A Cultural History of Marriage in Antiquity by Karen Klaiber Hersch;

Author:Karen Klaiber Hersch;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Love, Sex, and Sexuality

Marriage: The Myth of Intimate Strangers

VERED LEV KENAAN

THE BOND BETWEEN COSMIC AND HUMAN MARRIAGES

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24)

I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;

in pain you shall bring forth children.

Your desire shall be contrary to your husband,

but he shall rule over you. (Genesis 3:16)

As we see in the quotes above from the book of Genesis, the union of feminine and masculine elements is a common motif in cosmological narratives across cultures. Mythological accounts of the beginning of the world often imagine the production of things and concepts through sexual and erotic images. In Hesiod’s Theogony, a Greek epic poem from the end of the eighth century BCE, the cosmological role of sexuality is represented by the inclusion of Eros as one of the universe’s first four beings. Eros appears as a primary cosmic force, an abstract divinity whose distinctive beauty is associated with irresistible power: he is “the most beautiful among the immortal gods, the limb-melter” (Th. 120–121).

And yet, Eros’s defining characteristics are absent from the primordial stage of the world’s development. His absence is emphasized by the narrator’s use of negative phrases that mark his noninvolvement in the act of procreation, which, it should be noted, is either a fatherless, or a motherless, act of reproduction. Gaia (Earth), for example, who is the mother and sole progenitor of Ouranos, the sky, the mountains, and the sea, gives birth without delightful love, ater philotetos ephimerou (Th. 132). Similarly, Nyx, Night, gives birth through parthenogenesis, ou tini koimetheisa theon (Th. 213). The negative phrase, “sleeping with none of the gods,” is indicative of the problems that the narrator faces when he attempts to describe the genesis of the cosmos. For the narrator, the order of things is maintained through procreation, an act that, as he understands it, demands two participants, a male and a female who come together and procreate in an erotic encounter. However, the initial act of creation in the Hesiodic narrative involves just a single progenitor, and it is therefore presented as exceptional and unlike the prevailing mode of sexual procreation.

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