Paul Carus

“ We ourselves believe that modern man will come to the conclusion that in this image in its present shape we have a noble martyr of ancient paganism. Even the original statue itself in all its perfection, if it could be restored to us as it came fresh from the artist’s workshop, could not replace the torso as we know it now.
This is the reason why we do not take a great interest in the various restorations of the Venus of Milo, and therefore are not inclined to undertake a close study of them or to enter into an elaborate recapitulation of these otherwise quite laudable attempts. ”

“ He said: ‘Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.’ He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair ”

“ After all, the wife of homo alalus, of the primitive speechless man, is still the same Eve. There is the same sacrifice of motherlove, the same determination of bringing to life the man of the future, the higher, better, nobler man, whose life will be much more worth living than was her own.
This is the secret of life, that we live not for ourselves but for others. If mankind were one great immortal being, how monotonous life would be; how egotistical would all our aspirations become!{144} But nature renders all egotism futile. ”

“ THE DESCENT INTO HADES. AS the goddess of love Venus is the restorer of life, and as such she descends into the underworld and brings the dead back to life. Lewis Richard Farnell in his Cults of the Greek States [16] reproduces a remarkable votive tablet which shows Hermes the soul-dispatcher (psychopompos) confronting a woman holding in her outstretched hand a pomegranate blossom (the symbol of both the chthonian Aphrodite and Persephone) and Eros, the god of love, on her arm. The obvious meaning of the tablet indicates that it is love which redeems from death. ”

“ Once there was a time when there were neither men nor women, but the universe existed alone. And then one day, when the Creator was meditating with a view to further creation, he said to himself: ‘Something is wanting to complete the creation which I have created. It is blind, and unconscious of its own curious beauty and excellence.’ Thereupon he created a man. And instantly the creation became an object of wonder and beauty, being reflected like a picture in the mirror of the mind of the man. ”

“ The temples of Aphrodite lie in ruins, and her worship is abandoned; but the ideal of womanhood which she represented has remained to this day, and will remain so long as mankind will continue to exist on earth. The artist of the statue of Milo has left us an unsurpassed interpretation of this ideal which even in its mutilated condition is noble and beautiful. At the same time nature does not cease to actualize the type in every living woman that has been born into the world. ”

“ He assumes that the goddess, when in the act of undressing for a bath, finds herself surprised by an intruder. There is no fear or alarm in her attitude, but she raises her hand in protest with a self-poised assurance and grasps with her right hand the falling garment which she attempts to support by a hurried motion of her left knee. We regret that we have not seen either a picture or a statue of this restoration, but we are deeply impressed that this idea is most probably correct. ”

“ I am, and I am not.’ Then said the Creator: ‘Thou foolish intermediate creature, thou art a nonentity only when thou standest alone. But when thou art united to the man, thou art real in participation with his substance.’ And thus, O Brahman, apart from her husband a woman is a nonentity and a shadow without a substance: being nothing but the mirror of himself, reflected on the mirror of illusion. ”

“ For the attitude of the statue plainly indicates that the goddess endeavors to retard the falling garment so as to give the right arm a moment’s time to grasp it and to hold it up. It is more than merely probable that the left arm was raised toward an unexpected intruder in warning not to approach. There is no fear in the expression of the face, no fright, no anticipation of danger. ”

“ We can scarcely be mistaken if we interpret this little figurine as an amulet denoting the goddess whose emblem is the dove. Whether the figure represent the goddess herself with her emblematic bird or whether it be the portrait of a dead person protected by the dove, is of secondary importance. The main truth on which we insist here is that the dove is the emblem of the great goddess to whom people look for salvation in the dark beyond. ”

“ The idea that originally Adam comprised in himself the nature of Eve as well is suggested by the story that Eve was taken out of the side of Adam and was formed from one of his ribs.
Obviously the idea expressed here in this passage of Genesis is ultimately the same as that of the Greek poet Aristophanes, and from the standpoint of modern physiology neither man nor woman is an individual, but the combination of two, viz., the father and mother. Each one of them, man alone or woman alone, is but a one-sided half of human existence. Each, by itself alone, is doomed to die ”

“ Freya’s day, Friday, is easily recognizable as the Latin dies Veneris or vendredi, and it is peculiar that on that very day Christian custom still retains the fish diet of the ancient Astarte. The motive of course is changed, and the fish is no longer thought of as the emblem of Astarte but is eaten in remembrance of the death of Christ on the cross. Fish has become the diet of fasting. ”

“ In time, with the advance of art, the figures of Adam and Eve come more and more to assume the artistic appearance of natural beauty. Adam and Eve represent mankind in its primitive state, devoid of spirituality but perfect in health and vigor. It is noteworthy that Christian art portrays in them paganism in its rudeness and ignorance, and so they acquire a certain relationship to Greek antiquity.
In the Renaissance we reach a perfection in the figures of Adam and Eve which attains the ideal of classical beauty. ”

“ None of us finds an abiding home here on earth; we pass away and new generations fill the places we leave vacant.
Daily the world grows older, and yet it remains ever young. There is the same happiness, the same bliss and joy that ever thrilled the heart of a mother. Christianity has abolished Venus, the great mother goddess, but Eve has taken her place; and if Eve too is to be deposed, mankind will still cling to the old idea of eternal womanhood, the patron of love and loveliness, of wifehood and of motherhood.{145}
APHRODITE IN ART. ”

“ There is a counterpart of the western Magna Dea in eastern Asia, but we no longer know it in its primitive form and have it only as it is represented in art in the shape of a Buddhist deity, a kind of female Buddha, called in China Kwan-Yon and in Japan, Benten. Here again in some cases we find that the fish is her symbol as it is that of the Syrian goddess, and she frequently presents a remarkable similarity to the Christian Virgin Mary. She is never pictured naked like the Greek Aphrodite but is always dressed in the most scrupulously decent fashion. ”

“ The round form of the nimbus is later still and seems to have arisen with the development of the art of painting. The apple of empire was not used in the days of antiquity but appears frequently in Constantinople and in early Christian symbolism.
Without entering into details we leave it to the taste of the reader whether he would select any of these restorations as a possible solution of the problem: we prefer to admire the statue as it appears now; for after all the broken figure still remains dearer to us in its wonderful and appealing beauty than any of the restorations. ”

“ The consensus of art admirers, which is almost, though not quite, universal, sees in this marble the great mother-goddess, das ewig Weibliche, idealized femininity, the goddess of beauty and love, whom the Greeks called Aphrodite and the Romans Venus.{23}
THE VENUS OF MILO.
{24}
The goddess (if we may so call her) stands before us erect in queenly dignity. Her dress is falling down leaving the upper body entirely uncovered, and yet in spite of the nudity of the figure we are struck with its unparalleled purity and nobility of expression.
The statue has suffered many injuries. ”

“ The pagan remnant was small and kept quiet for fear of persecution, but we may very well imagine how they lived in the hope that paganism would celebrate a revival, that the storms of these barbarous outbursts would pass by and the temples of the gods would be restored in all their ancient glory. ”

“ In India the goddess of beauty was revered under the name of Lakshmi, and we need not doubt that she still finds worshipers among the Hindu population of to-day, but there are no statues left of the age of ancient Brahmanism. All monuments are of comparatively late origin; in fact the large mass of Hindu idols is quite modern, although it represents art and religious notions of a typically primitive character. ”

“ This conception of the great goddess found a fit expression in the myth of Demeter’s daughter Persephone (called in Latin “Proserpina”) who, after being snatched away by Pluto, the ruler of Hades, is allowed to return to earth. So life on earth with its bloom of vegetation dies off each winter but returns annually in the spring.
This idea became a symbol of human immortality in the Eleusinian mysteries, presumably derived{84} from older sources which go back to religious cults in Babylonia and Asia Minor, and the Christian doctrine is apparently derived from the same tradition. ”

“ The island of Milo was too small a place to have a temple that could afford a statue of such extraordinary value, and we must assume that it was carried thither on a ship. Athens is the only place that we can think of which might have been its original home.
The early centuries of the Christian era were troublesome times. Lawlessness prevailed and a general decadence had set in, which was due to the many civil wars in both Greece and Italy. The establishment of the Roman empire checked the progress of degeneration but only in external appearance. ”

“ He led out the Anunnaki and placed them upon the golden throne,
“He sprinkled upon Goddess Istar the waters of life and led her away:
Through the first door he led her and replaced the robe upon her body; 40. ”

“ Another emblem of the goddess of womanhood is the fish, as is fully described in Lucian’s most interesting treatise “On the Syrian Goddess.” In Egypt Isis has been represented with a fish surmounting her head as an emblematic ornament.
In some parts of Greece the hare or rabbit has also been sacred to Aphrodite, unquestionably on account of the fertility of that animal. Even to-day in Christian times the Easter hare and the egg are the symbols of spring, and the Easter festival cannot be celebrated without them. ”

“ In contrast to the sickly and poverty-stricken appearance of the human couple the good Lord is dressed in gold, like a wealthy nobleman of the age, and the scene is shown to be in Paradise by the trees too being overlaid with gold. ”

“ Freya transported the chosen slain to Folkvang, where they were duly entertained, and where she also welcomed all pure maidens and faithful wives, that they might enjoy the company of their lovers and husbands even after death. The joys of her abode were so enticing to the heroic northern women that they often rushed into battle when their loved ones were slain, hoping to meet with the same fate ”

“ Wherever we meet with original expressions of the pagan faith we find deep reverence and childlike piety. In many respects the worship of Istar in Babylonia and Astarte in Phenicia, of Isis in Egypt,{56} of Athene, Aphrodite and Hera in Greece, of the Roman Juno, and Venus, the special protectress of the imperial family, was noble in all main features, and did not differ greatly from the cult of the Virgin Mary during the Middle Ages. ”

“ The sculptor is either not known at all or, if the pedestal bearing the name of Agesandros or Alexandros actually belonged to the statue, he was a man unknown to fame, and it seems difficult to point out the reasons which give to this most badly wrecked piece of marble its peculiar charm.
We cannot help thinking that the artist worked after a living model and followed details pretty faithfully. It has been noticed for instance that the feet of the Venus are larger than those of the average woman of to-day and the head is unusually small. ”

“ A line in the hair of the statue shows holes which prove plainly that on top of the head there must have been a coronet like that commonly worn by Greek goddesses and called by the Greeks σφενδόνη, “sling,” because with the strings attached it resembles a sling. It was worn especially by the Queen of Heaven, Hera (the Juno of the Roman pantheon) .
Since the arms have been broken off and lost, the artist’s conception with regard to the posture can only be surmised. The face is calm and without passion. ”

“ These statues of Aphrodite in the Vatican and most others produced in the latter portion of the classical period of Greek art are entirely nude, but with the exception of the very latest ones we must grant that they are endowed with divine dignity. An improper feature enters only when nudity betrays either an intentional display, with a pretense of prudery, or an obvious purpose to excite sensuality. Originally these features are foreign to the Greek goddess and develop only with the decay of Hellenic civilization. ”