her, and sent Iris, the rainbow-messenger, slipping away from the island to fetch Eileithyia — promising her a great necklace of gold and amber nine cubits long if she would come. Iris found Eileithyia and coaxed her down from Olympus behind Hera's back, and the moment the childbirth-goddess set foot on Delos, Leto's labour came upon her in earnest. She flung her arms around a palm tree, sank to her knees on the soft meadow, and Apollo leapt forth into the light. So the god of prophecy and the sun could not be born until the goddess of birth arrived — and could be kept from being born, for nine days of suffering, simply by keeping her away. This is the gentler of the two delayed-birth stories, for here Eileithyia is only detained, not commanded; she does the labouring woman no harm once she is free to come.

The delayed birth of Heracles — Eileithyia as Hera's agent

The harsher version is the birth of Heracles, and it is Homer himself who tells the heart of it, in the Iliad (19.95–133), where the story is used to explain how even Zeus could be tricked by his own oath. Zeus, having fathered a child on the mortal Alcmene, boasted on Olympus that on that very day a child of his own blood would be born who was destined to rule over all his neighbours. Hera, hearing the boast and knowing which child he meant, made him swear a binding oath to it — and then set about turning it against him. She hurried down to Argos, where she hastened the birth of another child of Perseus's line, Eurystheus, bringing him into the world early, at seven months; and at the same time she held back the birth of Heracles, so that Eurystheus should be the child born "on that day" and inherit the lordship Zeus had sworn away. The whole trick turned on delaying one labour and speeding another — the childbirth-goddess's exact province.

In Homer, Hera does this by carrying off the Eileithyiai, the goddesses of the birth-pangs, so that Alcmene's labour is held open while Eurystheus is rushed to birth. The most famous and vivid detail — that the childbirth-goddess sat outside Alcmene's door with her legs crossed, her hands clasped, and her fingers interlocked, weaving a knot of her own body to bind the birth shut — comes not from Homer but from the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 9.281–323), who names the goddess Lucina, and from Antoninus Liberalis (Metamorphoses 29), who tells the same tale in Greek; the weasel that ends it belongs to their later telling and should be flagged as such. In their version, Alcmene lay for seven days and seven nights in the extremity of labour, unable to deliver, while Eileithyia (Lucina) sat just outside with her knees locked and her hands knotted, holding the birth fast at Hera's command.

What broke the spell was a servant's quick wit. Alcmene's faithful maid Galanthis (in Ovid) — called Galinthias in the Greek version, a companion of Alcmene — noticed the goddess sitting there with her hands clasped, and guessed the truth. She ran out crying a lie: that the child was already born, that Alcmene had been delivered, and the goddess's work was undone. Startled, Eileithyia sprang up and unclasped her hands in astonishment — and the instant the knot of her fingers came loose, the binding broke and Heracles was born. In the later poets, the goddess (or Hera) then punished the clever girl for her trick by turning her into a weasel (galē in Greek, a play on her name), a small creature that the Greeks strangely believed gave birth through its mouth, because it was through a lie from her mouth that Galanthis had loosed the birth. Again this weasel-ending is a detail of the later, ornamental tradition (Ovid and Antoninus Liberalis), not of Homer, and it is best given as the poets' embellishment.

Hera's agent, everyone's helper

In both these great stories Eileithyia does Hera's bidding — she is the instrument by which the queen of the gods punishes her husband's lovers, the loyal daughter who can be sent, or kept back, or set outside a door to lock a labour shut. It would be easy to think of her as a cruel goddess. But the Greeks did not, and the reason is that these are stories about Hera's jealousy, in which Eileithyia is the lever and not the will behind it. Left to herself, her nature is entirely the opposite: she is the one who comes to help. To the ordinary labouring woman she was never the goddess who might bind her birth, but the goddess who would come and loose it — and it is under that face, the deliverer and not the withholder, that she was loved and worshipped across the Greek world.

The cave older than Homer

Eileithyia is among the very oldest gods of Greece for whom we have direct evidence. Her name appears in the Linear B tablets of the Bronze Age — a clay record from Amnisos on Crete lists an offering of honey "to Eileithyia" (written e-re-u-ti-ja), centuries before the poems of Homer were composed. That same Amnisos held her most ancient shrine, a sacred cave by the harbour of Knossos, which Homer's Odyssey (19.188) already knows as "the cave of Eileithyia." Inside, a natural stalagmite ringed by a low wall seems to have stood for the goddess herself, and traces of worship in the cave run back into the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. That a goddess of childbirth should be honoured in a cave is fitting: the dark hollow of the earth, out of which one emerges into the light, mirrors the birth she governs.

Her shrines across the Greek world

From Crete her cult spread everywhere, because everywhere women gave birth and everywhere they needed her. The traveller Pausanias, writing his guide to Greece in the second century AD, records her sanctuaries in town after town: an ancient temple at Athens with three carved images of the goddess, said to have come from Crete and Delos; shrines at Argos, Megara, Tegea, Aigion, and Sparta; and, at Olympia (6.20.2–3), a sanctuary where Eileithyia was worshipped together with a boy-daimon named Sosipolis, "saviour of the city," an aged priestess tending the shrine and the infant god. She was honoured at Delos too, the island of Apollo's birth, in memory of the part she played there. Her images were often veiled and shown holding torches — the fire that brings the child "to the light" — with her hands sometimes reaching out, open, the opposite of the closed and clasped hands of the myth.

What women brought her

The offerings given to Eileithyia are among the most touching in Greek religion, because they came from women at the rawest moment of their lives. A woman who had come safely through her labour would dedicate to the goddess the clothes she had worn, or a fine garment or robe, in thanks for her deliverance; girls and mothers gave locks of hair and the girdle or belt loosened for the birth. Because Eileithyia received bloodless offerings by preference, women brought her honey and honey-cakes and small votive images of mothers and swaddled infants, rather than the blood-sacrifice given to many gods. The goddess was invoked by name in the birthing-room itself, and thanked by name when it was over; few deities lived so close to the ordinary crises of ordinary lives.

Eileithyia and Artemis

In many places her worship shaded into that of Artemis, who as a goddess of women and the young was also called upon over the birthing-bed and given the title Lochia, "she of childbed." At times Eileithyia is treated almost as an aspect or attendant of Artemis; at others she keeps her own clear identity and her own shrines. The two were felt as neighbours in the same domain — Artemis the great goddess who guards the whole passage of a girl into womanhood and motherhood, Eileithyia the specialist of the single hour of birth — and a labouring woman might well call on both.

The goddess of a universal hour

Among modern Hellenic polytheists — those who have revived the worship of the Greek gods — Eileithyia holds a natural and tender place, because the thing she governs has not changed. Childbirth is still the hour it always was: still hoped for, still feared, still the moment a new life comes into the light. A devotee who is pregnant, or who loves someone who is, or who works with mothers and newborns, may turn to Eileithyia as the ancient women did — not for the ordering of the cosmos, but for the safe passage of one particular child on one particular day.

How she is honoured today

Her worship now, as then, is quiet and domestic rather than grand. A modern devotee might keep a small shrine with a torch or candle for her — the light she brings the child toward — and a token of open, outstretched hands, the sign of a birth loosed rather than bound. Following the ancient pattern, offerings to her are traditionally bloodless and gentle: honey, honey-cakes, milk, flowers, and, most fittingly of all, a garment given in thanks after a safe delivery, exactly as Greek mothers once hung their robes in her shrines. Prayers to her are simple and direct — a request for a safe labour beforehand, and thanks afterward — and many who honour her also honour Artemis alongside, as the ancients did, as the two guardians of the birthing-woman.

An ancient name, still spoken

Eileithyia is not a famous goddess today; she has no planet, no constellation, no blockbuster retelling. But her name is one of the oldest divine names that survives in any European language — read from a scrap of Bronze Age clay in a Cretan cave — and the thing she stood for is one no age has outgrown. To light a small flame for her, and to remember with gratitude every mother and child who came safely through the passage she governs, is to keep faith with one of the very oldest prayers human beings ever prayed.