By far the best known and attended, though, was the spring
aphrodisia,
which commemorated the goddess’s birth from the sea. Hundreds of rose-garlanded devotees wended down to the harbor, where an Aphrodite surrogate stripped and submerged herself in the water, thereby summoning the divinity into their midst and revivifying the earth.
After the procession to her temple and tributes of incense and apples, the
pannychis
began: a rapturous carouse of wine drinking, opium taking, feasting, dirty dancing, sambyke and flute playing, and fornicating. Aphrodite’s chosen people, the hetaerae, sold their favors that night for a pittance in a diluted, wholesale version of the sacred marriage ceremony. Other festivals ran to greater extremes, including lesbianism, transvestitism, flagellation, and self-castration.
Aphrodite was not the marble poem in symmetry so dear to Greek aesthetes, arrested in an attitude of demure passivity, a hand in front of her pubis and a foot on a tortoise, symbol of female silence and domestic immobility. She was an “awesome power,” “greater than a god,” who epitomized the tempestuous force of sexual passion in all its splendor and terrible might.
A blood sister to Inanna and her kin, she ran roughshod over patriarchal institutions—a rambling, slick-talking voluptuary and law unto herself. She turned the Greek pantheon and polis upside down and ruled her way, with men in adoration and women released to themselves and their almighty sexuality.
Although downgraded over time into a pale copy of herself, Aphrodite and her archetype prevailed. There are more figurines of her in the Louvre than all other goddesses combined. Even the Judeo-Christian campaign to eradicate her never completely succeeded. Her capital city, Aphrodisias, was reduced to rubble, her name erased from nearly every surface. By 1357 the Siena residents had smashed her statue to pieces and buried the fragments in neighboring Florence.
She seemed to have been left for dead at last, written out of Western history. But she survived in occultism, magic, folklore, fairy tales, and the erotic imagination—persistent as the tides. Whether we use her name or not, we still petition her, like the ancient Greeks, in our secret erotic prayers: “Give me the kind of song that seduces, please.”
Lilith: The Demonization
Since Aphrodite, it’s been all downhill for the sex goddess. One of the worst threats to male domination, she’s been declassed to a sex toy and slut or demonized as a fiend. With Lilith we can track her mythic decline. According to talmudic lore, Lilith—a big, splashy goddess woman who sneered at female subordination—was Adam’s wife before Eve. She insisted on equality, rejected the missionary position, and at last fled in disgust. “Why should I lie beneath you,” she demanded, “when I am your equal since both of us were created from dust?”
In high dudgeon she soared off to the Red Sea, where she assembled a crew of male demons more to her liking. Unleashing her female supersexuality, she copulated around the clock, giving birth to a hundred monsters a day. Finally three angels appeared to put a stop to her lascivious living, and she agreed to give up her sex marathon if she could plague mankind for eternity. As the antitype of the divine life force she became the death bringer incarnate. She prowled through the night and throttled children after playing with them. She infested men’s dreams so that they spilled the seed of life; she killed them with her kisses.
In one myth, she again preyed on Adam. When he escaped to the desert to atone for his sins, she dogged his steps and tormented him with wet dreams. Not that she felt any nostalgia for him or monogamy. Lilith required the entire population of the Near East to glut her rapacious appetite; she even stooped to Gentiles. Although she began inauspiciously, she eventually worked her way into the bed of God himself. She cast such a potent spell on the almighty that he abandoned his lawful wife, Israel, and set Lilith up in her place, thereby precipitating the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. Folk tradition decreed that only the coming of the Messiah would put an end to her depredations. We’re still waiting; Lilith and her train of femmes fatales have struck deep roots in Western culture.
Lilith systematically reversed all the positive sexual attributes of the earlier goddesses. Her magic became black; her promiscuity, manic; her supremacy, despotic and satanic. Aphrodite’s bestiary, setting, goldenness, and roses turned malevolent. Lilith’s animal entourage consisted of jackals, hyenas, and carrion-eating kites, and her preferred oceanic habitat was a “Sea of Blood.” Instead of Aphrodite’s billowing blond hair, Lilith wore a kind of fright wig, long, snaky tendrils dyed rose red.
As with other erotic deities, Lilith melded genders. But her bisexuality arose from hell and only increased her iniquity. In one account of her birth she sprang to life from the dregs of a satanic wine like an evil hermaphroditic genie. Entwined with her in a single rose-colored shoot was her male half, Samael, with whom she formed a perfect “image of the androgynous deity.” But their male-female fusion potentiated their nefarious natures so that they spread villainy tenfold throughout the earth when they separated.
Lilith also preserved traces of the love goddess’s totality of being. With protean wizardry, she could assume myriad identities and had the name “mother of a mixed multitude.” However, her personas were infernal, and her infinite progeny, the cancerous metastases of an unholy womb. Like the sex goddesses before her, she fancied younger men and took the dominant role. Her preference, though, for little boys, which began in “sport” and ended with asphyxiation, were pedophilic and homicidal.
Lilith perverted the goddess’s stewardship of nature as well. Instead of spring verdure, she dispatched diabolic weather fronts from her command post on the Mountains of Darkness. Her name Lil meant “dust storm.”
Lilith also dragged the love arts through the mud. As the original saddle tramp she debased and caricatured the principles of erotic attraction. She possessed Inanna’s and Aphrodite’s seductive eloquence—a suave tongue and words as “smooth [as] oil”—but her blandishments led men to their doom. Behind their backs, she resumed her “real” voice, shrieking so loud the earth shook.
In private she also danced the dance of the damned with her female minions in the desert. Rather than divine roundelays, these demonesses whirled and gyrated with berserker fury, then fell upon one another in pitched battle. Lilith put Aphrodite’s wiles to the most depraved purposes. She enticed victims with “the sweet, sensual sounds of cymbals” and feigned a coy virginity that she later disproved with a vengeance. Once bedded, her prey found himself in the clutches of such rarefied sexual delights that he could never be satisfied again. Usually, though, Lilith solved the problem for him by making him impotent or killing him altogether.
Her appearance was as two-faced as her character: beautiful in front, hideous behind like the Frau Welt figurines in medieval cathedrals with their lovely facades and putrescent backsides. Instead of rebirth, she brought decay and annihilation. In one terra-cotta relief, she rises nude, half female, half bird of prey, on the backs of two monkeys. Bewinged and crowned with a tiered tiara, she makes a stop sign with her outstretched arms and fixes us with a Gestapo stare. Death everlasting, all who enter here.
When she dressed up, she pulled another demonic fraud. She stationed herself at the crossroads costumed in goddess wear, a flaming gown with forty ornaments—six earrings in each ear and ropes of Egyptian necklaces. But as soon as she’d ensnared and ravished the unwary, she transmogrified into her terrible self, a tower of fire, denuded of all her trinkets and charms. Sometimes, with a satanic inversion of the deity’s snake imagery, she took the form of a serpent, aflame from the waist down, with a dragon and second serpent on her back.
What Lilith gained in gothic frisson and melodrama, she lost in interest and complexity. Without the variegated personas of the earlier goddesses, their contradictions and caprices, Lilith became a cardboard cutout. She was stripped of the seductress’s most potent aphrodisiac, her full personhood, her “plentitude of being,” with all its mystery, depth, and complication.
Monster of depravity, “Spirit of Defilement,” queen of mean, Lilith wore only one color, black. She personified Evil Womanhood and with her Dragon Lady forefinger, pointed mankind to the inevitable holocaust attendant on female sexual autonomy and freedom. Cartoon vamp that she is, though, she has taken up stubborn residence in the Western psyche. Until the nineteenth century people wore amulets to ward off her infernal machinations; her legends circulated for four thousand years, and her demonic stereotype still rears up in films and fiction or whenever a woman takes her sex power too far.
Despite a Gen Y tide of postfeminist sex avengers—bad girls ransacking bars and frat houses—the Lilith model is played out, a passé remnant of old-guard male-dominant societies. There are sexier, happier, more adult erotic exemplars for the twenty-first century. Just as we’ve cleansed the temple of cipher wives and dumb floozies, we need to exorcise Lilith and recall the sex goddesses.
Whether men admit it or not, these mythic queens of creation are their dream women, and the Seductive Way, established through millennia of goddess-worship, the royal road to their hearts. Since the dawn of history, men have not been content with hog-rutting, soulless carnality. They’ve hungered for an ideal love object, cut to the divine pattern. Far from the nubile childbearer of neo-Darwinian theory, she was a flashy, hell-on-wheels Ms. Big, Our Lady of Lust.
If archaeology and prehistoric lore are to be believed, she once occupied the catbird seat of the cosmos. She made and contained all that was, jump-started creation, and kept it rolling from death to rebirth with her divine sex energy. A mental titaness, she knew everything and merged multitudes and contraries in her being: masculinity and femininity, maternity and sexuality, consolation and aggression, and constancy and variability. She came on strong, with thunderclaps and kettledrums, and struck awe and wonder into mankind. Men, deep in their erotic circuitry, still crave a woman of her cosmic scale and impact, a charged-up Somebody who electroshocks them with the life spirit and transports them elsewhere. They want the transcendence and redemption of the old ecstatic rites, according to the primordial sacral script.
The Seductive Way might seem antiquated in an age of Turbotongue vibrators, designer faces, insta-sex, image doctors, and love coaches, but it endures in the erotic pathways of the subpsyche. The women who sow heartbreak and love madness trade in charms established at the genesis of sexual desire, when the idea of eros crystallized around a mythic goddess and was played out in her worship services. Men cannot escape the tidal pull of her physical magic: pyrotechnic costumes, lush settings, high maquillage and body care, and hot dance, music, art, and sexpertise. Nor have they lost their thirst for mind spells, the delights of “infinite variety,” and the labyrinthine “tortuous path.” They prefer the most circuitous, arduous, unexpected, and complicated route home, a “latticework of anticipation,” succeeded by a cannonade finale that stands their hair on end. Anything less is blahsville and June Cleaver.
Men may tell us they want a living doll in a hostess apron and quiescence on the home front, but they’re programmed otherwise. Their receptors are primed for a numinous empress of excitement, a life pump, and a mover and shaker. Their love lights dim and wink out unless a grandmistress of eros takes them in hand: an ever-variable “Mother Cow” or “Loud Thundering Storm,” a replete, holographic charismatician who keeps them as transfixed and fascinated as the mythic goddesses aeons ago.
One of the uses of an archetype is that it provides a “self-portrait of the instinct.” The archetypic sex goddesses, with their consistent character traits, symbols, and rites, give us a diagram from
Gray’s Anatomy
so that we can view desire from the bones up. We can see how ego enhancement, maternal nurture, and pain, for example, infiltrated sexual passion and why we’re subliminally moved by scent, speech, and food offerings.
Better still, we can read the makeup of the ultimate desirable woman with CAT scan clarity. And she explodes every bimbo-in-bustier image of sex appeal that men have created to suppress us. The mythic archaic seductress defines woman as subject and restores control and pride. Autonomous, smart, proactive, she has no truck with submissive norms and incarnates complete personhood par excellence. A paragon of mental health and maturity, she contains opposites with energy to spare. She plants the flag of female sexual power and flies it from the battlements of heaven and earth.
Psychiatrists have long recognized the therapeutic value of identification with mythic figures, which helps explain the runaway popularity of the goddess movement. But the goddesses usually held up for our admiration are crones, oracles, Amazons, great mothers, and angry fiends like Medusa.
The seductress deities, if and when they’re treated at all, have been given short shrift and cleaned up for PG consumption, their sexuality muted and sugarcoated. Most Inanna scholars avert their eyes from her hungry vulva and phallus kissing. In one feminist re-vision of the Lilith story, Lilith washes her hands of sex altogether after she leaves Adam and bonds platonically with other women.
The mythic seductresses not only give our egos a shot in the arm; they purge feminism of this puritanical legacy. They were queens of raunch, vulva-proud divinities who reveled in their hypersexuality and ran with it. Cosmic reminders of women’s sexual supremacy, they took charge, reaped the fruits of their anatomy, and put the male population at their mercy.
Feminist critic Mary Ann Doane argues that “everyone wants to be elsewhere than in the female position.” It depends on how you see it. If we look at sex goddesses through the ages, they show us another position for women: on top, studs at our feet, aglow with superior personhood, total empowerment, erotic allure, and postcoital bliss. As the hapless singleton in the pop British novel
Dear Goddess
discovers, “It was time to reclaim my pedestal, bring it down from the attic, polish it up, and clamber back on.”