Free Seductress by Betsy Prioleau Page B

relations.”
    To the consternation of the ruling patriarchs, Aphrodite plied her love arts to her heart’s content with impunity. Her seductions were no cheap candlelight and negligee affairs. When she went after a man, such as the shepherd Anchises, she rolled out the big effects. She had the Graces bathe, oil, and perfume her and deck her in operatic finery, a gown “brighter than fire-flesh,” caught at the waist by a belt figured with sexual scenes, and ornamented with fabulous jewelry. Her necklaces, brooches, earrings, and spiral ringlets—their goldenness proclaiming her associations with honey and seminal fluid—shone before the astonished Anchises “like the moon” when she surprised him on the mountaintop.
    A shepherd greeted in such circumstances on the wild scarps of Mount Ida required deft handling. Aphrodite, the “weaver of wiles,” did not disappoint. She appeased him with arch flattery, then beguiled him with her golden tongue. Another Scheherazade, she spun an account of herself so colorful, picturesque, and expertly crafted that Anchises listened in rapt fascination. Posing as a virgin princess, she told him she’d been kidnapped by a god to be his bride and accord him honor, riches, and prestige. Filled with “sweet longing” by her words, Anchises bore her to his tent, where she ravished him on a bearskin rug.
    At this point Aphrodite, as part of Zeus’s revenge, should have become the shepherd’s love slave. Instead she resumed her divine identity and shot up to the ridgepole of the tent in all her eight-foot glory. The terrified Anchises reacted with the same thrill of terror as his ancestors in the presence of the goddess—with a Grecian difference. Panicked by the specter of female sexual power, he begged not to be castrated. The obliging Aphrodite reassured him, promised him the consolation prize of a heroic son, and rocketed back to Olympus in a blaze of special effects.
    Aphrodite foiled Zeus’s attempt to shackle her and thwarted every other patriarchal takedown. When her cuckolded husband, Hephaestos, invented an invisible iron net to capture her flagrante delicto for eternity, her philandering days seemed over. But as soon as the panel of gods saw her in bed with Hermes, they were so overcome with lust they voted to free her. The state proved just as ineffectual in curtailing her power.
    Her rites, the most popular in the Mediterranean, proliferated in dozens of forms despite their unofficial, unsanctioned status. All honored different aspects of Aphrodite inherited from past goddesses, with the same riotous abandon to mystical intoxication, revelation, and transfiguration. At one, girls reenacted Inanna’s maturity passage, filing through a tunnel to Aphrodite’s temple with secret objects on their heads. This likely duplicated ceremonies in which the objects were phalluses, and the celebrations, revels with dildos. (The Greeks took female hypersexuality as an unfortunate given and thought it exceeded men’s tenfold.) Another cult restaged the death and annual resurrection of the consort god, Adonis, with the traditional bacchanals afterward.
    By far the best known and attended, though, was the spring aphrodisia, which commemorated the goddess’s birth from the sea. Hundreds of rose-garlanded devotees wended down to the harbor, where an Aphrodite surrogate stripped and submerged herself in the water, thereby summoning the divinity into their midst and revivifying the earth.
    After the procession to her temple and tributes of incense and apples, the pannychis began: a rapturous carouse of wine drinking, opium taking, feasting, dirty dancing, sambyke and flute playing, and fornicating. Aphrodite’s chosen people, the hetaerae, sold their favors that night for a pittance in a diluted, wholesale version of the sacred marriage ceremony. Other festivals ran to greater extremes, including lesbianism, transvestitism, flagellation, and self-castration.
    Aphrodite was not the marble