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China (China) (search for this): chapter 10
d they indeed are feminine, three to one. The Roman Catholic Church, with more wisdom of adaptation, has kept one goddess from the Greek; and the transformed Demeter, with her miraculously born child, which is now become masculine, presides over every altar. Softened and beautified from the elder image, it is still the same,--the same indeed with all the mythologic mothers, with the Maternal Goddess who sits, with a glory round her head and a babe on her bosom, in every Buddhist house in China, or with Isis who yet nurses Horus on the monuments of Egypt. As far as history can tell, this group first appeared in Christian art when used as a symbol, in the Nestorian controversy, by Cyril, who had spent most of his life in Egypt. Nestorius was condemned in the fifth century, for asserting Mary to be the mother of the human nature of Jesus, and not also of the divine; and it was at this time that the images of the Virgin and Child were multiplied, to protest against the heretic who
Mackay (search for this): chapter 10
beautiful, the wronged. Wronged, because human coarseness cannot keep up to the conceptions of the celestial Venus, but degrades her into a French lorette, and fills storybooks with her levities. How unlike this are the conceptions of Plato, whose philosophy has been called a mediation of love. Love, according to him, first taught the arts to mankind,--arts of existence, arts of wisdom. Love inspires self-sacrifice; he who loves will die for another. Love, he says, in his Banquet, Mackay's translation. is peace and goodwill among men, calm upon the waters, repose and stillness in the storm, the balm of sleep in sadness. Before love all harsh passions flee away. Love is author of soft affections, destroyer of ungentle thoughts, merciful and mild, the admiration of the wise, the delight of the gods. Love divests us of all alienation from each other, and fills our vacant hearts with overflowing sympathy. Love is the valued treasure of the fortunate and desired by the unhapp
Phoebus (search for this): chapter 10
d Persephone; and through them this relation is glorified, as wifehood becomes sublime in Hera, love in Aphrodite, and maidenhood, active or contemplative, in Artemis and Athena. But besides these five attitudes of woman as girl, maiden, lover, wife, and mother, there must be finally one which shall comprise all of these, and may outlast them all. Hestia, or Vesta, is the sister of Zeus, but not his wife like Hera, nor his symbolical mistress like Demeter; nay, when sought in marriage by Phoebus and Poseidon, she has sworn by the head of Zeus to be a virgin forever. She represents woman as queen of home. Houses are her invention. No separate temple is built to her, for every hearth is her altar; no special sacrifices are offered, for she has the first share of every sacrifice. Every time the household meets before the hearth, she is named, and the meal becomes thereby an act of worship. Every in-door oath must be sworn by her. The worst criminal who enters the house and touche
Mary Magdalene (search for this): chapter 10
: and again, when in the first Roman Catholic procession I ever saw, a great banner came flapping round the windy corner with only the inscription S. P. Q. R. The phrase under which ancient Rome subdued the world still lingers in those borrowed initials, and the Church takes its goddess, like its banner, at second-hand. If we set aside its queen, the Church has added no new image. Martyrs are abundant in every faith, and saint and sibyl add but a few softer touches to the antique. Mary Magdalene is really the sole modern figure, and she has not an ideal interest, but one that is philanthropic alone. Her presence in art asserts the modern spirit, and perhaps marks an era in history. Far be it from me to deny its value. Yet if we are looking for the very highest, it cannot be found in the fallen; and if we must lose either from the temple, we can better spare the suppliant than the goddess. And save in depicting this attribute of humility or contrition, modern literature, at
Endymion (search for this): chapter 10
ook of the Venus dea Medici implies modesty, since she is supposed to be standing before Paris with Hera and Athena. In Homer's hymn to her she is described as ordinarily cold and unimpressable, and only guiding others to love, till Zeus, by his sovereign interference, makes her mind to wander and she loves a mortal man. And though she regards Anchises simply as her husband, and calls herself his wedded wife, yet she is saddened by the thought of her fall, as much as Artemis when she loves Endymion. This is Homer when serious; but the story of her intrigue with Ares he puts into the mouth of a wandering minstrel in the Odyssey, as a relief from graver song, and half disavows it, as if knowing its irreverence. The true Aphrodite is to be sought in the hymns of Homer, Orpheus, and Proclus. The last invokes her as yet a virgin. *basilhi/da kourafrodi/thn Proclus, Hymn 3. 1. It is essential to her very power that she should have the provocation of modesty. She represents that passi
Callimachus (search for this): chapter 10
Aristophanes, any more than we seek the feminine ideal of to-day in the more chastened satire of the Saturday Review. We must seek them in the remains of Greek sculpture, in Hesiod and Homer, in the Greek tragedians, in the hymns of Orpheus, Callimachus, and Proclus, and in the Anthology. We are apt to regard the Greek myths as only a chaos of confused fancies. Yet it often takes very little pains to disentangle them, at least sufficiently to seize their main thread. If we confine ourselll others, that attribute. She retains the privilege of that sublime cradle, and, whenever she bows her head, it is as if Zeus had nodded,--a privilege which he has given to her alone. That is ratified to which Pallas hath bowed assent, says Callimachus. to\ d'e)ntele\s w(=| k' e)pineu/sh=| *palla/s. Callimi., Hymn V. 131, 132. Yet while thus falling but one degree below omnipotence, she possesses a beauty which is beyond that of Aphrodite. If the cowherd Alexander (Paris) judges otherwise,
Goethe (search for this): chapter 10
oddess. And save in depicting this attribute of humility or contrition, modern literature, at least since Petrarch, seems to me singularly wanting in grand pictures of ideal womanhood. Spenser's impersonations, while pure and high, are vague and impalpable. Shakespeare's women seem at best far inferior, in compass and variety, to Shakespeare's men; and if Ruskin glorifies them sublimely on the one side, Thackeray on the other side professes to find in them the justification of his own. Goethe paints carefully a few varieties, avoiding the largest and noblest types. . Where among all these delineations is there a woman who walks the earth like a goddess? Where is the incessu patuit dea or Homer's di=a gunaikw=n? Among recent writers, George Sand alone has dared even to attempt such a thing; she tries it in Consuelo, and before the divinity has got her wings full-grown, she is enveloped, goddess-like, in the most bewildering clouds. Perhaps it is precisely because these high id
Artemis (search for this): chapter 10
ore familiar but more deceptive Latin namesby Artemis or Diana, Athena or Minerva, Aphrodite or Vene. But it is a brief and simple epoch that Artemis represents. After early girlhood comes the mat the head of all the goddesses. Beside her Artemis is undeveloped, while all the rest have passey seen naked, unlike every other goddess save Artemis. Yet Praxiteles represented her veiled at Coddened by the thought of her fall, as much as Artemis when she loves Endymion. This is Homer when round it. In her yet childish freedom she was Artemis; in maiden meditation, fancy free, she was Ae fragrant and lofty chamber came Helen, like Artemis of the golden distaff. For her Adrasta immedption from a votive offering in the temple of Artemis, where brides were wont to offer their childiTimarete, before her marriage, has offered to Artemis her tambourine, and her .precious ball, and hy Church such an advance beyond the temple of Artemis? At any rate, the final result of Greek wo[6 more...]
Anchises (search for this): chapter 10
Venus Victrix; Phidias carved her in ivory and gold, her feet resting on a tortoise, as if to imply deliberation, not heedlessness. The conscious look of the Venus dea Medici implies modesty, since she is supposed to be standing before Paris with Hera and Athena. In Homer's hymn to her she is described as ordinarily cold and unimpressable, and only guiding others to love, till Zeus, by his sovereign interference, makes her mind to wander and she loves a mortal man. And though she regards Anchises simply as her husband, and calls herself his wedded wife, yet she is saddened by the thought of her fall, as much as Artemis when she loves Endymion. This is Homer when serious; but the story of her intrigue with Ares he puts into the mouth of a wandering minstrel in the Odyssey, as a relief from graver song, and half disavows it, as if knowing its irreverence. The true Aphrodite is to be sought in the hymns of Homer, Orpheus, and Proclus. The last invokes her as yet a virgin. *basilh
Voltaire (search for this): chapter 10
if each had married into a Roman family. It is only since the publication of Thirlwall's Greece, in 1835, that they have generally appeared in English books under their own proper titles. With the Latin names came a host of later traditions, mostly foreign to the Greek mind, generally tending toward the trivial and the prosaic. Shakespeare in French does not more instantly cease to be Shakespeare, than the great ideals vacate their shrines when Latinized. Jeanne d'arc, in the hands of Voltaire, suffers hardly more defamation of character than the Greek goddesses under the treatment of Lempriere. Now that this defilement is being cleared away, we begin to see how much of the stateliness of polytheism lay in its ideal women. Monotheism is inevitable; there never was a polytheism in the world, but so soon as it produced a thinker it became a monotheism after all. Then it instantly became necessary to say He or She in speaking of the Highest; and the immediate result was a mascul
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