The Birth and Rebirth of Aphrodite
Excerpt-Ginette Paris
The Sun, hearth of tenderness and life, Pours burning love over the delighted earth,
And, when one lies down in the valley, one smells How the earth is nubile and rich in blood;
How its huge breast, raised by a soul,
Is made of love, like God, and of flesh, like woman, And how it contains, big with sap and rays of light, The vast swarming of all embryos!
And everything grows, and everything rises!
—O Venus, O Goddess!
Rimbaud, Sun and Flesh
The so-called sexual revolution of our day has endeavored to remove the stain of guilt and sin with which Christianity has traditionally associated sex. It has accomplished this by removing sexuality from the domain of religion. Sexuality, being thus secularized, permits contraception, erotic adventure, and pleasure for the sake of pleasure. So far, so good.
But at the same time, the sacred nature of sexuality has been expunged; and this laicized sex has become, in the minds of too many, the equivalent of a hygienic function or a social game. Is not one of the by-products of the sexual revolution the playboy—literally, a boy (rather than a man) who plays?
Sex games certainly have their place among interesting leisure-time activities. But what has happened to sexuality as an initiation into the realm of the sacred? Must we borrow from the Tantric tradition of the Orient to learn of illumination by the sexual path? No, we have in our own cultural past an alternative to both the Judeo-Christian attitude of sexual repression and its corollary, contemporary sexual promiscuity and the insignificance that accompanies it.
It is this point of view that I propose to develop in the following chapters. But before imagining a rebirth of Aphrodite, let us take a look at the myths surrounding her birth.
The Marriage of Heaven and Earth
The great and amorous sky curved over the earth, and lay upon her as a pure lover.
The rain, the humid flux descending from heaven for both man and animal, for both thick and strong, germinated the wheat, swelled the furrows with fecund mud and brought forth the buds in the orchards.
And it is I who empowered these moist espousals, I, the great Aphrodite …
Aeschylus, The Danaids
The numerous myths concerning the birth of Aphrodite vary according to epoch, ideology, and place of origin. Inasmuch as our task is neither that of a Hellenist nor that of a historian, we may use and mix many variants of this myth, since each one reveals a different aspect of our consciousness.
The elements of the Aphrodite myth gathered by Charlene Spretnak and rendered in poetic form acquaint us with the goddess in her most simple aspect, the one closest to the human and to nature:
Life was young and frail when Aphrodite arose with the breath of renewal. Borne by gentle winds on the eastern sea, she alighted on the island of Cyprus. So graceful and alluring was the Goddess that the Seasons rushed to meet her, imploring her alway, to stay. Aphrodite smiled. Her stay would be never-ending, her work never complete. She crossed the pebbled beach and wandered over the hills and plains, seeking out all living creatures. Magically she touched them with desire, and sent them off in joyous pairs. She blessed the females’ wombs, guarded them as they grew, and warded off love’s pains at birth. Everywhere, Aphrodite drew forth the hidden promise of life. Every day she kissed the earth with morning dew. The wanderings of the Goddess carried her far, yet each spring she returned with her doves to Cyprus for her sacred bath at Paphos. There she was attended by her Graces: Flowering, Growth, Beauty, Joy, and Radiance. They crowned her with myrtle and laid a path of rose petals at her feet. Aphrodite walked into the sea, into the pulsing moon rhythms of the tide. When she emerged with her spirit renewed, spring blossomed fully and all beings felt her joy. Through seasons, years, eras, Aphrodite’s mysteries remain inviolable, for she alone understands the love that begets life. [1]
Our most sexual goddess, therefore, was born of the sea foam. If we believe or fancy that every human being has somewhere, buried within his cells, not only the memory of his own intra-uterine life, but also the unconscious memory of the origin of all life in ocean’s depths, we can see also how sexuality stimulates this fantasy. Do we not very often, and very simply, associate the movements of making love with the movement of the waves, the salty odors of the sea with certain good odors of sex? And do we not feel, on going to the sea, a sense of return to our origin, to the rhythm of the waves, and to the moist?
On the small beach of Paphos, where Aphrodite is reputed to have first set foot the manner in which the sea advances upon the round, pink pebbles of the long shoreline produces a peculiarly sensuous rhythm. The penetration of the sea is powerful, the retreat slow and foamy. The rustling water on the pebbles, so powerful that we cannot hear anything else; the penetrating water, the hypnotic cadence, the seductive foam, the enveloping ocean: Aphrodite comes to us.