Free Seductress by Betsy Prioleau Page A

force,” the joyous energy of procreation, who fecundated earth and sea and reanimated existence. She inspired art; she “postponed old age.”
    Celestial superstar that she was, she carried a large entourage in her wake, advertising her primordial, mythic attractions. Along with Eros, Himeros (desire), the Seasons, Graces, and Persuasion, a throng of amorous creatures followed her everywhere. Attended by bees, doves, sparrows, goats, “insatiable panthers,” wolves, and dolphins and trailed by a swarm of children from each of her affairs, she announced her divine kinship with the Mistress of the Animals and Mother Goddess.
    Of all the Greek goddesses, none approached her multinatured complexity and plentitude. Despite the loss of the creatrix’s total wisdom, she still possessed a formidable “mind that ruled over” the gods and got the best of “even the wise.” Like her prehistoric ancestress, she “resolved opposites” and “made pale very sort of partialness” with her triumphant wholeness. Besides sensuality and maternity, she combined compassion and vengeance, peace and war, candor and guile, and male and female. She gave birth to the twin-sexed Hermaphroditus, and her rites featured gender bending and an androgynous Aphroditus.
    With divine variability, the “shifty-eyed” Aphrodite changed moods and personas as unpredictably as her mother, the sea. By turns cruel and kind, she unleashed hideous persecutions with her blessings. She fomented the ten-year bloodbath of the Trojan War, put her daughter-in-law, Psyche, to the torture, and afflicted the Lemnian women with such a bad smell that their husbands deserted them. At the same time, she saved sailors from the deep, arranged happy marriages, and adopted orphans.
    Her most salient trait, though, like Inanna before her, was her gangbusters sexuality. Although the Greeks attempted to domesticate her, she incarnated “ sex, the sheer amoral drive” of lust and attraction. Misogynistic mythmakers married her off to the hunchbacked Hephaestos and made her guardian of conjugal love. Sculptors subjected her unruly sexuality to Apollonian law and order, freeze-framing her in ideal visions of symmetry and “beauty without extravagance.”
    But she behaved with supreme disregard for Attic sensitivities. Repudiating respectable femininity—servile marital fidelity, house arrest, and nonpersonhood—she cat-prowled the premises in search of buff gods and men. The second part of her name, hodites, means “wanderer.” Never raped in a culture that celebrated rape in hymns and odes, she aggressively pursued lovers and took her pleasure with un-apologetic “extravagance.” She went by the epithet “laughter-loving,” a pun on “penis-loving.”
    She was a lioness on the loose in the Olympian firmament. There was “no resisting her.” She could lead astray the “mind of Zeus himself.” Warriors dropped their swords, men’s knees buckled, and the immortals “gawked” in her presence. When Hera wanted to recapture her husband, Zeus, she turned to Aphrodite for help: “Give me love and desire, the powers by which you yourself subdue mankind and gods alike.”
    Contrary to modern expectations, Aphrodite didn’t zap Hera into a willowy blonde. Proving that she relied on more than her beauty to bewitch men, Aphrodite provided her subjects with a whole system of love artistry. This “complex, learned discipline” incorporated some of the basic precepts of the Seductive Way.
    Of the five separate areas of expertise, the first treated the most elementary: the movements and positions of lovemaking, with special emphasis on the ultimate Greek delicacy, kelēs, the female-superior “racehorse.” Second came singing, dancing, cosmetics, and hygiene, then persuasive speech, followed by the more advanced arts of poetry and recitation. Finally, there were the virtuoso psychological skills: empathy, sensitivity, and all the ruses, “wiles and charms of amorous