A number of the figures, made of the soft stone picrolite, have shrunken versions of themselves worn, as amulets, around their own stone necks.
Lovingly laid in Edwardian wooden cabinets, they are an extraordinarily vivifying connection to a prehistoric past. I first met these inter-sex marvels in the atmospheric back storerooms of the old Cyprus Museum in Nicosia. But what about her physical trail? What does the archaeology in the ground reveal about the historical inception of Aphrodite and of her adoration?Īphrodite, born from the sea in a shell, c. The ancients had a vivid mental picture of how their supernatural goddess of love and desire was conceived. It is a story, with some variations (an alternate myth suggested that Aphrodite was the daughter of the king of the gods, Zeus, and the sea nymph Dione), that was told and retold across the Mediterranean world. This is how many in Ancient Greece explained Aphrodite's birth. Aphrodite is far more than an attractive figure on a Valentine's Day card. Born from abuse and suffering, this sublime force is being described to us not just as the goddess of mortal love, but as the deity of both the cycle of life and life itself. This broiling, gory mass proceeded to travel the Mediterranean, from the island of Kythera to the port of Paphos in Cyprus.Īphrodite, an incarnation of fecund life, was accompanied, as she made her flower-sweet progress through the dusty earth, by gold-veiled Horai, the two Greek seasons of summer and winter, spirits of time and of good order. From the frothing sea-spume rose "an awful and lovely maiden", the goddess Aphrodite. As the bloody organs hit the water, a boiling foam started to seethe. Gathering up a serrated flint sickle, Kronos frantically hacked off his father's erect, rutting penis and threw the dismembered phallus and testicles into the sea.
The earth goddess Gaia, sick of her eternal, joyless copulating with her husband-son, the sky god Ouranos (sex which left Gaia permanently pregnant, their children trapped inside her), persuaded one of her other sons, Kronos, to take action. Venus – or Aphrodite as she was originally called by the Greeks – was a primordial creature, said to have been born out of an endless black night before the beginning of the world.Īncient Greek poets and myth-makers told this ghastly story of her origins.
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