From divinity to sin

Abstract

This article aims to comment on the role of mythological figures from ancient cosmogonies in the construction of female imaginary that Simone de Beauvoir evokes in The Second Sex (1949) according to modern narratives about the mythical female past. It is a matter of flying over the philosopher's approach to the mythical discourses of creation according to the studies of her ethnological and anthropological interlocutors: the divinity of women in societies, considered by them as “primitive”, and their desecration before Christian morality. This is one of the investigations carried out by Beauvoir to understand the situation of oppression of women, namely, how through discourses and narratives about the body, in the overlap between myth and history, one tries to place women as the absolute Other. In view of this cut, our focus, therefore, is to present the analysis made by the philosopher that makes it possible to identify how the body, now interpreted by sacralizing explanations of what is feminine, now rejected by Christianity as sin, becomes an expression of otherness.