Aphrodite Ourania

With these in troop

“I,” said a voice—“I am Desire. In Greece I am revered, and there I am Aphrodite. In Italy I am Venus; in Egypt, Hathor; in Armenia, Anaitis; in Persia, Anâhita; Tanit in Carthage; Baaltis in Byblus; Derceto in Ascalon; Atargatis in Hierapolis; Bilet in Babylon; Ashtaroth to the Sidonians; and Aschera in the glades of Judæa. And everywhere I am worshipped, and everywhere I am Love. I bring joy and torture, delight and pain. I appease and appal. It is I that create and undo. It is I that make heaven and people hell. I am the mistress of the world. Without me time would cease to be. I am the germ of stars, the essence of things. I am all that is, will be, and has been, and my robe no mortal has raised. I breathe, and nations are; in my parturitions are planets; my home is space. My lips are blissfuller than any bloom of bliss; my arms the opening gates of life. The Infinite is mine. Mary, come with me, and you shall measure it.”

ASTARTE, a Semitic goddess whose name appears in the Bible as Ashtoreth. She is everywhere the great female principle, answering to the Baal of the Canaanites and Phoenicians, and to the Dagon of the Philistines. She had temples at Sidon and at Tyre (whence her worship was transplanted to Carthage), and the Philistines probably venerated her at Ascalon (1 Sam. xxxi. 10). Solomon built a high-place for her at Jerusalem which lasted until the days of King Josiah (1 Kings xi. 5; 2 Kings xxiii. 13), and the extent of her cult among the Israelites is proved as much by the numerous biblical references as by the frequent representations of the deity turned up on Palestinian soil.

The primitive statue of the goddess of Pessinus, a black stone or baetyl dignified by the name of the Mother of the Gods, was transported to Rome in the stress of the Second Punic War and there became the centre of a ritual served by eunuch priests supported by the State; while, later, her analogue, the Syrian goddess, whose temple at Hierapolis, according to Lucian, required a personnel of over three hundred ministrants, became the object of the special devotion of the Emperor Nero.

At the head of the female procession and facing the great god who is borne on the two men, stands a goddess on a lioness or panther. Her costume does not differ from that of the women: her hair hangs down in a long plait behind: in her extended right hand she holds out an emblem to touch that of the god. The shape and meaning of her emblem are obscure. It consists of a stem with two pairs of protuberances, perhaps leaves or branches, one above the other, the whole being surmounted, like the emblem of the god, by an oval with a cross-bar.  ... The goddess who at the head of the procession of women confronts the great sky-god in the sanctuary at Boghaz-Keui is generally recognized as the divine Mother, the great Asiatic goddess of life and fertility. The tall flat-topped hat with perpendicular grooves which she wears, and the lioness or panther on which she stands, remind us of the turreted crown and lion-drawn car of Cybele, who was worshipped in the neighbouring land of Phrygia across the Halys. So Atargatis, the great Syrian goddess of Hierapolis-Bambyce, was portrayed sitting on lions and wearing a tower on her head.At Babylon an image of a goddess whom the Greeks called Rhea had the figures of two lions standing on her knees.

As a matter of fact, immorality was nowhere so flagrant as in the temples of Astarte, whose female servants honored the goddess with untiring ardor. In no country was sacred prostitution so developed as in Syria, and in the Occident it was to be found practically only where the Phœnicians had imported it, as on Mount Eryx.

Two animals especially were the objects of universal veneration, the pigeon and the fish. Vagrant multitudes of pigeons received the traveler landing at Ascalon, and they played about the enclosures of all the temples of Astarte in flocks resembling white whirlwinds. The pigeon belonged, properly speaking, to the goddess of love, whose symbol it has remained above all to the people worshiping that goddess. "Quid referam ut volitet crebras intacta per urbes Alba Palaestino sancta columba Syro?" The fish was sacred to Atargatis, who undoubtedly had been represented in that shape at first, as Dagon always was.The fish were kept in ponds in the proximity of the temples.A superstitious fear prevented people from touching them, because the goddess punished the sacrilegious by covering their bodies with ulcers and tumors. At certain mystic repasts, however, the priests and initiates consumed the forbidden food in the belief that they were absorbing the flesh of the divinity herself. That worship and its practices, which were spread over Syria, probably suggested the ichthus symbolism in the Christian period.

It is certain that the first worshipers of the Syrian goddess in the Latin world were slaves. During the wars against Antiochus the Great a number of prisoners were sent to Italy to be sold at public auction, as was the custom, and the first appearance in Italy of the Chaldaei has been connected with that event. The Chaldaei were Oriental fortune-tellers who asserted that their predictions were based on the Chaldean astrology. They found credulous clients among the farm laborers, and Cato gravely exhorts the good landlord to oust them from his estate. Beginning with the second century before Christ, merchants began to import Syrian slaves. At that time Delos was the great trade center in this human commodity, and in that island especially Atargatis was worshiped by citizens of Athens and Rome. Trade spread her worship in the Occident. We know that the great slave revolution that devastated Sicily in 134 B. C. was started by a slave from Apamea, a votary of the Syrian goddess. Simulating divine madness, he called his companions to arms, pretending to act in accordance with orders from heaven.This detail, which we know by chance, shows how considerable a proportion of Semites there was in the gangs working the fields, and how much authority Atargatis enjoyed in the rural centers.

In a class of legends, "specially connected with the worship of Atargatis", wrote Professor Robertson Smith, "the divine life of the waters resides in the sacred fish that inhabit them. Atargatis and her son, according to a legend common to Hierapolis and Ascalon, plunged into the waters--in the first case the Euphrates, in the second the sacred pool at the temple near the town--and were changed into fishes". The idea is that "where a god dies, that is, ceases to exist in human form, his life passes into the waters where he is buried; and this again is merely a theory to bring the divine water or the divine fish into harmony with anthropomorphic ideas. The same thing was sometimes effected in another way by saying that the anthropomorphic deity was born from the water, as Aphrodite sprang from sea foam, or as Atargatis, in another form of the Euphrates legend, ... was born of an egg which the sacred fishes found in the Euphrates and pushed ashore."

Down the long hall she glistens like a star, The foam-born mother of Love, transfixed to stone, Yet none the less immortal, breathing on. Time's brutal hand hath maimed but could not mar. When first the enthralled enchantress from afar Dazzled mine eyes, I saw not her alone, Serenely poised on her world-worshipped throne, As when she guided once her dove-drawn car,— But at her feet a pale, death-stricken Jew, Her life adorer, sobbed farewell to love. Here Heine wept! Here still he weeps anew, Nor ever shall his shadow lift or move, While mourns one ardent heart, one poet-brain, For vanished Hellas and Hebraic pain.

Mystery: lo! betwixt the sun and moon

By its influence everything in the earth is generated. For, as it rises in either direction, it sprinkles everything with its genial dew, and not only matures the productions of the earth, but stimulates all living things

Mother of Rome, delight of Gods and men, Dear Venus that beneath the gliding stars Makest to teem the many-voyaged main And fruitful lands- for all of living things Through thee alone are evermore conceived, Through thee are risen to visit the great sun- Before thee, Goddess, and thy coming on, Flee stormy wind and massy cloud away, For thee the daedal Earth bears scented flowers, For thee waters of the unvexed deep Smile, and the hollows of the serene sky Glow with diffused radiance for thee! 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 For Memmius mine, whom thou hast willed to be Peerless in every grace at every hour- Wherefore indeed, Divine one, give my words Immortal charm.

My jests do not prevent me from thinking at times that in truth there is only one deity, eternal, creative, all-powerful, Venus Genetrix. She brings souls together; she unites bodies and things. Eros called the world out of chaos. Whether he did well is another question; but, since he did so, we should recognize his might, though we are free not to bless it.

High in the home of the summers, the seats of the happy immortals, Shrouded in knee-deep blaze, unapproachable; there ever youthful Hebé, Harmonié, and the daughter of Jove, Aphrodité, Whirled in the white-linked dance, with the gold-crowned Hours and Graces.

Consider [Love] in mind, you, and don't sit there with eyes glazing over. It is a thing considered inborn in mortals, to their very bones; through it they form affections and accomplish peaceful acts, calling it Joy or Aphrodite by name.