When History Makes Us Uncomfortable
Telling the Truth About the Sacred, the Bloody, and the Forgotten
Every so often, someone unsubscribes from my Substack, and I don’t usually take it personally. We all have limited time, changing interests, different paths. But recently, one person left with a message that struck a nerve. Not because they left, but because of why they left.
They said they found my writing "concerning" because I described “horrific animal cruelty done in the name of goddess worship” and, in their view, I seemed to justify it.
Let me be very clear: I do not justify ancient practices. I study them. I analyze them. I tell the stories we’ve forgotten, stories that are raw, complicated, sacred, and yes, sometimes brutal.
The piece they were referring to was my post about Despoina, the veiled goddess of Arcadia. In that post, I described, among other things, rituals and sacrifices that may unsettle modern readers. And they should. We are not supposed to feel good reading about ancient rites that included the dismemberment of animals. But pretending they didn’t happen, or reducing them to metaphor, is not history, it’s avoidance.
To study the ancient world is to sit at the feet of cultures whose worldviews are radically different from ours. The gods were not cuddly. The divine was not always merciful. Life and death were entwined, and sacrifice, of animals, food, blood, song, time, was part of the sacred contract between mortals and the gods. It is not my role as a historian to smooth those edges. It’s my role to understand them, and help others do the same.
Contextualizing an ancient practice is not the same as condoning it. It is a difficult, necessary act of translation: not of language, but of mindset. And yes, sometimes that translation makes people uncomfortable. But discomfort is a threshold. We either turn back, or we step through it and begin to see the world differently.
But let me say more here, because I think this part is often misunderstood.
Analyzing ancient ritual is not about aestheticizing pain or horror. It’s about asking: What did this mean to the people who performed it? What did it mean to offer a sacrifice to a goddess you feared, loved, or begged for protection? What did it mean to walk into a sanctuary not just to celebrate the divine, but to stand in awe of it, sometimes in terror, sometimes in grief, sometimes in communal catharsis?
Learning about the goddesses, especially the older ones, the chthonic ones, the forgotten ones, is not always a soft-lit circle of women dancing under the full moon. That exists too, and it’s beautiful. But the ancient world is not all moonlight and rosemary. It’s blood. It’s ash. It’s ritual cries that echo through the mountains. It’s sacred masks, torn flesh, and ecstatic mystery. It’s women who endured and acted and bled and survived. It’s power that isn’t always palatable.
And if we truly want to understand the goddess, not as projection, not as fantasy, but as she was worshipped and feared and loved, we need to sit with all of it. The wild and the wretched. The luminous and the grotesque. Because this was the full range of human experience, and we are still those humans. We have evolved, yes. We’ve shifted our ethics, developed laws, expanded empathy. As we should. But the ancient echoes still live in our myths, in our symbols, in our sacred bones.
To write about these rituals is not to glorify them. It is to grapple with them. To let them sit in our bodies and intellects and see what they stir up.
I also want to say this: perhaps the tone of my post seemed neutral. Perhaps I wasn’t visibly outraged by the ritual. But that’s because I wasn’t trying to express outrage. I wasn’t trying to give any emotional response. My aim wasn’t to react, but to describe, to document, to trace, to open a door into an ancient worldview that wasn’t mine to judge.
Because how can we judge the ancients?
I don’t subscribe to animal sacrifice. I barely eat meat. I’m not here to defend those acts. But that’s not the purpose of this blog. This isn’t my personal diary. This platform exists to educate, to bring to light forgotten or overlooked goddess traditions, particularly those that make us shift in our seats.
Perhaps that’s why early male scholars turned away from these topics. Maybe they didn’t want to look directly at the grotesque, the dark, the animal, the feminine in its rawest form. And yes, male gods received their fair share of violent rites too, but the messiness of goddess worship, especially in its oldest forms, has often been ignored, buried, or edited into something more serene.
I think we’re ready to stop doing that.
I think we’re ready to look at it, not to glorify it, not to return to it, but to learn. To sit with the discomfort and ask why it was done, what it meant, what it cost.
My job is not to take a side. My priority is education. Maybe that’s the academic in me. I assumed the conversation, if there was to be one, would unfold in the comments, in the workshops, in the places where people gather to process and discuss. That’s where opinion, response, and healing can happen. But this space is where I lay the groundwork. The Artemis Mapping Project, and much of what I write here, is deliberately held in that neutral tone so that learning can happen before judgment rushes in.
And if the uncomfortable truths spark dialogue? Then I’ve done my job. That’s the kind of engagement I believe in. That’s teaching. That’s history. That’s remembering.
And in the case of Despoina, I think we owe her more than silence.
Her rites, as we’ve pieced them together, were not entertainment. They weren’t casual. They weren’t something you posted about after for attention or spectacle. They were heavy. They were secret. They were real. We don’t know what the participants felt, did they cry? Did they tremble? Did they look away? Did they feel proud or sick or blessed or damned? We don’t know. And that is part of what I hope to open space for, not just the facts of the ritual, but the unwritten human response to it. Because somewhere in that void of uncertainty is the thread that ties them to us.
To write about these rituals is not to glorify them. It is to grapple with them. To let them sit in our bodies and intellects and see what they stir up. I share these stories so we can talk about what history often refuses to: the emotional toll of ritual, the psychological cost of belief, the unrecorded echoes in the minds and hearts of ancient women and men.
And if it makes you uncomfortable, that’s okay. You don’t have to read my blog. You don’t have to agree with my framing. But what I hope, what I ask, is that those who follow my work understand this: I will not spare you the truth. I will not soften the edges to make the goddess more marketable.
My job as a historian, a critical thinker, and a goddess worshiper is to hold the complexity of the sacred feminine. That includes the parts that are hard to look at. The parts that challenge us. The parts that carry both terror and transcendence. I’m not here to offer a sanitized version of ancient womanhood. I’m here to ask: What was it really like? And what does that mean for us now?
So to the person who unsubscribed: thank you. Your message reminded me of my purpose. I am here to remember. To witness. To tell the stories as they are.
Thank you to those of you who continue to walk this path with me, especially when it winds through hard terrain. Your trust means everything. And I promise to keep showing up with honesty, curiosity, and a deep reverence for the sacred stories we’re trying to understand together.
🎧 Bonus: Bleeding for the Gods
If this post stirred something in you, or made you want to explore these themes more deeply, I invite you to watch my podcast episode “Bleeding for the Gods.”
In this episode, I speak more personally and intuitively about sacrifice in the ancient world, what it may have meant to those who witnessed or performed it, and how we might begin to reconnect with the sacred through metaphor, not violence. This isn’t a repeat of the blog, it’s a deeper companion piece, grounded in the same reverence and honest questioning.
If you’re inspired by this work and want to support what we’re building, whether it’s mapping forgotten temples across Greece and Turkey, researching ancient rites, or making goddess-centred education more accessible, please consider supporting this blog, sharing it, or becoming a patron.
You can also purchase my book, She Who Hunts: Artemis, the Goddess Who Changed the World, a heartfelt and scholarly introduction to the Greek Artemis. It’s a great place to begin if you're curious about her history, her many faces, and why she still matters today.
Every offering helps fund fieldwork, content creation, and the long work of restoring her memory, one step at a time.
With strength,
Carla
www.artemisresearchcentre.com
You're doing a wonderful job! Too often today people interested in Goddess think it's just about the flowing clothes because so much out there now is shallow and frivolous. Thanks for keeping it real. I love your work and you are uncovering so much new material and bringing it to the public. Thank you for us and for Her!
Well-written article! I really enjoyed reading this. Like others have said, I appreciate how you didn’t sanitize or water down history but represented it in its honesty (with room for the uncertainty and mystery of course!)