Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

RELIGION AND EROTIC

fulfilment of religious desire is for the great part displaced sexuality, in single instances also conscious. The Catholic church reckons with this fact, and this in great part is the explanation of its unexampled success. Think of auricular confession !

Erotic conceptions meet us already in the manifold stories of the beginnings of the world. According to the opinion of Hesiod (Theogony, 116 ff.), not one God created the earth, but after Chaos, the infinite, empty, yawning space, arose the broad-breasted earth and Eros, “ the most beautiful of all immortals, who governs the mind and thoughtful counsel of all gods and men.” But already love, that divine natural law of Becoming, which separates male and female, rouses himself to bring them together again and couple them, and therefrom by coupling and procreation to cause one generation to arise after another.

The Greeks called the sky Uranus, understanding by the name the generative power of the sky which penetrates the earth with warmth and moisture, and through which the earth brings forth every living thing. In the Danaides of 7Eschylus (frag. 44 (Nauck?) in Ath., xiii, 600b) we read: “ The pure sky desires to penetrate the earth, and love seizes the earth and longs for union with it; the rain falling from the fair-flowing sky fructifies the earth, which bears for mortals fodder for flocks and the sustenance of Demeter.”

The fruit of the embrace of Uranus and Geea are the Titans, whose number is variously given and who represent many kinds of phenomena of sky, earth, and sea. Further, the three Cyclopes (not to be confused with those in Homer), representatives of mighty powers of nature, and also the Hekatoncheires, hundred-armed giants. Cyclopes and Hekatoncheires gradually become too powerful for their own father, and now Greek fancy thinks of a truly grandiose myth. The father thrusts the monsters into the bosom of the earth.

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