QUESTION: What does Aphrodite mean to you personally?
SHORT ANSWER: Love and freedom.
LONG ANSWER: I have a strong personal connection because of having spent much of my childhood in Cyprus which is the island of Aphrodite. In the ancient world she had her main temple at Paphos and in the various stories it is to Cyprus that she always returns. Aphrodite is the embodiment of sexual freedom. Very few people are really sexually liberated. Most people live with inhibitions and taboos that occasion horror, dread, anxiety, physical dysfunction, and great suppression of energy as well as interfering with love, work and leisure, making life difficult in all manner of unnecessary ways. Sexual liberation does not imply any particular course of action. Sometimes we say that promiscuous people are sexually liberated, but this is not necessarily the case. They might be just as driven or inhibited as anybody else, just in a different way, or just expressing it through different behaviour. The promiscuous person may actually be frightened of love, just as may be the case with the person who never manages to have a relationship at all. Freedom from inhibition simply means freedom to do whatever is natural in a given situation. Many people are only able to cope with a limited range of situations or are caught on tramlines, always repeating the same route. Societies and communities suffer similarly in a collective way and impose restrictions upon their members. All of this gobbles up a huge amount of energy that would be better deployed in more constructive ways. Being among people who themselves feel free and able to allow relationships to find their own level without the constraint of a long list of do's and don't's is, on the rare occasions when one finds it, very freeing. Aphrodite represents such a spirit. She is the patron of all kinds of sexual relations including marriage as well as the bonds between lovers. As a result she is also the patron of everything fertile, of grace and music and beauty. In her is found the beautiful life and freedom of the body and soul. I regard her as my guardian deity and every time i think of her my spirits lift.
[Picture: Aphrodite, detail, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1825 - 1905.]
Replies
... translations, I don't know. The one I pasted is by William Ellery Leonard. It's very old (1916! one century) and not good in my opinion. I'm sure there is something much better..
... liturgies, interesting, fascinating... I'll be waiting for these developments...
Yes, certainly different. I very much like the poem. Are there other translations, do you know? I have in mind that we might develop some Aphrodite liturgy in due course.
... thank you David. I'm happy to take part in this kind of talks.
In re-reading my text I realize that there is a big mistake (not to mention the many more I see and I cannot see.:)): "morality" has to be read as "moralism": a very big difference...
Thank you, Massimo. This is a really lovely contribution.
For soon as comes the springtime face of day,
And procreant gales blow from the West unbarred,
First fowls of air, smit to the heart by thee,
Foretoken thy approach, O thou Divine,
And leap the wild herds round the happy fields
Or swim the bounding torrents. Thus amain,
Seized with the spell, all creatures follow thee
Whithersoever thou walkest forth to lead,
And thence through seas and mountains and swift streams,
Through leafy homes of birds and greening plains,
Kindling the lure of love in every breast,
Thou bringest the eternal generations forth,
Kind after kind. And since 'tis thou alone
Guidest the Cosmos, and without thee naught
Is risen to reach the shining shores of light,
Nor aught of joyful or of lovely born,
Thee do I crave co-partner in that verse
Which I presume on Nature to compose ...
The above are the verses 9 - 25 of Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things". The idea put forward by David of Aphrodite/Venus as the guardian deity, able to lift our spirits, is perfectly in line with the sense of these verses, in which the poet is willing to have her, the goddess, as companion in what he wants most: understanding nature. Some verses after he invokes the goddess for her power of keeping the terrible Mars busy, in love with her, and this way bringing peace to people at least for a while.
I understand this as a quest for a superior kind of understanding, "scientific" (as the De Rerum Natura aspired to be) but also fully "wise". Infused with the kind of wisdom that one can reach looking deeply at nature, at things as they are, moved by vibrations which are at the same in time internal and external, individual and meta-individual, within the vast cosmos in which everything is generated.
Exactly the opposite of the "sad passions" - that David was also talking about - generated by the kinds of greed that are frequently felt as love or sexuality (on which huge temples of repression and morality have been erected in the centuries by those who deny the nature of things).