This essay won't discuss any of the authors mentioned in Part 1, and in fact it deals less with "impossible things" than "unlikely things." The stimulus for this essay was a blogpost dealing with a vaguely "evolutionary psychology" approach to what I called in 2019 "the pervasiveness of the Amazon archetype." Said blogpost, however, did not in my opinion make any valuable observations, so I'm not troubling to cite it.
The image of amazon-like women in world cultures are not all subsumed by the specific Greek myth of the Amazon tribes. Some figures evolve from purely polytheistic concepts of war-goddesses like Athena and Anath. Others may evolve either from figures believed to be real, but actually purely legendary (the Chinese Ha Mulan), to those clearly rooted in history, like the pirate Anne Bonny. The element most of these would have in common would seem to be females who in some way challenge males on the field of battle, and so would not include other archetypes like sorceresses (Morgan Le Fay) or women who kill men with deception (the Biblical Jael, who lulls an enemy general into sleep and then kills him).
That said, one may fairly question the provenance of the Amazon archetype. I've stated that I can engage philosophically with the archetype, whether it's rooted in any historical reality or not, simply because the archetype reverses the expectations of normal life. The norm, even in prehistorical eras, would have been the division of labor arising from sexual dimorphism. Even in tribes where the men might not have been much taller than their women, the men always had greater body mass thanks to testosterone, and this hormone usually, though not universally, encouraged males to be the foremost protectors of their respective tribes against marauding males from other tribes, or from predacious animals.
By and large, it seems likely that most females in all eras accepted the division of labor, not least in the belief that offspring were best nurtured by the female of the species. If there were individual women of this or that tribe-- what moderns sometimes call "tomboys"-- who pushed back against the division of labor, seeking to compete with men in various ways, no feminism existed to champion their outlying nature. Archaic women are as likely to have been just as conservative as archaic men, condemning any females who deviated from the norm.
Given this likely tendency toward conservatism from both genders, then, why would any archaic tribespeople come to imagine goddesses of war, which is at least part of the makeup of the Greek Athena and the Ugaritic Anath?
Though the pure appeal of "unlikely things" could be the reason for the appeal of the archetype, there's one "evo psych" influence that might have provoked the development of the archetype, and that is the influence of the Ha Mulan/Anne Bonny type, the woman who joins male ranks to fight alongside them for whatever reason.
To the extent that tribes all across the face of the Earth have always been fighting with one another for supremacy, it's not impossible that "women warriors" fighting alongside men, possibly in disguise more often than not, could be a cross-cultural phenomenon that spurred the equally cross-cultural archetypes of "warrior goddess" and "Amazon society." A few societies may have normalized the participation of worthy females alongside males, such as the Brazilian woman-warriors whose storied existence led to the naming of South America's Amazon River. The roving tribes of the Scythians, which allegedly included both horsewomen and horsemen, is often nominated as a real-world source for the Greek myth of a society ruled by dominant female warriors.
I'm familiar with only one resource that went into great detail regarding the widespread phenomenon of women fighting in the battlefield with men: Jessica Salmonson's 1991 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMAZONS. I read the book long ago, and primarily remember some interesting narratives regarding women who fought in male guise during the American Civil War. I have not found any detailed reviews of the Salmonson book online, only this indirect disparaging comment in the course of reviewing a separate book about "women in war." It's quite possible that Salmonson's book is not well sourced. However, since I'm concerned more with the archetype than with real history, even stories with no basis in real history, like that of Mulan, are relevant to my line of thought.
It's not demonstrable that "women warriors" were a continuous presence in any historical society. For all we know, even the horsewomen of the Scythians might have been a temporary aberration from the norm of whatever "nurturing vs. protection" division of labor existed in Scythian society over the centuries. However, as I said primitive societies were liable to being attacked more often than not, and that could have eventuated in the irregular but consistent appearance of "tomboy heroines." Greeks and Romans sometimes explained individual warrior-women like Camilla and Atalanta as virgin huntresses devoted to Artemis/Diana. But there need not be a specific allusion to religion. In some versions of the Brunhilde story, she seems to be a mortal woman despite being termed a "valkyrie." Her strength is such that she can easily repulse the advances of the weakling warlord Gunnar, though not those of the hero Sigurd, who in one iteration masquerades as Gunnar, overpowers Brunhilde in the marriage bed, and so deceives her as to Gunnar's masculine prowess, causing her to marry an unworthy man.
In the fantasy-novel THE LADIES OF MANDRIGYN, a group of women have to train themselves to fight men to achieve a particular goal. In the course of that training, author Barbara Hambly has the trainer impress the women with a crucial difference between the sexes, to wit: "Women fight because they have to; men fight because they want to." But even if one takes that as an absolute, there could have been countless instances where women, even those who were not disposed to be tomboys, took the field purely to defend their homes and children. And that is the one factor of "evolutionary psychology" that I can imagine as pertinent to the evolution of the Amazon archetype.
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