Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship by Thomas Moore

Author:Thomas Moore [Moore, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Psychology, Relationships, Spirituality
ISBN: 9780062466860
Amazon: 0062466860
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2016-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

CREATIVE ILLUSIONS IN ROMANTIC LOVE

it was the west wind caught her up, as

she rose

from the genital

wave, and bore her from the delicate

foam, home

to her isle

and those lovers

of the difficult, the hours

of the golden day welcomed her, clad her, were

as though they had made her, were wild

to bring this new thing born

of the ring of the sea pink

Intimacy is sometimes born of elements so inward, so part of nature and deeply embodied, that the accompanying emotions feel impossibly strong and overwhelming. The American poet Charles Olson describes this elemental nature beautifully in his poem “The Ring Of,” his hymn to Aphrodite Anadyomene, Venus rising from the foam of the sea, an image known best perhaps through Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

Aphrodite, the goddess who generates the lusty, sensual emotions of romantic love, blows into a life as though on a wind, and she rises from the waves of genital feelings that are so central to sexual attraction. Olson’s poem, like an ancient Greek hymn, praises this goddess whom the modern world finds difficult to appreciate in her full complexity and power. Olson implies that there is divinity in our waves of lust and in elemental, perhaps impersonal, feelings of attraction. Something eternally valid comes to us in the sensations of sex and romance.

The hard part, as the poem suggests, is to clothe this divinity with the particulars of everyday life—the Hours. Botticelli shows a nymph of the Hours holding a flowery robe in her hands, ready to place it on the goddess’s body. Our task is to find a way to weave deep-seated emotions into our daily lives, to clothe eternity in the garments of time. But how is it done? Do we marry the person who stirs our passion? Do we live out our sexual fantasies? Do we move from partner to partner in search of the goddess? Do we break up a marriage because the west wind has done its work once again, blowing in another visitation of this being “of the sea pink”?

We are often divided in our approach to the rising of Aphrodite’s passions. On the one hand, we may look for them frantically, joining social groups for that reason alone, or placing ads in the personal columns. Advertisers are confident that we will buy almost any item they can invent and package, as long as they also promise that Aphrodite comes with it. The tried and true method of placing scantily clad models—men or women—near the object of consumer desire is effective because they evoke naked, elemental Beauty rising from the sea, which most of us want at all costs.

On the other hand, religious purists complain of Aphrodite’s nakedness, and even psychologists sometimes moralize against her when they warn that romantic love is an illusion, a projection, an obsession, a parental fixation, or an anima possession. The ancient historian Eusebius recounts that when the crusaders were attacking and razing the pagan temples of the Mediterranean, they would not only tear down the temples to Aphrodite,

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