Living Goddesses Presents Deborah Maroulis Radiant Agency & the Politics of Theft: Helen of Troy as Solar Goddess

The Living Goddesses Series is a Space for Women to Gather in Community. Recordings will be offered at a later time for all to access the lecture portion of the presentation.

Radiant Agency and the Politics of Theft: Helen of Troy as Solar Goddess

Lowell Edmunds’ Stealing Helen identifies Helen of Troy as part of a widespread mythic pattern of the “stolen woman.” Building on Edmunds, Helen’s myth also preserves solar agency, in which Helen belongs to an Indo-European tradition of sun or dawn goddesses whose power operates through radiance, visibility, and revelation—forms of agency that provoke pursuit, conflict, and cosmic rupture precisely because they cannot be contained.

Rather than treating abduction as evidence of female powerlessness, theft can be reframed as a mythic response to autonomous radiance. Helen’s epiphanic appearances, cultic associations, and narrative capacity to expose oath-breaking and moral failure align her with solar figures whose agency is exercised through being seen,…