A Look at the Labrys

The most girl-power of axes, the L word of choppy weapons: The Labrys! Find out how this iconic multipurpose tool became a lesbian feminist symbol...we talk about power goddesses, snakes, the island of Lesbos, Amazing Amazons, Homer, murder, Danny de Vito(?!) and more!

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Artworks mentioned:

Small golden double-headed Minoan axe, 1700 - 1450 BCE, Heraklion Archeological Museum. Image credit: Jebulon
Plaster cast of Plate B, Rear, Minoan Moulds of Palaikastro, 1420/10-1075/50 BCE?, Heraklion Archeological Museum. Image credit: Stephanos A. Xanthoudidis
Minoan Snake Goddess Figure, c. 1600 BCE, Heraklion Archeological Museum. Image credit: J.Ollé
Double Headed axes, Minoan Moulds of Palaikastro, 1420/10-1075/50 BCE?, Heraklion Archeological Museum. Image credit: Olaf Tausch
One of the lateral faces of the "Agia Triada" sarcophagus, Crete, Greece, 1400 BCE?, Heraklion Archeological Museum. Image credit: Jebulon
René-Antoine Houasse, Athena emerges from Zeus' brain, before 1688, Palace of Versailles.
François Boucher, Zeus disguised as Artemis seducing the Nymph Callisto, 1759, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas. Image credit: William Rockhill Nelson Trust
Amazon fighting hippeus, 4th century CE, Roman mosaic, Antioch (Turkey), Louvre Museum. Image credit: Jacques Mossot
Herakles fighting the Amazons, side A from Attic amphora, 520 BCE, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image credit: Marie-Lan Nguyen
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Reading from Homer, 1885, Philedelphia Museum of Art. Image credit: George W. Elkins Collection
John Collier, Clytemnestra, 1882, Guildhall Art Gallery. Image credit: Stephen C. Dickson
Labrys earring, 1999, Museum of London. Image credit: Museum of London

Sources:

Emily Townsend Vermeule, A Gold Minoan Double Axe, Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Vol. 57, No. 307 (1959), pp. 4-16

Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, Esther Eidinow, ed., The Oxford Classical Dictionary

Homeric Hymn to Demeter, translated by Gregory Nagy: https://uh.edu/~cldue/texts/demeter.html

Margaret C. Waites, The Deities of the Sacred Axe, American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1923), pp. 25-56

Barbara A. Olsen. "Women, Children and the Family in the Late Aegean Bronze Age: Differences in Minoan and Mycenaean Constructions of Gender." World Archaeology, Vol. 29, No. 3, Intimate Relations (Feb., 1998),

Jane E. Francis, Anna Kouremenos ed., Roman Crete: New Perspectives

Jeremy B. Rutter and JoAnn Gonzalez-Major, Aegean Prehistory, Dartmouth College website: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~prehistory/...

Davies, M.. (1987). Aeschylus' Clytemnestra: Sword or Axe?. The Classical Quarterly, 37(1), 65–75.

Christine Morris, Thoroughly Modern Minoans: Women and Goddesses between Europe and the Orient, in Situating Gender in European Archaeologies, Eds Liv Helga Dommasnes, Tove Hjørungdal, Sandra Montón-Subías, Margarita Sánchez Romero, and Nancy L. Wicker 2010, Budapest, Archaeolingua