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| "Choosing the Rose" by Portaels (1860s) |
Any spiritual tradition that venerates motherhood is operating in accord with the regenerative aspect of nature. When we look at the most prominent Gods of ancient Rome we see what aspects of nature they revered most: Venus and Mars – thus love, fertility and virility (Mars is not only a God of war but also agriculture). To get these very fundamental things right is to light the path to success, though it’s clearly a path on which many descendants of Europa have lost their way. It is not so much that we are not sexually active but that too few of us are in long term relationships.* This not ideal, as a tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses demonstrates:
“The Propoetides – fools who denied Venus divinity – she stripped off their good names and their undergarments, and made them whores. As those women hardened .... their features hardened like their hearts. Soon they shrank to the ... heartless, treacherous hardness of sharp shards of flint.
The spectacle of these cursed women sent Pygmalion ... slightly mad. He adored woman, but he saw … these particular women transform, as if by some occult connection, every woman's uterus to a spider. Her face, voice, gestures, hair became its web ...
So he lived in the solitary confinement of a phobia, shunning living women, wifeless. Yet he still dreamed of woman ... [The story of Pygmalion from bk X, as translated by Ted Hughes]”
