Good Selfishness

I have been doing some thinking about this, and yes, selfishness, my own included, is a bad thing. I hadn’t quite expected this to be what I was thinking of while working on my connection to Aphrodite, but these things come as they come, not as I want them to. Selfishness is bad because it forces us, with our consent, to ignore the needs of others. It is not a good thing to have yourself as the sole reason for being, the sole reason for everyone else to be.

But, and I suppose this is where Aphrodite comes in, selfishness is a byproduct of self love? What is self esteem requires us to be selfish and that we must then force ourselves, as thinking beings, to also include love of others to temper that selfishness? And what if most people simply don’t do that?

Of course, there are some relationships in which we are selfless instinctively. We are selfless with our children, most of the time. We are slefless with our parents, some of the time, and we try to be selfless with our mates, some of the time. But if we ask ourselves, if we truly explore our motivations for the things we do, do we not more often than not come up with a selfish answer? Do we do good for others because it makes us feel good? Is that selfish? If so, so what?

You see, sometimes selfishness can cause us to do good things for other people. Sometimes a desire to feel good can lead us to making others feel good as well, and that crosses many lines in our lives, from giving to charity and donating our time to dating and making love. Sometimes making others feel good, be it in the soup kitchen or in the bedroom, makes us feel good too, and as a result it can be selfishness made manifest for the good.

I suppose it is cynical to look at a considerate lover or a nun giving her time to maintain a homeless shelter as selfish, because they are often motivated by more than just selfishness, but there is that element in all the things we do, and sometimes we have to let a little selfishness in. We have to think of ourselves and not everyone around us, because if we concentrate all our efforts on what others need, we will be sucked dry, physically and spiritually, and if we are to ever do anyone any good in the future, we must make sure we are around and willing to help in the future by taking care of ourselves today.

So, go out and do something that makes you feel good, it’s OK, just remember to temper it so that it is also making others feel good, and you will see how sometimes small acts of kindness, even done to make you feel good, can have a much greater impact on the world than you think.

More on Selfishness

So, as I said before, my friends are self centered, self obsessed, and only ever want to do things they want to do.

Wah!!!

Right?

It isn’t that I am internally bitter about this. I am a loner, for the most part, and if people don’t want to do things, I just go off and do them on my own. I don’t have an issue going to a movie alone, in fact, I sometimes prefer it since it means no one is talking while I’m trying to watch. I don’t have an issue going to a restaurant alone, or to a bar, but sometimes you really just want to be among other people. Not strangers in a bar, but people you can talk to.

Still, it does reflect badly on me, I think, that I give even this much thought to why people aren’t servicing my needs. Why do we do that as people? Why do we expect others to be there to help us? Even when we are more or less available to others, we should not necessarily expect the same from others, should we?

So, I thought I would give that some thought and I am sitting here asking Aphrodite to give me a clue, an answer, a hint. All I get are images of Eros, of the Erotes, of the divine goddess surrounded by her attendants. It is, I suppose, an answer of sorts. Eros, the primordial, is a God that brings things together. Gravity, if you will, and in many ways, he falls under the domain of Aphrodite in the emotional levels, while he is sovereign in his own domain. Aphrodite and her angelic aspects, the Erotes, the Horai, etc. are like a lovely family that must work together to be effective.

We seek others because it is our nature, but we expect from others because we expect reciprocity. that too is apparently our nature. The good and the bad, the selfishness and the selflessness intwined forever.

I got that from an image of Aphrodite surrounded by the Erotes?

Sure. The Erotes, the little angelic aspects of Love, are odd little critters in the mythos. They can inspire love or revulsion, obsession or repugnance, love or hate, and together the opposing aspects of divine emotion are made manifest in us. We feel all of these things, sometimes simultaneously, and we feel that just as we give, so must we receive. Two opposing aspects of the same thing. A sense of reciprocity.

Selfishness

So, in my last post I asked, prompted by an orgy, of all things, if perhaps I am a selfish man. It is a fair question. One that we must all ask ourselves often enough that we don’t allow ourselves to fall into bad behaviors.

What do I mean by selfish?

I mean that I think of me, and essentially only me, in my dealings with other people. Sexually, politically, personally.

The answer is a resounding yes, and no.

First, the yes.

I am selfish because I have to admit to myself that in most dealings, I tend to consider how something affects me before I ever consider how it might affect other people. It isn’t that I never consider others, but that I always come first.

But the no surprised me, because I also tend to blame myself for a great many things that, as I put some thought to it, were not really my fault. I blamed myself for my dealings with certain people in my life and called myself selfish in the process, but as I gave this all thought, and Aphrodite helped me figure this out, it turns out I was reacting to the things others do to me.

The people I associate with are selfish. In fact, they are tremendously self centered, and it has caused me to react in ways that have been detrimental to me. An example of this is the fact that they only turn to me to do things THEY want to do, while my requests to do things that I want to do go rejected. So as a reaction I have essentially made myself as self centered as they are, and I generally now reject things if I am not personally interested in them myself.

In other words, I have a lot of ass hole friends to whom I am just companionship when all else fails them.

But, my own selfishness in this is in both blaming myself for their behavior and in reacting to it in a selfish manner. If their behavior bothers me, I should remove them from my life, not act as an ass hole in return.

Instead, I have made the arrogant move of selfishly planning things to make myself feel good and including them only as an afterthought, and so, do they now react in return? Of course they do.

Anyway, I have to explore this selfishness further as I think about it in situations of emotion, love, sex, etc.

Taking a moment...

Stumbling along, as I usually do in my life as I usually do I often stumble upon the little messages that the Gods leave behind for me to find, like breadcrumbs in a forest. This week, it was actually a fairly blatant one, and I think it was Aphrodite herself who did it.

I was invited to a party, and by party I mean a bunch of men who get together, get naked, and do the nasty. An orgy, and as I usually do, i try to go to these things because I do enjoy these things. But I found myself titillated yet not necessarily turned on. none of it seemed to really get my juices flowing, and in the end, I left, not bothered, but not satisfied either.

I usually have a reasonably good time at these things, Even if i don't necessarily engage anyone in sex, because the very visceral experience of witnessing it is usually more than enough to give me a thrill.

But something was bothering me. Something was making me feel ill at ease, and so, except with some minor engagement with a friend, I remained aloof, and others remained aloof from me. The entire thing, now that i think about it, had an almost dark feeling to it.

Of course, part of it may be my own reluctance to engage too many people in friendly banter. I find myself ill at ease with idle chit chat, i don't know why that is, but I often find myself at a lack for words when the chat is supposed to be light and fluffy. Yes, that's right, me, ME, speechless.

But something else that bothered me was the total lack of concern for anyone else that so many, including the friend I engaged with, have for the people they have sex with. I am not talking about matters of health here, we all have to take responsibility for our own protection, i am talking about the actual sex act. The actual desire to not just blow your load, but help the ma n who just helped you do the same.

I'm talking about sexual selfishness.

Now, i admit, an orgy is not the place where one should expect thoughtful consideration and total sexual satisfaction from a partner, and I didn't and do not fault any of these guys for any of this, but rather, I have to look at it as a kind of sign, and as such, I have to look inside myself and ask myself, how selfish am I in the act of love making? How selfish am I in the playful sex that is not love making? How selfish am I in general?

Not necessarily a question I can easily answer today, but tomorrow, I hope to have meditated on it enough to do so. I just hope it is an answer I am comfortable with.

Hmmm

Should I have done that?

Before I get into it today, I want to make it clear that this is not going to be me feeling bad about having sex. I, quite frankly, don’t understand the American penchant for disgust in anything sexual. It is part of the Puritanical tradition of the U.S.A. that things sexual are so shameful. That the same conservative elements in our society that are screaming about how good torture is also have a heart attack at the idea of the word Penis being said in public. I just don’t get it.

This is about me trying to explore the motivations behind some of the things I have done in my life in the domain of Aphrodite and why some of those things have been bad decisions, and why some of them have lead me to further explore my own feelings and how they affect the way I treat people with whom I have sexual relations.

First, I am a man. I make no apologies for the inherently sexual nature of my being. I make no apologies for being horny or having sexual thoughts or dreams of an erotic nature. It is perfectly natural.

Second, I identify almost exclusively as gay, and I make no apologies for that either. Not to man or god. I like the male gender, I long for it, I lust for it, and I long for the love between men that is such a basic foundation of who I am as a human being.

Third, I am a strong believer in sexual freedom. There are restraints, of course, all things must be handled with both body and mind, and we must all be willing to take responsibility for our health. But I am also not a paranoid person, at least not when it comes to my health. I am not going to become a neurotic mess worried about every little germ when the truth is that it is impossible to avoid disease 100% of the time. Common sense must, however, be applied in all things, and when the Apollonian saying “Nothing to excess” comes to mind, I try to apply it in my life to all things, except maybe food, and I am working on that one.

So, what is it that I have done in my life, with relation to Aphrodite, that I have regrets about?

Nothing, really. I don’t regret having met, loved, or fucked anyone, not in the sense that I wish I had never met them, rather I feel that there have been situations that I seriously wish I had handled differently, or perhaps gotten into with more of my head leading the way.

I have been in several relationships. In the last ten years I have had two serious ones, and one which almost got off the ground but somehow fizzled, and before that I have, as I mentioned before, fallen in love a few times. The falling in love has never been an issue for me. If it happens, I welcome it and am willing to enjoy it, but I have a hard time dealing with people in many ways. I am a somewhat stubborn man, OK, way stubborn sometimes, and I am too often unwilling to give way in a relationship, which causes a wall to form that can, in time, become too tall to climb over.

With William, there was no wall. With Tony, we always had certain issues between us that caused us to build barriers between us. Some of these were physical, his HIV status demanded it, but some were cultural. I am Puertorican, he was Guatemalan, and I am much more Americanized than he ever was, and often our differences of opinion left us with walls to tear down.

With Steve, our relationship was always a little dysfunctional. We had an open relationship, which is not a problem for me, and he was just a little too immature. I had a hard time dealing with a man who still looked at life too much like a kid. He did not work, did not see his own fault in anything he did, and I eventually had to remove myself from that. The sex was hot, though. HOT.

And, finally, my relationship with Jim. That one was a bit rough because I never quite figured out where I fit in with him. He was in the closet and it became a real issue with me. I am a believer in being me. If people like it, cool, if not, too bad. He could not move in a direction that would take him out of the closet, and I could not move in a direction that would put me in a closet.

So, so far it sounds pretty normal. People have relationships, they succeed or fail on different levels, for different reasons, and I don’t regret any of them.

But then there are the things I do, and have done, while single. I have fucked and been fucked by men, in groups, singly, known there names, haven’t, and in the end it has rendered me, maybe, a little jaded to with whole experience. Sex is a wonderful thing. playful and exciting, it can be as helpful to us as adults as playing is to children, but there are also a lot of times when we use sex as a way to escape things in our lives that trouble us.

After William died, I threw myself into all kinds of sex with all kinds of people who, to be honest, I could never name. I simply never knew their names. But if I am to be perfectly honest, it was not that I was suffering over william, but that I was still very much reacting to being raped. Part of me needed to have sex and feel that it was me who was in control, me who was using them, me who was seeking it out and doing it. It never occurred to me that in doing so I was allowing myself to be used. When raped, it was forced upon me. He took me and used me, and I had no choice, and now I was allowing myself to be used. While I don’t regret the sex, I do wish I had taken the time to think about why I was doing it and had come to realize what I was doing to myself. Rather than dealing with my feelings, I was burying them in sex. That is almost always a mistake.

When I moved to Ohio and Steve and I were trying to make a go of it, I should have been more clear with him about what I expected out of the relationship. I gave myself over to the love I felt for him, and the lust, but I did not allow myself the luxury of allowing the mindful part of Aphrodite to look after my heart. I never allowed Ourania in, I simply gave in to Eros and Porne, and was slapped in the face as a return.

And, perhaps, that has always been my failing. I have given myself over to the lust and eroticism that is Aphrodite, but not the higher levels of love, at least not since Tony, and it is causing me to lose sight of a greater reality.

Once things got going

...Of course, once he introduced me to sex properly, in a way that was not dark and forced, I wanted more. Typical guy, gay or not, thinks about sex all the time. It isn’t anything immoral or dirty, it is just the reality of how we men are built. We are built to stud. We are built for sex in so many ways it is sometimes amazing to think we ever had time to do things like conquest, science, and literature. But we managed.

At this point, knowing what I had always felt, and now knowing what it all meant at a physical and emotional level, I knew I was gay. I mean, let’s get something straight, if I had had sex with William and enjoyed it but later realized that it just wasn’t for me and that it was women that I really wanted, I would not be gay. Gay sex itself is not what makes a man gay any more than lesbian sex makes a woman a lesbian. There is simply so much more to it, and even then there is just too much to feel and understand that the sex itself is not even secondary to the equation.

But, I was just a teenager, so to me the sex meant just that, and I was basically right. I was, and continue to, identify as a gay man. I fell in love with William, and I am certain he did with me too. At the very least, I can tell you that he loved me, even if he was not “in love” with me. But I prefer to think he was. But it would not last. William died just a few months later, in a horrible car accident. I did not know he’d died for another three weeks, and was never able to properly say good bye to him until I visited his grave in New Canaan, Connecticut.

I will not bore you with details of every man I ever had sex with, it would be repetitious, but I do want to mention one other man, his name was Tony, and I was then about 25 while he was about 23. We met while he was still about 18 or 19, and he was dating a man who also became a friend of mine, though most recently I would have to think of him more as an adversary than a friend. His constant insistence on pushing his Christianity on people simply bugs me too much for me to call him a friend.

But the two of them eventually broke up, and Tony eventually went his own way, going home to Guatemala and then returning to the US. We met up again and got on with our friendship, and he even lived with me for a short time as he found a place to live of his own. He was beautiful. His face was almost angelic, his hair was perfectly wavy, his body smooth and alluring in the most innocently sexual way you could imagine. By that I mean that he seemed incapable of not being sexy. He didn’t intentionally dress to make your mouth water, he was just naturally that way, and no matter what he wore you just wanted him. Of course, I thought it might just be me, after all, horny 25 year old and hot 23 year old usually equals sexual attraction, but it wasn’t. There were no people who ever saw him who did not comment on his beauty.

The first time we made love it was an astonishing experience. He was just as naturally sexual in the act as he was in appearance, and it felt great. We did it on and off for a while, and I fell for him. But I did not want to push him. When he told me he loved me but did not want to “marry me” yet, I was sad, but I understood it. We were both young, we were both looking for a way to make a life before settling into something as serious as a live-in relationship. That changed when a mutual friend contacted me from the West Coast and asked me to move out there.

Tony thought it was a good idea. That maybe if I moved out there and got settled in that he could join me in a few months and we could sort of start fresh. Start a life together. I thought it seemed odd, but I was ok with the idea.

I have to tell you at this point that there is something else about Tony that was very important. Tony was HIV positive. I knew it, had known it for some time, but he had always been one to take care of himself. Always took his meds, though the meds back then were not the kind of life prolonging meds we have today. We were always careful, and to this day I remain HIV negative.

One day, while in Portland, I got a call from my mother. She informed me that Tony had died at Stamford Hospital and she was sorry she had not found out sooner. His mother had come up from Guatemala and taken him home to be buried. Unlike with William, I would never get to visit his grave and say good bye, as lame as that sounds from someone who does not believe in an afterlife.

I broke.

I had had a previous issue, which I am not going to go into here, but I can tell you that it had changed me. But this broke me. I can’t really explain what I mean by that, I can only say that my ability to connect to other people was severely damaged by this. To this day I have a real problem making friends. I have a real problem relating to people, because once he died, I think part of me did too, and that part was the best part of me. I have never recovered. I have never gotten over his dying like that with me so far away.

But I have come to understand that I still have a lot left in me. And I have come to understand that I need to make the best of what I am today, but along the way I have been just a little crazy.

Next installment? Why I have given myself over to Aphrodite in ways I never should have...

OK, now on with the regularly scheduled program

I have been kinda skirting around an issue here because I have never really gone into anything that is too “adult” here, and by that I mean “adult” in the sense that America seems to think of sex as being adult only, a subject not for discussion, a subject which merits X ratings and censorship while murder and mayhem do not.

That’s right, sex, and if Aphrodite has one aspect that is famous above all others, it is her role as slut, whore, and sexual being. The Goddess Aphrodite is Love, Beauty, Affection, Attraction, and the pure and unadulterated expression of Sex and all that implies. For me, this has meant coming to realizations and learning that deep within we are a great many things when it comes to sex, and which of those things I am, or if even defining it in any way is helpful, to incorporating them into my life in a way that is healthy to my spiritual life.

I will tell you that my, and most people’s, first encounter with sex is mental. It is chit chat with buddies and boisterous babbling of young boys who think they know what they’re talking about. The hormones raged, the talk was cheap, and, to be honest, I had no clue what any of it meant then. I was raised to be rather naive about sex, although my mother was not shy about talking about it, she was not one to make sex a topic of conversation with her 11 year old boy (or the girls that were his younger sisters). So, as with most of us, my first experience with sex was a lot of talk and bullshit from my little friends, none of whom knew anything more than I did. And along with such talk, there is the natural childish explorations, which hardly count as sex, really, but count as part of the whole continuum of activities that build our sexualities.

But, as with most of us again, my second experience with sex was, of course, with my dear friends lefty and righty. Let’s be adult about this, all human beings masturbate. Why we as a society pretend like it is something we need to hide away in closets (don’t get me started on closets) and make of it a sin is beyond me, except we, especially here in America, still can’t seem to deal with the fact that we have animal instincts, instinctive desires and needs, and so our culture has created all these horrid strictures around it all, forcing us to feel shame at the most natural of things.

But, as I made my way into my teens, I ran up against the sex thing in the worst possible ways. I was raped on a beach in Connecticut. I don’t normally talk about this, I have never told my family what happened to me because I feel that it was something I had to deal with on my own, and I have. It was an experience which, while I would hope no one ever has to experience it, did force me to see the negative side of sex. It forced me to see the violence and evil that can be funneled into the sex, and that sex was an act that could be used to hurt as well as pleasure a person.

I won’t dwell on this here, but I do want you to know that there is no sympathy needed for me here, I have long since moved on from this, and in many ways, later in life turned it around and made it not only a learning experience, but one that I feel made me a better person in the end (I can expand on this later if anyone feels they want me to) because I was willing to look at it and not wallow in the pain it caused me.

But, not more than two years later, I was faced with my first true sexual experience. This was not some quickie in the sand, or the horrors of rape, but the long lustful pleasure of love making.

I won’t lie, the relationship was completely inappropriate. But I fell in love with him. After the ordeal on the beach, I guess part of me needed to revisit it, to feel something other than anger and fear. I think part of me longed to understand something about sex that had not yet become apparent, and that was that it was not bad. It was not evil or shameful (or painful if done with my consent) and to that end I went back to those beaches late at night, watching people hang out, talk, make friends, but not able to really join them. I was all of 16 and they were people in their 20s and 30s. But one of these people, a 24 year old man, and a chick I thought might be his girlfriend, sort of pulled me in and made me their pet.

I kept staring at him and her, they seemed to be together, and I kept wondering about him. What did he look like under those clothes? How soft was his skin? What did his tongue taste like? Remember, hormonal but very confused and scared guy here, and if there is one thing a 16 year old boy thinks about constant;y, it’s sex, even if it was sometimes tinged with fear due to his only other experience with it. Add to that gay in the 80s, and there was just so much to feel fear about. I was at a point where I would either break free of that fear or become bound to it forever, and I chose to pursue a path that would lead me away from the fear. As it would turn out, she was not his girlfriend, though the two of them were sexual partners on occasion, and he became the first man to have true sex with me.

It was a beautiful experience, at least from my current perspective. But then it was a scary thing. William was gorgeous. A bit of a Punk type, you remember them from the 80s? And he was something of a free spirit. And he and I spent some time, one fine night, chit chatting about all kinds of bullshit that must have been very boring to him, because at 16, my interests were probably quite different from his, but he listened and made me feel comfortable (I really do not want anyone to write me and tell me he was a pedophile, I was 16, not 10, and we really need to stop infantilizing our young people in this country) and then he gave himself to me.

If that seems like a strange way to put it, it seems so to me too, but it really is the way it happened. He did not push me, he did not make a move, he just sort of made it clear to me that there was nothing he would judge me for, if I chose to do anything. That he would not judge me as bad, or sinful, or evil, for anything I was feeling or desiring. So, when I touched him, and my hand lingered, he did not move away, or question me, or ask me if I was sure. He accepted it and never once made me feel like a child for doing it.

He did not immediately jump out of his clothes and do me, but rather allowed me to guide his choices. When we kissed and touched each other, it was because I wanted to do it, and he was there to be the recipient of my desires. It was, for me, an experience that let me see that this was all very natural, all very kind and pleasing to the senses, and I was a little afraid.

Eventually, however, he understood that I didn’t really know what I was doing. Oh, I knew the mechanics of it, having talked so much about it, fantasized about it, and gotten my hands on plenty of images. But there is such a big difference between the fantasy and the reality, and once he understood where I wanted to go, he took over and showed me the rest of it.

continued...

And while on the subject of affection...

...we lost Bea Arthur today, and here is an actress/comedienne who I grew tremendously affectionate to during the 80s when, as a teenager and in my early twenties, I fell madly in love with The Golden Girls.

Bea Arthur played the tall and down trodden Dorothy, daughter of the hilariously grumpy Sophia, who stole almost every scene she was in. But Dorothy and Sophia together were a team made in heaven, and along with the wonderfully slutty Blanche and the dimwitted yet adorable Rose, made for funny television every Thursday Night (I think it was Thursday)

Affection is something we can throw out there into the world with tons to spare, and characters in TV shows, movies, radio performers, and characters in books are some of the non-entities we actually form affectionate attachments to all the time.

I loved Dorothy because I related to her in so many ways. I was young, but in almost all other ways she and I were alike. She was awkward, and lonely, and she had a mother who more often than not stood in her way with good intentions. I felt for her and at the same time was envious of her because she had a relationship with her father that she remembered with tremendous fondness.

I loved Bea Arthur because she brought the character to life in a way no one else could have, and it made me laugh all the time.

Affection

One of the many parts of our lives that we owe to Aphrodite and the great domain of love is affection. Affection is not really love, but it is connected to it. It leads to it sometimes, but mostly it is in and of itself a means to help us achieve connection.

But the affection we build for friends, lovers, pets, etc. is something that is also capable of helping us get through life. In combination with love, affection builds a strong bond. It is the aspect of loves domain that influences us to feel a longing for the good traits in others. It is the aspect of the domain of love that leaves us feeling heart broken when a friend disappoints us and when a brother betrays us.

Affection allows us to have a small connection with someone who is not really a friend, but who becomes part of our lives anyway. A genuine sense of affection can affect us as much as love, though rarely in so long lasting a manner. And affection is something we can feel for people we don’t really know. Like the people we interact with daily in mailing lists or chat rooms. People we sincerely miss when we don’t hear from them, yet can’t truly ay we love.

Blessed be Aphrodite for the little love known as affection.

Time Out! The Comic Book

        There are a great many ways in which we all hang on to life. We hang on to youth. We hang on to the little things that make us all feel like children on the inside, where it counts. One of these things, for me at least, is my love of Superheroes and the mythic storytelling that is part and parcel of how they function in our society.

        My name is Hector Lugo, and I am 42 years old, and some 14 years ago I gave up reading comic books out of a misguided idea that at 28 years old, I had outgrown the genre and what it had to offer me. During this time, however, I was also developing new and, some might say, odd religious beliefs about the world around me, and one of the factors in this development was myth.

        Myth filled the void left by the comic book genre in that it allowed the imagination to fly, yet myth did something the comic books did not because they had a history as sacred literature. Myth helped to explain the world, and from them entire philosophies, theologies, and cosmologies were built over thousands of years. They allowed the world of the imagination and the world of logic to come together into a form of storytelling that went beyond either.         Myth, you see, links us to the divine, and as I am about to postulate, so do the many forms of fiction and storytelling that we humans so revel in.

        But unlike myth, the comic book has never been seen by society as an acceptable expression of divine reality, rather it has more often than not been seen as childish delusion, simple entertainment, and silliness. But something happened to the comic book along its long history, it grew up, and the genre is no longer simple, no longer silly, and it has become ever more relevant to people who enjoy it for what it is, an expression of human reality through the focus on the super human. In other words, a view of man from the viewpoint of Gods.

        True, Superman, Batman, Wolverine, Wonder Woman, and Phoenix are not Gods in the traditional sense, but one could argue that we human beings sense a connection with the divine, with God or the Gods, angels, demons, etc., through the very art that we produce, and no art, no matter how simple, fantastic, or profound is exempt from this. The comic book, like the myths of old, are an expression of man’s connection to the divine reality. But that in itself is not the purpose of this piece, just an attempt to explain it, or perhaps justify it, to those who may not understand it.

        Just a couple of years ago, I rediscovered my love of the genre. How could I not? Hollywood has fallen in love with the superhero, and along with the move of characters like Batman and Spiderman to not only the box office, but the academy award lists of nominees, the superhero has proven once again that it can capture the imagination and thrill us. That the superhero is indeed relevant because we are now atthe dawn of an age of adults who no longer see the genre as silly, even if they may sometimes consider it childish or geeky.

        This rediscovered love of the genre came as no surprise for me. It gave me a glimpse back into my own past, to remember things, people, places, and events that were formative for me. Because seeing Power Girl break through a wall somehow reminded me of that sweet comic shop owner who befriended me when I was very alone. Because seeing a beautiful rendition of Thor, hammer in hand, brought back images of a childhood home I seldom ever thought about. Because seeing Wonder Woman kick ass reminded me of a love I lost a long time ago who always laughed that I had to pick up my books rather than go to dinner every Thursday.

        The comic book brought me back to a time when I was happy, sometimes sad, sometimes frightened, but times when these books, short as they are, would help me escape into a world where anything was possible. And today, the same characters, some changed, some hardly at all, bring me the same kind of relief from the mundane. Just as a good Sci-Fi thriller or another reading of Lord of the Rings does. It allows me to access my most basic programming, my inner child, and revel in his joy. It keeps me from going into the dullness that is middle age by keeping my spirit fresh and full of wonder, and it keeps my imagination flying.

        But unlike the child, I can look at this genre with a fresh set of eyes. I can look at it and see in it symbolism and concepts that a child might miss. Where Wonder Woman is simply a kick ass hot chick to the 12 year old, she is a symbol of a powerful woman to the 42 year old man. Where Wolverine is a cool dude with knives and a gay haircut to the 13 year old, the 42 year old sees him as a symbol of man in his constant desire to overcome his baser, animal instincts and brutality. The man can see the symbolic nature of Red Tornado as the machine who longs to be human as more than that, as a symbol of all who are different in their struggle to fit in while remaining unique. Of Green Lantern as symbol not just of courage, but of every man’s need to overcome his own fears.

        Combining these two, the ability of the 42 year old man and the child inside to see these books in such different ways, allows me to stay youthful, even if the body is going to heck through a singularity, the mind is still enraptured in the simple act of imagining the impossible, and enjoying every minute of it.

Connecting

I’ll be honest, connecting to people is hard for me. I am very much a solitary creature. My mind is always flowing, running, going at a million miles a minute, and in many threads all at the same time. It is why writing this website is sometimes so hard for me, and why some of what I say sometimes seems to make no sense. This is not ADD or some such, this is simply the fact that I am essentially disconnected from people on a fundamental level, and so my mind works and works, within itself creating a world that is mine.

Before you jump to the conclusion that I am crazy, I do have friends, and I do have conversations with them, but I often find my friends limited because they cannot understand my own ways. I understand that there is no way for them to be able to do that, since so much of what I am, and who I am, is happening in my own head and they are not mind readers. But I often find it difficult to convey the concepts in my head, which makes it hard for people to get me. Perhaps language is not what I need in order to convey some of these concepts, perhaps it is through some other medium that I need to do this, or perhaps a different use of language, one which might convey what I mean without being encumbered by conversational conventions.

I don’t know.

But I do know that Aphrodite is asking me to try. Aphrodite is forcing me to take a look at my inability to connect and to break that pattern, because I have to learn to be a better friend, a better lover, and a better man, and the first step in doing that is to learn to let others understand me.

Now, if I could just figure out the best way to do that?

Suggestions, anyone?

Drawn to Connection...

To feel love, one must know love. One must have experienced it in some way in oder to appreciate it. The idea that one must learn to love oneself in order to love another stems from this basic idea, although it is turned on its head.

But we all experience love in some way or another. As children we feel it from our parents or caretakers, and even if they do not love us, we feel it for them. It is a attachment we carry with us forever, even when we do not recognize it. It is a feeling of belonging that we bear with us no matter how old we get. We remember it as home. We feel we belong there when we are with them.

But later in life, when we detach from them, from our mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, we are forced to fill a hole left in our hearts. We desire to form a new home, a new set of links all of which are based in that most primal of all our emotions, love.

But is this really love?

Yes, absolutely! Love is too often confused with that romance novel soap opera kind of love, but love is, and always has been, so much more than that. It is the power that draws us, forces us, to seek out connections with others, with our nation, with our culture and language, and with the Gods.

We are forced to seek out our place in the great web of life, that little knot in the web that connects us to all other things, big and small, because love is not really about lust, but about connection.

So when we seek out family, we are doing so out of love. When we seek out our friend, it is love that causes that impulse. When we are drawn to a lover, it is love. And when we are drawn to the divine, we do so because we feel the love that is part and parcel of the divine sphere. We feel Aphrodite’s presence, whatever we may call her, and we respond to it.

Love and Lovelessness

I was accused recently of not knowing what love is. This happened on facebook by a person who has not seen me in 15 years, who knows nothing of the person I have become since he knew me, and, I should point out, who has become something of an evangelist, as in Christian, and perhaps he thinks that one cannot know love unless one knows Jesus.

I have to leave that idea behind, seeing as it is so obviously ridiculous, but I do have to wonder if I do actually know what love is. After all, the question has been raised, right?

I know love in several forms. And I believe love is never really all encompassing except in it’s purest divine form, and we call that form Aphrodite. Only the Goddess Love herself knows love itself in a pure and all encompassing way because in a very real way, she is that love.

But as a man, a human being, I experience love in a variety of ways, and each of these ways can feel all encompassing in its time and place.

I am not a very physically expressive person. I am not the touchy, feely, huggy type. I think it has caused problems in relationships for me because people expect the soap opera romance novel type romance, but I am very expressive of feelings in other ways. I may not always seem it, since I tend to write in such a dry way which is often a bit blunt, but I am very considerate, sometimes too considerate, and I show people I love that I love them in ways that, I think, many men can relate to. I give my time, I listen, I give small tokens of my affection unexpectedly, and it often strikes people as odd.

If I see a small thing in a store and I remember a friend mentioning it as something they loved and could not find, I will buy it and give it to them. If I have a piece of hardware, like an old laptop, and I know a friend needs one, I will give it to them. I should probably sell it on e-bay, since I am very needy during these financially trying times, but I don’t, because I think it is more in line with what Zeus, lord of hosts, wants from me than just to be pragmatic.

I love my family, though I have trouble relating to them, and if any one of them needed my kidney, my liver, or hell, my heart, I would give it to them even if it meant I would die in the process. Is that not love?

I love my friends, though I have so few of them, because I love that they love me. We may not be constantly on each other the way bffs are in movies, but I will do for them just like I would for family. Maybe not to the extent of giving up my life, but close. They accept and like me the way i am, and I love them for it.

I love the Gods, though anyone reading this silly blog should probably think that obvious, but I think I should reiterate it, that I love the Gods. I may have a very relativistic view of the universe, but I do believe whole heartedly in them, who are of many names and many aspects, and through them I have come to learn to respect others for their beliefs and practices, even when I personally thought those beliefs and practices silly. I think people who have known me for years on the Hellenism lists can attest that I have mellowed out tremendously, though I am still prone to foot in mouth syndrome from time to time because of the way I write and discuss things. I tend to be a bit imperious in writing, though I am not that way when I speak.

I love laughter, music, art, and the human spirit, in both its light and dark aspects, because they are human expressions of a divine reality.

I love, and love, and love, yet, do I actually know love?

Is it possible that I see the love I generate from within me, but seldom notice or acknowledge the love that others show me?

I guess in that way I am a bit of a narcissist that way. I simply neglect to notice others on many levels. Even when I am very considerate to others, it tends to originate with me. It makes me feel good to give people things because it feels good to make others happy. But, is that not the reality of all love? Does not Aphrodite demand that you love yourself, and that by doing so you can then express that love to others?

Maybe I have done this all backward.

Goddess of Beauty

The promise of sexual pleasure is not one Aphrodite actually makes. Aphrodite offered Paris the most beautiful woman in the world. She gave Hera her girdle that Zeus might be attracted to her as he had been once. He gave Pygmalion his heart’s desire, the love of the statue he had so lovingly created.

Aphrodite is said to be the Goddess of Love, but if we explore what this means to a deeper level, it means she is the Goddess of Beauty. Man aspires to beauty, for beauty, and to come from beauty. Men long for beautiful mates, beautiful lovers, and beautiful children, and in these things, Aphrodite is the great promise, the great provider, for the world is filled with her eternal spirit of beauty and the pleasure beauty brings.

Sexual attraction, love, physical desire, they are all tied to beauty. This doesn’t necessarily mean culturally accepted standards of beauty, but a personal, and often subconscious standard of beauty.

When we fall in love, there are always a million things we find beautiful about the person or people we fall for. They are physically attractive to us. They are sexually arousing to us. They are intellectually beautiful. Emotionally appealing. All of these things, are part of our inner beauty, part of what makes us beautiful to others.

It is in these things that Aphrodite is present. It is in these things that Aphrodite forces us to bend to her power, and say what you want, deny it all you want, we are, all of us, powerless against her.

On the bareback conundrum...

This is not a post that would normally end up on both my blogs, because one is dedicated to my religious/spiritual/philosophical explorations and the other to matters of gayness, but in this case, the two have crossed paths.

I am currently exploring the domain of Aphrodite, of love and sex, of sensuality and sexuality, of beauty and pleasure. So, of course, questions about sex and the dangers of sex are bound to arise, and this week I found out that a very good friend of mine has become HIV positive, or rather, that he has been HIV positive for a long time but has continued to indulge in dangerous behaviors. Behaviors that are dangerous both to him and to his partners.

As a man with HIV, his immune system is in danger. True, drug therapies today can make a big difference, keeping people from converting to full blown AIDS status, but the immune system is still in potential danger, and exposing oneself to diseases that can be, and often are, very dangerous is not a smart thing to do even when you are not already infected with a virus that targets and destroys the immune system.

It bothers me that he, like many out there, are buying into the denial that HIV is not what the government tells us it is. These conspiracy theorist deniers who will stop at nothing to indulge their fantasy that HIV is caused by drugs rather than an actual virus, or that AIDS does not exist, are so unwilling to face facts that they are taking themselves down, and with them, others who they are indoctrinating into their fantasy.

At a spiritual and philosophical level, I have to ask myself, is sex, sexuality, pleasure, and the beauty inherent in these acts more holy if it is 100% natural? Are these people indulging in a natural and beautiful thing untainted by latex? Or are they ignoring the aspect of our spirituality, as human beings, that demands we be moderate in our thinking?

I am a Hellenistos, and I struggle with one of the “commandments” of Apollo (Not really Commandments, but we can get into that some other time) which demands that we do nothing to excess. In other words, that we be moderate in our actions, our thinking, and our indulgences in the domains of the Gods.

There is wisdom to be applied here. No matter what religion you are, the Gods have always demanded that we think. That we look at things and keep in mind that overindulgence in anything, be it food, sex, or morality, can lead to disaster. It is all about balance.

But for these people, I have a sense of fear and yet I almost envy that they can live in such denial. Not that I could live this way. I need to jump into most things with my eyes open, even if not always wide open. I wonder if it is possible for me to enjoy sexuality to its fullest if I am bound by the rational in such a way that I have to behave responsibly, and I always have to answer yes, because in the end, I get to live another day to explore and enjoy the possibilities and joys of love, sex, and desire.

Be smart, people, condoms are cheap, and they are easy to use. USE THEM!

Exploration of my own aspects...

It is important to try to understand the Gods, which is why I have been doing this little blog. It is a way for me to reach out to them, but there is more to this blog than that. I am also exploring myself.

Like the Gods, we are aspected creatures, we humans, we have different forms for different occasions, and we allow or disallow behavior that is otherwise natural to us based on where we are and who we are with. We even see the Gods this way, as we reach out to them depending on our needs and desires.

I am, of course, no different. In this part of my exploration I am forcing myself to explore aspects of my sexuality and emotional self that I tend to keep to myself, usually. And in keeping them to myself I have also damaged myself. I have not allowed myself to feel things, both emotionally and physically, that I really should have.

Perhaps as a means to protect myself.

But what is it Aphrodite wants me to understand this time as I see the things I have chosen not to do or allow myself to feel? What does she want from me?

Does she want me to jump in with both feet and fuck like a mad dog? Does she want me to not do that, so as to learn to appreciate it better? Does she want me to detach emotion from sex, or to attach more meaning to it?

To some these things may seem easy enough, but not to me. I have lived a life of some misery till now, but I have also had some great times. I have laughed and felt good things, and I have fucked and loved and been heart broken. Now what am I supposed to feel? How am I supposed to enjoy the sexuality I have taken so much pleasure in in my life, and not have it become just another throw away thing in my life?

All of these things I will have to try to answer for myself as I try to explore her and all she represents.

Not just erotic, though

The erotic nature of Aphrodite is not limited to the erotic itself. Eroticism is the art of sex. Titillation, teasing, flirting, and even things like obsession and lust are all part of the erotic experience.We are, all of us, victims to its power. We all remember that man or woman who you just couldn’t get out of your mind. We all have that memory of that one man or woman who touched you one day, and the very touch of him made you react sexually, even if there was no such intent.

The erotic nature of Aphrodite extends to the concept of sensation and all that means. The feeling of a penis in your hands is erotic, but so, I might add, is the taste of a cold orange. You might wonder how this can be, but that’s not hard to explain, because sex, as a part of the erotic art form, is all about sensation. It is all about pleasure, and sometimes, eating a cold orange is almost as intense a pleasure as sex is. “That was better than sex!” is the expression.

But the erotic, as an expansive explanation or definition of pleasure, is always with us. Aphrodite adores sweet scents and flavors as much as she loves the ac of love making, and we often forget this in our looks at this bright and broadly encompassing goddess.

Her nature is one that demands that you be aware. If you are not aware of how much you love a feeling, a taste, a smell, you may never learn to appreciate it. You may never learn to see that pleasure and thus acknowledge that part of yourself. This is an aspect of the goddess as Ourania, or Celestial. This aspect of Aphrodite is often seen as a higher aspect. One of the mind, of consideration, and of the soul. But this is a false assumption based on the Judaeo-Christian ideal. An ideal that sees the body, sex, sexuality, and eroticism as bad.

Not that Christianity is alone in this, the Greeks had philosophies of this type too, as do the Hindus and Buddhists. Philosophies in which the body and its pleasures are said to hold down the soul, keep it from flying free when life has ended.

To me, this is simply a falsehood. The great goddess of love is not intimately tied to both love, an emotion that is very much a high one. One that requires a person to sacrifice and think of another before him or herself, and to lust, the emotion that focuses on the bodies instinctive sexual reactions, for no reason. The great goddess love is tied to these for a reason, and that is that Ourania is not an aspect that is as a separation of purity and carnality, but a symbiosis of the two, a combination, a harmonious union of the purity of emotion and the carnality of lust.

Aphrodite lusts after Ares, and Ares lusts after Aphrodite. So the myth goes, and in that myth lies an interesting answer, for the goddess of love and lust and the god of war, and the restless emotional warrior spirit are joined and give us Harmonia. Love and Lust, bound together into Harmony.

Amen, brothers and sisters :-)

On Eroticism

Eroticism is one of those topics that is sometimes hard to discuss. In our culture, as Judaeo-Christian as it is, the idea of sexuality is taboo as a topic of conversation, but as a people who are searching for truths from the Gods, not from the Bible, we must come upon this topic and try to handle it with grace and truthfulness.

Eroticism is multifaceted and extremely complex a topic, and I am not expert, but as a human being, I am intimately aware of it. It permeates our natures because as mortal life forms, it is necessary for our survival as a species. But sex, sexuality, and eroticism are actually three separate things.

Sex is the act of sexual contact between people. Genitals in contact with genitals and the act of ejaculation are just base acts of instinctive nature. We are all capable of sex, and nature has made sex enjoyable because as thinking creatures, we have the capacity to ignore our instinctive urges.

Sexuality is the complex of feelings and impulses that accompany our psychological need for companionship to produce sexual attraction. This is also very much evolutionary. Physical sexual attraction is as instinctive as is sex itself, because we tend toward the beautiful, which in evolutionary terms suggests genetic health, and therefore the survival and prosperity of our species.

Eroticism, however, is a different matter all together. Eroticism is not really evolutionary, it is psychological (which is itself evolutionary, mind you) but it is possible to think of eroticism in terms of art. If sex and sexuality are the clay and tools, then eroticism is the artist, for that is exactly what eroticism is, an art form.

Aphrodite is the goddess of this art form. Hers is a combination of all things erotic, of the sex, the sexuality, and the ability to instill thought and higher feeling into these for the sake of a better experience. We humans, under her tutelage, have made of sex an art, a philosophy, and a playful expression of our inner selves, and in so doing, we have made it into eroticism rather than just sex.

How we apply this art form to our lives is based on how we accept the goddess of love and eroticism into our lives, and how we are willing to express that which is deepest within us to another person or people.

Erotic Aphrodite

The most oft illustrated aspect of Aphrodite is her erotic one. Her harlot aspect, as I sometimes call it. She, of all the Goddesses, embodies “The Whore” so perfectly that she has basically become a symbol of it. She has become the epitome of what it is to be a “whore.”

The word whore itself is rife with negativity in Judaeo-Christian culture, of course, because sexuality itself is looked down upon as sinful and evil to these people. Most of us grew up with this attitude, and we have been acculturated to it so that the word whore is an insult to all of us. It is a word that denotes a woman of ill repute, a tramp, someone who indiscriminately has sex with anyone, showing no sense of decorum or standards.

If this is how we in the Western World (and most patriarchal societies) see the whore, then this is not really Aphrodite at all. Aphrodite is not an indiscriminate whore, Zeus might be more of a whore than she is, but rather she is that woman who is fully aware of her power over those who find her attractive and utilizes that power. She is beautiful, and knows it, and is not afraid of that beauty. She is sexual, horny if you will, and is not only not afraid of that, but proudly makes it known.

She is sexually vibrant, sexually powerful, and sexually free, and she teaches us that this is not something to be afraid of, and especially, not something to be ashamed of.

Mistakes? How about the good stuff?

So, if I must look at the mistakes I have made as I have made my progress along the star, I must also take a moment to reflect back at some of the positive things I have done in the last year and a half, or perhaps to see the effects that these meditations and the forcing of myself to think about things that come to mind as a result of these meditations.

I was kinda nuts. I don’t mean I was just a little off. I am quite sure that if I had continued as I was, I would have ended up dying by my own hand, or as a result of my crazy behavior and inability to control the runaway emotional roller coaster I was on.

This is important to remember, because while I write in a reasonable logical manner, sometimes even cold, I am in fact a very emotional person. Not, perhaps in that touchy-feely, Emo way, but in a dark and passionate way. I have anger, rage, and bitterness in me that was killing me.

My upbringing left me a destroyed man, one who did not really understand the reality of what he had become because too many people around me simply refused to be honest with me, and because self delusion is an art form I must have perfected somewhere along the line.

Since starting this little trek of mine, though, I have been forced to remember and think about those things which today I can fully recognize as flaws that need controlled or changed. Changing these things about myself is not ever going to be an easy thing, but in the end they are the things that will save me, because letting go of the anger by recognizing it, is the first step to maybe ending my life as a complete and happy person.

Hestia, Hera, and Apollo, and Poseidon, taught me to reconsider my place in things. Not just the great cosmic ideas of man’s place in the universe, but my own place in my family, in my community (something I still need to do something about), and in my own home.

Taking these things into consideration, I have worked to bring the Gods closer to me, to remind myself of their presence and to actively seek their aid when I feel myself falling off a precipice. More importantly, I have learned to recognize certain triggers, certain reactions, and certain “thought forms” that occur in me and cause me to act in self destructive ways, and by recognizing them, to stop them in their tracks.

Everyone has noticed the differences in me, and I am hoping that some day I can look back at this time and simply laugh it all off.

And since I am on the topic of mistakes...

And since I am on the topic of mistakes, allow me to say that the biggest one I make these days is spend too much time on line.

Oh, sure, I know in our age that doesn’t seem at all strange. I mean, if I didn’t, I might not have any friends at all, and being something of a hermit, I would probably be OK with that, except that I need to have conversation, contact, friendship. We all do, so the internet has allowed me that while still indulging that inner hermit.

But the internet does not really lend itself to a full exploration of Aphrodite’s gifts. Sure, it can sometimes lead to a relationship, and it can certainly lead to lots of sex, but it is not the same as that divine dance we do as we lock eyes with someone in a dance club, at a restaurant, or waiting in line at the movie theater. That divine wash of emotions, expectations, hopes that come when one finds oneself attracted to someone one doesn’t know because he is standing just a few feet away.

The internet has taken that away from too many of us, or, I really should say, we have thrown that away for the convenience and immediate satisfaction of the internet.

Mistake

I am making the mistake of going into education mode, or lecture mode, again, and need to put a stop to it, since part of the reason behind this blog is to explore the Gods on a more personal level. Part of me finds it easier to work these meditations through a lens rather than looking at them on a very personal level. So, exploring Aphrodite on a personal level is much more difficult for me than you might think.

Part of that reason is judgment. America is a very judgmental country, and we are a very judgmental people. We constantly judge what other people do because we can't seem to grasp the idea that different people just do things differently.

Part of why Aphrodite is difficult for me to express here is that, in a very real way, i am a very strong devotee of Aphrodite as a sex goddess. I love sex, have lots of sex, and am not unfamiliar with random sex, orgies, threesomes, and the total loss of self in the pleasures of sex for its own sake.

America has a very romanticized, and dare i say Abrahamic, attitude toward sex, and I do not fall into that paradigm at all. As a gay man with some bisexual tendencies, I am not part of the mainstream of America, which would not be a problem for me if America did not so readily judge me for it.

Normally, I have no issues discussing things that are controversial. I am known in the Hellenic community as something of a loud mouth at times, but in this case, i feel like there is a need for restraint because I do not want to give people the wrong idea of what it is I am doing and how. People are too quick to jump to pop psychology to place labels on the why of my actions, but the truth is that I do the things I do almost always because I want to, and only seldom as part of a deeper need for some kind of validation.

I love cock, and Aphrodite seems to travel with me all the time. She touches me with her presence and I am always more than willing to go along with it. This aspect of the goddess we call Porne, which in essence means "pornographic" but without the negative connotations we Americans tend to associate with such a word. This is the aspect of the Aphrodite that makes us horny, the sends the blood rushing to the cock, that makes us look at guys on the bus and want to rip their clothes off. This is not simple attraction, not simply lust, it is some kind of biological impulse that we inherit as part of divine influence, a divine influence that takes me somewhere immensely pleasurable for the body, but sometimes hurtful to my soul.

If there is one lesson to be learned from allowing oneself to express ones sexuality fully, it is in learning when to set boundaries between emotion and sex. When you are with someone who is good for you, who you feel something for, that barrier must come down. Love must join with lust to create that very special even we call "love-making", but when you are in it for the fun, you must learn to build that barrier, because if you do not, you will hurt yourself more than you can imagine.

I tell guys all the time. Random wild sex is not for everyone, and that is definitely a lesson Aphrodite has taught me over the years.

Lesson number two, of course, is learning to break down that wall once you've learned to build it, and that can be a lot harder than you think. Once you build a barrier between sex and emotion, can you really tear it down so easily, and when does the barrier become an impediment rather than a help? When does that hot guy you've been having booty calls with for the last year become more than just a booty call, and will you even recognize it if you cannot let down the barrier?

Lesson number three Aphrodite Porne has taught me is that there really is such a thing as too much sex.

Have fun figuring out where that line is in your life! ;-)

Aphrodite, the Warrior

It is difficult, within the context of Hellenism, to decipher this aspect of Aphrodite. In Greek literature, Aphrodite is portrayed as playful, laughter loving, deceitful, dangerous, and sultry, but almost never is she portrayed as a fighter, at least not with the weapons of war.

But what does it mean for Love to be a Warrior?

It means that love fights, struggles, and if necessary, makes the ultimate sacrifice for the object of that love. That love will suit up and jump into the trenches for the sake of fulfilling its purpose, and that purpose is not always the love of a lover, or family, sometimes it is the love of one’s nation.

If I have one major failing it is that I lack this. I lack this passionate warrior spirit when it comes to love. I have allowed too many of my relationships to fall apart because I was simply not willing to fight for them. I could argue, of course, that my unwillingness to fight for them meant they were not worth fighting for from my perspective, but that is more justification than answer. Relationships are not absolute things. They change, grow, dwindle, phase in and out of passion’s sphere of influence, all within their confines, yet if we give up on them because we are unsatisfied at some point, we also relinquish the potential for that relationship to grow into something beautiful.

So, like a warrior on the field of battle, love must make decisions. Fight or flight. Be miserable and fight for the potential in a relationship, or give up, surrender to the death of love.

But the aspects of love in the furthest Eastern regions of the ancient Greek world, where Hellenes mixed with the people of the middle eastern world, the goddess of love had strong martial aspects. Even in the North, among the Vikings, the goddess of love was a strong martial being. She could love you, fuck you, make you love her so much you would die for her, and then join you on the fields of battle.

This aspect of the Goddess of Love is one I think the Hellenes themselves tried to suppress. Their patriarchal system had trouble with such images as Amazons, yet among them, in the very foundations of their pantheon, they were forced to accept strong powerful Goddesses who did not simply bend to the will of Gods, but often bested them in battle, strength, and influence.

Aphrodite is one such Goddess.

Coming to grips

As I try to come to grips with Aphrodite and what it means to explore her in my own life, I have to explore several core concepts of life that we human beings take for granted. Love is hard enough, but emotion as a concept is even harder. But then comes sex and the biological and psychological imperatives we all feel to have sex.

And what kind of sex? For some who believe in the Christian ethos, sex seems to be an almost utilitarian thing, meant for no other reason than to produce children, a silly notion if I ever heard one. After all, sex is a form of play for adults. It creates bonds between people, relieves stress, and offers a psychological benefit beyond simple sexual pleasure.

And what of the concept of Aphrodite as a Celestial being. As a force of nature, not just as an emotional impetus, not just as Goddess of love and lust, but of bindings and links. If Eros can be said to be Gravity, then perhaps Aphrodite can be said to be the Strong Nuclear Force.

What do I mean by that?

Eros is the God (One of the Protogonoi) who is responsible for what we call gravity. but at small levels, there are different forces at work, and just as the Erotic force affects life through attraction, so too does the Aphroditic force which acts on us from a lower level, a smaller level just as the strong nuclear force acts on quarks to form protons and neutrons. This is an aspect of the Gods which is seldom discussed in pagan circles.

And what of war. Aphrodite is a Goddess of War as well as love, and while that aspect is often lost in the Hellenic mythos, her relationship to Ares points us in this direction. Goddesses in the middle east related to Aphrodite (her middle eastern aspects) are very martial, and one must assume, though it is not scientific to do so, that Aphrodite also carried such aspects. Exploring this aspect of the Goddess is hard, after all, our culture speaks of love as a purely beneficent thing, pure, and so we must try to come to grips with how differently from ourselves this concept of love is.

Aphrodite is also a temptress. She tempts us to do things that may not be all that moral or ethical for the sake of pleasure. Is this a form of divine immorality, or does she lead us to question our morality, to challenge our preconceptions about what is and isn’t appropriate?

I hope to move forward to a place where I can answer some of these things in my own mind, and pray I have the wherewithal to properly express what I discover.

What is Love?

What is love?

Our modern Western world, especially we Americans, has a rather simplistic interpretation of love. When many here in America speak of love and God, they say God is Love, and that Love is some kind of supremely sublime state of being that is wholly pure and beneficent. But, their own theology points to something different, and that is that love is not always beneficent.

Love can be selfish and dangerous. It is capricious, unpredictable, and painful. To love one must sometimes hurt the object of that love, and sometimes one must be hurt by it. It can make us blind to reality, or force us to see it so clearly that we can no longer view ourselves in a healthy way.

It can make us paranoid, jealous, and angry. It can make us thoughtful and vengeful, and in none of these is love ever truly inconsistent. All of these things, from the basest of lusts to the purity of that love you feel for your newborn child, love is actually very consistent. At least consistent in its utter chaos and unpredictability.

Where the Christian masses view God as Love and Love as a pure, almost passive thing, the Ancient Greeks did not see love that way at all. They understood, perhaps not always in philosophical terms, but they understood it none the less, that the deity we call love, that glorious Aphrodite, is and always will be a temptress that is capricious and not always out to give us fuzzy pink feelings inside. Sometimes we need to fear her, because sometimes love is more than we can handle, and it hurts.

Love is a precious suffering that we human beings surrender to willingly because love is also full of rewards that outweigh the negatives. That teen who is making your life miserable right now, will one day fill your life with joy when they grow into a human being of great character and bring you grandchildren. That man or woman who too often makes you want to strangle them also gives you a shoulder to cry on and that feeling that you belong. In that bond of love there is both joy and pain, and we accept both willingly because that is how the goddess wants it. Because getting into her graces is never going to be an easy thing. You don’t just walk in and have her like your whore, you court her and spend your life savings on her, because you know in the end, misery and all, she is worth it.

That is love. The willingness to accept it, for all that it is, and know it is worth it anyway.