EROS: nota bene

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:08 AM, Peter of Lone Tree wrote:
"He is the god of love, EROS:"

Lest we fergit, the anagram is "sore."


Peter of Loin Tree

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Oh my aching back and knees.... Point is, funny man, Hesiod. Eros is more than erotic sex. Eros is metaphor for Desire, sure, which implicates Libido. But to grasp the real meaning, let go of Freud, his hangups, and embrace Jung. Libido is life force, life force beyond mere (magical, stuffing souls in clay!) procreation. Libido is living, is Life: the body and all its necessary equilibriums, homeostasis, gradients; spirit beyond meh, blah: passion: the passion to do anything. Their unity, spirit and matter (of which Christ is the sublime -- and but one of many -- metaphor). Thus (stay on target) Eros is as Hesiod frames him: movement itself, the force that moves all. Read again with these new eyes.
Naquarius. Sex is but life's sacrament, the cherry on top. Or bottom. The thing is -- Dance. No better religion than life.

He is the god of love, EROS:

We read much about Rossetti, the Aesthetes and their eroticism. Let's go to the source.

You know how the body, nature, physics works in our experiential world: Gradients. There has to be an energy imbalance to make things flow, to do "work". And flow -- change -- is the nature of being in the sphere of time, essential to the magic of life. This understanding frames my thinking, as it did with Jung's, applied not just to the material world, but to the psyche, personal and collective. But that creator of gradients, that potential for movement, change, chaos, creation: Eros is the personification of that cosmic force.

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He is bold and forward and strenuous, always devising tricks like a cunning huntsman; he yearns after knowledge and is full of resource and is a lover of wisdom all his life, a skillful magician, an alchemist, a true sophist.... but on one and the same day he will live and flourish, and also meet his death; and then come to life again through the force of his father's nature." ~Plato, Symposium

"... the Love-god, golden-haired, stretches his charmed bow with twin arrows, and one is aimed at happiness, the other at life's confusion." ~Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis 549

The idealizations which Eros tends always to constellate can be counterbalanced: creativity expresses itself also as destruction. Love's torture may not always lead to the happy ending of our tale. The idealizations may further be weighted by recalling the connections in Hesiod, the Orphics, and renaissance Neoplatonism between eros and chaos.
Eros is born of Chaos, implying that out of every chaotic moment the creativity of which we have been speaking can be born. Further more, Eros will always hearken back to its origins in chaos and will seek it for revivification. ... Eros will attempt again and again to create those dark nights and confusions which are its nests. It renews itself in affective attacks, jealousies, fulminations, and turmoils. It thrives close to the dragon." --James Hillman (Love's Torturous Enchantment, A BLUE FIRE)

Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so . . . . He belongs on one side to man's primordial animal nature which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he thrives only when spirit and instinct are in right harmony. ~CGJung CW 7.

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Right Harmony. That pair so important in ancient music and extrapolated into all the arts onward: the eternal, orderly and unified Apollo and the diverse and unpredictable Dionysos. The latter had the ability to make the head spin, to overwhelm, to make mad, so that one did not drink wine alone, but in a group, and only one person drinking from the vessel at a time. The idea of the fire and the moving flame, then, is reflected in the pair. And Eros is the movement, the stirring.

There is simply no abiding, no sitting still, no resolution of opposites in the field of time, especially for the force, the energy, that moves it (not to mention the sun and all the stars). This ambivalence, this two-faced nature, both creative/destructive has been intuited and personified in metaphor as far back as we can remember... And later, as the mythology morphs and mutates, we find Venus wed to Hephaestus--Venus, variously mother or sister of Eros; Eros, shooter of arrows, mover of stars, and Love itself--the ultimate fascination:

[Latin fascin³re, fascin³t-, to cast a spell on, from fascinum, an evil spell, a phallic-shaped amulet.]

In these same early myths, that creative fire inside the earth, that union of opposite forces, made and projected the stars that make our very bodies. (Fascinating, the way we've always known this.) The source of starlight was Hades, that place of paradox and inversion. Originally, daemons were messengers, inter-mediators between man and deity; time and eternity.

The Greek poet Hesiod tells us Eros is born of Chaos at the same time as Earth and the Tartarus. He's the comrade of Aphrodite from the moment of her birth. And he's not merely the god of sensual love. He's much more:

Eros is the power that forms the world by the inner union of the separated elements...

Throughout Plato's Symposium, speakers relate mythical accounts of Eros. There are two opposing mythologies of the origin of Eros. The opening speaker, Phaedrus (light-bringer), the “Father of Logic," introduces Eros as the first god according to the story in Hesiod. In this view, Earth and Eros are born of the whirling (“dynos”) chaos. Eros is not a personification, but a cosmological force or ordering principle (“kosmos” meaning “order”). It is as though in Hesiod’s account, matter and order are born of Chaos, are the inchoate elements of the universe in which all life originates. According to this view, Eros is a primordial cosmological mechanism.
The account of Eros as the youngest god depicted in traditional Greek mythology appears in Pausanius’ speech. Pausanius, reputed for little other than being Agathon’s lover, presents the famous dichotomy between Uranian love and Pandemic love. Pausanius shares the view that Eros is the youngest god, son of Aphrodite. There are differing accounts, however, of the nature of Aphrodite’s birth corresponding to the two different types of love: Uranian (heavenly) and Pandemic (earthly). According to the Uranian account, Aphrodite is born of the castration of Uranus. In contrast, Pandemic love derives from the view of Aphrodite as the child of Zeus and a mortal. It is here that the system of romantic relationships between an older man and a younger man, lover and beloved, is described. Ideally, says Pausanius, this relationship is to represent Uranian (heavenly) love in that the older man, or lover, is a teacher and mentor to the youth (beloved), as opposed to the older man lasciviously desiring the youth only to leave him once his beauty fades. The Uranian lover is a lifelong friend to his beloved, remaining dedicated to him after the flower of youth.
It is one of the oft-mentioned facts of the Symposium that Socrates’ speech is, oddly enough, an account of love that he received from a woman. This woman, Diotima the Delphic Priestess of Mantinea, gives an original mythical description of Eros and his parentage. In contrast to the views of Eros as both the oldest and youngest god, according to Diotima, Eros is the child of Resource (Poros) and Poverty (Penia). Because Eros’ mother is destitute, she sleeps with Resource and conceives Eros on the night of Aphrodite’s feast day. The result is an offspring who is ever in search of objects but unable to maintain them. Like his mother, Eros is ever craving, restless and desirous, yet he possesses the charms and know-how of his father. Because of his relentless conniving to possess what he does not have and his inability to maintain it, Eros is said to be a daimon. Daimon, in the Greek, means something like an intermediary or spirit, a messenger between gods and humankind.
In this exposition, Diotima also establishes that Eros is like a philosopher because he constantly seeks to find what he lacks. One cannot desire what one already possesses. If one already possesses something, one cannot desire it in itself, though one may desire the maintenance of this possession. A philosopher desires wisdom because he recognizes that he lacks it. The gods, on the other hand, do not seek wisdom as they already possess it. It is also established that though humans do not possess immortality, humankind seeks to possess deathlessness. There is a drive within humanity for different types of immortality. Procreation is a type of yearning for bodily immortality, but as it is limited to the body, it is the lowest sort of love. The highest type of love is that which, inspired by beauty, ascends to a vision of the Forms.
Socrates’ account of love is as a spirit guiding one, through the experience of Beauty, to a vision of the Idea of the Good, or the Form of all Forms, the origin of all that exists in the universe.
~EMC, The Platonic Eros

Thumos

Under the arch of Life, where love and death,
Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw
Beauty enthroned; and though her gaze struck awe,
I drew it in as simply as my breath.
Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath,
The sky and sea bend on thee,— which can draw,
By sea or sky or woman, to one law,
The allotted bondman of her palm and wreath.
This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise
Thy voice and hand shake still,— long known to thee
By flying hair and fluttering hem,— the beat
Following her daily of thy heart and feet,
How passionately and irretrievably,
In what fond flight, how many ways and days!

Soul's Beauty by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The House of Life. 1881

"There was also a famous Orphic poem, written by a Pythagorean in southern Italy. Hardly any traces of it have been allowed to survive. It presented Orpheus making his journey to the underworld in another state of consciousness, in a kind of dream. And the poem described him as making one major discovery that he brought back to the world of the living. This was the fact that Apollo shares his powers with Night."

~Peter Kingsley

THE MARES that carry me as far as longing can reach
rode on, once they had come and fetched me onto the legendary
road of the divinity that carries the man who knows
through the vast and dark unknown. And on I was carried
as the mares, aware just where to go, kept carrying me
straining at the chariot; and the young woman led the way.
And the axle in the hubs let out the sound of a pipe
blazing from the pressure of the two well-rounded wheels
at either side, as they rapidly led on: young women, girls,
daughters of the Sun who had left the mansions of Night
for the light and pushed back the veils from their faces
with their hands.

These are the gates of the pathways of Night and Day,
held fast in place between the lintel above and a threshold of stone;
and they reach up into the heavens, filled with gigantic doors.
And the keys — that now open, now lock — are held fast by
Justice: she who always demands exact returns. And with
soft seductive words the girls cunningly persuaded her to
push back immediately, just for them, the bar that bolts
the gates. And as the doors flew open, making the bronze
axles with their pegs and nails spin — now one, now the other —
in their pipes, they created a gaping chasm. Straight through and
on the girls held fast their course for the chariot and horses,
straight down the road.

And the goddess welcomed me kindly, and took
my right hand in hers and spoke these words as she addressed me:
'Welcome young man, partnered by immortal charioteers,
reaching our home with the mares that carry you. For it was
no hard fate that sent you travelling this road — so far away
from the beaten track of humans — but Rightness, and Justice.
And what's needed is for you to learn all things: both the unshaken
heart of persuasive Truth and the opinions of mortals,
in which there's nothing that can truthfully be trusted at all.
But even so, this too you will learn — how beliefs based on
appearance ought to be believable as they travel all through
all there is. *

~Parmeneides Translation from Peter Kingsley,

love and death

Eros, mediator of the Forms and their creations, is of Eternity, timeless time, and its material dependent, time itself. As for death, we find a connecting metaphor as Eros was used in the Anthesteria...

When the divine fields of motley flowers
Into the shady grove receive with open arms
The Bacchic dances performed by tender virgins...

The divine fields, the shores of Okeanos where Persephone was picking flowers... you can extrapolate the Bacchic Anthesteria festival and its mystery-wedding from this:

A happy and unique find is a krater in the Naples Museum, because the painting is clarified by an inscription. A winged youth throws a colorful embroidered ball to a hesitant woman. Looking outward but at the same time inward, she is resting one hand on a stele which bears the inscription. This stele is a horos, a boundary stone, and here it probably marks the boundary of the hesitant woman's home country, which she, wearing no ornament and lightly clad, must now leave. She does not reach for the ball, but looks with her shadow of a sly smile at the messenger who has thrown it to her. She will go. On the other side stands a woman with a grave expectant face, holding out to her a mirror and a tainia, a festive ribbon. The woman who thus hesitates is not a hetaira; she is a bride-to-be, but one who already knows. She would prefer not to travel this road.

Who the winged youth is and what the ball means we are told in a well-known poem by Anakreon:

Eros with the golden curls
Throws me the purple ball
And calls me to play with
The girl with the bright colored sandals.

It is Eros--golden curled in Anakreon, here dark-haired--who summons the girl to the game of love with the ball. The ball is an erotic message. Whence and wither? Eros is only the intermediary. What the hesitant woman thinks we are told on the inscription on the boundary stone: "They have thrown me the ball" --"they" in the plural, not any definite individual, even if the bridegroom is waiting in the background. The plural does not befit the language of ancient erotic poetry, but it does that of sepulchral epigrams: "The goddess of fate . . . led me down to Hades." Ordinarily they sent a messenger to act as guide, in this case, Eros. Often it was Hermes, the guide of souls. The woman to whom the daimon of love has been sent as messenger and guide hesitates to accept death fully, though it has already taken possession of her. She is unwilling, but she goes nevertheless to the great erotic adventure. For such was death in the atmosphere of the Anthesteria. Eros with the ball is an aspect of death. ~from The Greek Dionysian Religion of Late Antiquity in Kerenyi's DIONYSOS 365-367)

"...It is not man as such who has to be regenerated or born again as a renewed whole, but, according to the statements of mythology, it is the hero or god who rejuvenates himself. These figures are generally expressed or characterized by libido-symbols (light, fire, sun, etc.), so that it looks as if they represented psychic energy. They are, in fact, personifications of the libido.
Now it is a fact amply confirmed by psychiatric experience that all parts of the psyche, inasmuch as they possess a certain autonomy, exhibit a personal character, like the split-off products of hysteria and schizophrenia, mediumistic 'spirits'; figures seen in dreams, etc. Every split-off portion of libido, every complex, has or is a (fragmentary) personality. At any rate, that is how it looks from the purely observational standpoint.
But when we go into the matter more deeply, we find that they are really archetypal formations. There are no conclusive arguments against the hypothesis that these archetypal figures are endowed with personality at the outset and are not just secondary personalizations. In so far as the archetypes do not represent mere functional relationships, they manifest themselves as daimones, as personal agencies. In this form they are felt as actual experiences and are not "figments of the imagination," as rationalism would have us believe. Consequently, man derives his human personality only secondarily from what the myths call his descent from the gods and heroes; or, to put it in psychological terms, his consciousness of himself as a personality derives primarily from the influence of quasi-personal archetypes.
Numerous mythological proofs could be advanced in support of this view. .... It is, then, in the first place the god who transforms himself, and only through him does man take part in the transformation. ..." ~CGJUNG, in CW5, SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION