The Mysteries of Bliss (IV)

The Florentine Renaissance came to love the Homeric hymns even more than the two great epics. Marsilius Ficinus, the translator of Plato, began by translating the Homeric and Orphic hymns. We know that he also sang them in the antique manner to the accompaniment of a lute. Angelo Poliziano, another leading spirit of Florentine humanism, paraphrased a hymn to Aphrodite -- neither the greatest nor the least of those ascribed to Homer -- in his own verses.

We could say that he painted it in the style of the Quattrocento were it not for the painter who actually did so, with Poliziano’s poetic assistance: Botticelli. The Birth of Venus is not a good name for this picture. It is rather Aphrodite’s arrival in Cyprus according to the Homeric hymn, or, in accordance with the significance of this masterpiece and the role it has played in our civilization, Aphrodite’s arrival among us. Botticelli’s picture contains at least as much living mythology as the Homeric hymn.

Aphrodite's birth is different: brutal and violent, and departing from the style of Homer poetry in just as archaic a manner as from the style of Botticelli. In both cases the mutilation of Uranos, the casting of his manhood into the sea, the whole terrible foregoing history, the titanic mythology of the world’s beginnings -- all this was swept aside. The unity of that mythological moment when begetter and begotten were one in the womb of the water had been broken up even in Hesiod and became a historical process. In Hesiod, too, we hear of Aphrodite drifting, drifting on the waves, as Maui did in the myth of the Polynesians.

At last the white foam gave birth to the girl who took her name from it ... This ancient etymology, accepted by Hesiod, derived its creditability from a grand mythological vision that must be still older: from the picture of Anadyomene, the goddess risen from the waves. Representations of Aphrodite’s arrival are later. The mild breeze carries the great goddess, already born, to one of her sacred islands, or, in Botticelli’s picture, to firm ground.

The soft foam that cushions Aphrodite is a symbol of her birth, and fits in with the Homeric style just as the mussel-shell does with Botticelli’s. In the Roman poets we read that Venus was born of a mussel-shell, or that she journeyed in a mussel-shell over the sea. Ancient representations show her as if growing out of a mussel. We need not surmise with H. Usener, the eminent philologist, that the growth of the pearl was at the bottom of the symbol. Later, this image was blended with the archaic foam-image.

Originally yet another kind of mussel, by no means so noble, was the creature sacred to Aphrodite in Cnidos. The mussel in general constitutes a most graphic example and expression, appealing at one end of the senses, of the aprhodisian properties of the ‘humid element.’ The Homeric poem was too spiritual to employ this symbol Poliziano was too sensual to be able to forget it. Venus steps out of her mussel-shell in Botticelli in such a way that you can see immediately: it belongs to the goddess, yet she is leaving it behind her as she leaves behind the whole of primitive mythology...

From the high sea, stepping out of a mussel-shell, borne along by the wind and received by the gaily clad goddess of earth, Aphrodite Anadyomene arrives. She is an aspect of the primordial maiden, Protogonos Kore. Botticelli’s picture helps us, as modern men, to conjure up the vision of Anadyomene. And she must be conjured up if we want to understand the Greeks. She is the closest to the origins.

-- Carl Kerenyi, “Kore,” in Essays on a Science of Mythology





A swoony humid storm-charged
night high-runneled in door-foam:
that portal was the mussel which gave
birth to my pagan, love-tossed heart,
drowning the last pews of my Christian
soul inside a new-found woman’s
world-waking, heaven-remaking Yes.
Three times in Heading Out I had met
the woman that I dreamed, enacting in
a starry fusillade the wave-like crash
and smash of my broken self into ecstatic
smithereens. Three times I drifted past
the dawn on a womblike ocean stream inside
my other’s peace, her breasts heaving against
my chest in sleep, her soft breath lush
inside my ear & all the world blue water,
sparkling to a fresh-born sun. Such eternal
rapture wrapped its tail round me
when I woke up, convulsing me with
the hopeless desire of living forever there,
scarring a deep alcoholic trench in me
and, further down, suggesting the roof
of a lost temple I’m still trying to exhume.
Venus was only the first goddess to there appear,
anointing me in a votive mystery which
must proceed through two more, revolving
and evolving successively harder births,
doors you can’t go through until you finish
with the first. (Or it with you.) For a buck
like me back then, fresh-loosed from all
control and free to roam my will, I looked for
that sweet first goddess night after night
in greed of her rogue roller -- rare as a
royal flush, evanescently plush on the coast
where two bodies find and propound her
milk-foamed hard resound. God I ached
to find her again in the next bar’s smoky thrash,
apart from all the others I deemed embalmed
in party sins (venials I spotted because I had
so got ‘em ). Somewhere out there she waited,
I was sure, for the groom who make her bloom;
I saw her sweetly pure and fragile, not naive
but innocent in the way of Kore, playing with
her Oceanids, those girls who back the band.
Somehow that night I’d find her and offer to
buy her a drink, the way Hades handed Kore
a flower from his black depths, the dreaded
groom who hauls every daughter from her
mother’s hearth down onto the couch of pleasure
which wakes the maiden’s other, the queen-maid
Persephone. Of course, I didn’t see it that way,
or couldn’t say so, being young and drunk
and addled by too much beer & rock n roll.
I saw myself the gallant who’d rescue her
from falling into a bar whore’s floozy night,
myself the only one that night graced by God’s
white light, one half of destiny, desperate to
find its wife for life inside the spread thighs
of the perfect catch. My dreams were thus
hard-Kore, a stone-laced ritual of finding that
first field in the forest of fucking’s night,
so much that I repeated it again and again,
an ever-saggier knight of cups with a vaunted
droopy lance, staring crosseyed out across
the void, driving drunk on all those roads.