 NFINITELY GRACIOUS, radiantly beautiful, Aphrodite rose from the foam. All life loved and laughed, and begot new life in tender play.
"Alma Venus Genetrix!" the poet sang.
Love became lust, laughter scorn, life a combat. Groves gave way to market places; paths worn by tranquil herds became hard-surfaced streets resounding to the clash of iron-shod hoofs and rattling chariot wheels.
"Venus of the Crossways," sighed a realist.
Love stood on the corner and simpered and bartered. In secret places merchants offered new combinations and re-combinations to temp the cynical, cloyed with sophistication.
"Sin!" screamed the prophet. "Ye shall suffer and castigate."
The saint writhed under the lash and yearned for purity. A black cloud rose up out of hell, a tornado of maddened bodies dancing obscenely in the Witches' Sabbat to do ribald honor to the Venus of Tannhauser.
Saint and witch were methodically suppressed by a sour and sober fold. "Duty," They said, as they hanged the witch, burned the saint, and put aprons on antique statues. This last they did because they could tolerate no reminders of Eden times when life love, laughter, and play were gentleness.
The aprons slipped. The fervor of saintliness and the fury of lust infernal had long been quenched. Now sobriety relaxed, sourness sought alkalinity.
A streamlined era (unable to impose a mechanical pattern of clarity on complex confusion), aware of all that has been, profoundly troubled by its urges yet bluffing a mastery over them, has created a deity in its own image.
She is an irreverent enchantress. An uncanny wisdom, of the world and the other worlds, lurks in her bizarrerie.
Hers is the realm where all things touch, and, touching, engender. Her magic joins neither like to like, nor opposite to opposite. Under her spell the subtly inter-related incestuously inter-create the ever unexpected inevitable.
She is Nova Venus
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