PBP: Epitymbia, or How Aphrodite is a Goddess of Necromancy

Inanna and her sister Ereshkigal (Queen of the Underworld)

Within every Black Goddess, there is a shimmer of Light; as within every White Goddess, there is the Shadow of Night. Life hints of death; Death promises Life.

Aphrodite, for all intents and purposes, is the very epitome of a White Goddess. She is a a beautiful enchantress, the bestower of love and fecundity. And, in keeping with the simple Mystery stated above, she has a dark shadow -- one that not all who look upon her see. I believe that the Ancients saw it, though, and the proof is in a few of  the epithets they gave her:

Epitymbia - She of the Tombs
Melaina, Skotia - Black One

I also think it is recounted in her mythos, though we need to pull back the layers just a little (and remember her connections to Inanna-Ishtar and Astarte) in order to discover Aphrodite's connection to the Dead and the Underworld.

The Dying Shepherd

The myth of the dying shepherd is the first that connects Aphrodite to the Underworld, its Queen, and to her Middle Eastern cognates. While the story of Adonis, Aphrodite and Persephone varies in cultural tone and flavor from its Middle Eastern predecessors, there's no denying that Aphrodite and Adonis are the Greek counterparts to Inanna & Damuzi or  Astarte and Tammuz. Indeed, the mourning ritual commenced for Adonis (the Adonia) by all the women of Greece is an exact parallel to the mourning undertaken by the women of Damuzi and Tammuz myths. Also paralleled in both sets of myths are the fact that "arrangements" are made in such a way that the Beloved Man returns to the Goddess for a portion of the year, thus making him a dying and resurrecting God of land.

In the Greek version, Persephone falls in love with the youth, as well -- emphasizing the connection between the Queen of the Underworld and the Starry Goddess. In Sumerian, Babylonian and Phoenician lore, you see, these two Goddesses were sisters. In a sense, they were the light and dark halves of the same coin. In Greek myth, though, this isn't the case. Yet the myths bear out their connection again and again.

Journey to the Underworld

In the Middle Eastern variants, The Starry Goddess makes an Underworld Journey to plead to her dark sister, Queen of the Underworld. It is an important exception to the Greek myths, I think, that this doesn't happen. What *does* happen, however, is that the two Goddesses work in concert on at least two occasions (for Adonis and Psyche) and that they share a number of common symbols and sacred places. Among them are the Cyprus and the pomegranate -- both of which are vastly important to both Goddesses.

But of course the Starry Goddess -- whose "star" (the planet Venus) is both the Evening Star (Hesperus) and the Morning Star (Eosphorus) -- would be connected to underworld journeys. She dips below the horizon, into the west -- always the place of the dead -- and rises again. And if not her, then her lover (Adonis) and her priestess (Psyche) -- those whom she guides.

Psyche's Test

I plan on devoting a whole entry to Psyche, soon. In fact, I plan on devoting a whole book to Psyche!

Psyche was a mortal who was said to be as beautiful as Aphrodite. She was "sacrificed" by her parents and carried on the wind to the palace Eros (Love),  Aphrodite's beloved son. She disobeyed the instruction not to look upon her husband, who then fled. Psyche then sought Aphrodite's help, and the Goddess gave her seemingly unconquerable tasks -- one of which involved an Underworld Journey to retrieve a cask of beauty potion which was kept in the care of Persephone!

I don't believe that Aphrodite was trying to thwart her daughter-in-law, as most people who relay and interpret this myth seem to indicate. I don't at all see Aphrodite as jealous of the girl's beauty or resentful of Psyche's love for Aphrodite's beloved son. On the contrary, I believe she set Psyche upon the Heroine's Journey. She was testing her -- initiating her. At the end of Psyche's tasks, she is made immortal; and I believe it was the worthiness of this immortality that Aphrodite was judging -- and also the worthiness of the girl for her son.

Psyche means "soul" in Greek, so in essence, Aphrodite sent the human spirit on a quest that proved its worthiness of the immortality of the Gods -- and of it's worthiness of all-encompassing Love.

(By the way, if this episode in mythology doesn't illustrate the profound importance of the Love Goddess, I don't know WHAT can!)



Love and Death

Amor Vincit Omnia. Love conquers all things. She is the subduer of war-like Ares, where all others fail. And what about Death? Is Death, whose realm we all must enter, powerful enough to undo the touch of Love? While these myths give us room to speculate -- and are designed to make us do so -- I know that I have my answer. (I bet you can guess what it is.)


Aphrodite Epitymbia and the Necromancer

I call upon my Beloved and Mighty Dead all the time, and Aphrodite Veiled, She of the Tombs, is my guiding star. I approach them in love, respectful of Death's Dark Queen. Aphrodite, her sister in myth and spirit, is a mediator and light. With her, I continue to seek the Light in the Shadows, the Dark in the Light.

Menelaus-Helen-Paris= Ares-Aphrodite-Ankhises???

I just wrote this in the Hellenismos.us forums, but I want to pose this idea (and its questions) to several sets of folks. Please forgive the cross-posting, my loves....

I have a thought/idea that I would like to explore in fiction, and I want to get some input from folks who are well-studied in such things.

Let me preface this by saying that I am a historical fiction writer, and I am primarily concerned with the Universal Truth that underlies a story -- and a little less concerned with the absolute historical truth.

I also ought to confess that I harbor some resentment toward Homer. I feel that he has done some disservice to Aphrodite (and others) in his codifying of the myths. She, in particular, had been a foreign goddess -- and an old one, at that -- with a fairly well delineated set of traits. He stripped her of her war-like aspects and demoted her by re-creating her birth story.



I wrote the following in my writing journal tonight...

“She loved Menelaus like no other. History and myth haven’t told that portion of my sister’s story well. For Helen, the Spartan queen, her strong war-king was a far greater prize than a pretty shepherd. Paris was her duty, as the golden goddess of love made clear, and Helen loved him as much as her body would allow. Her heart, though, had been wedded to the towering, thundering, iron-hardened warrior who swept across the sea to reclaim his beloved queen.

“If she was Aphrodite made flesh, he was Ares.”

I’ve written Sappho as a priestess of Aphrodite, and now it is Helen’s turn. She was the queen of war-like Sparta, a city-state that honored the goddess of love equally as a goddess of war. This comes truer to Aphrodite’s original nature, born to the Hellenes by the sea-faring Phonecians who knew her as Astarte and Ashteroth. To the Sumerians, she was Ishtar, a lady of love and war whose myth includes an important romance with a shepherd.

Aphrodite’s dual nature was split in Hellenic myth. She longed to be reunited with her war-self, always taking risks to connect with war-like Ares. The pastoral affair was kept, though, in the tale of the goddess and her own Trojan shepherd.

That’s fantastic! I’ve never read anywhere that the love triangle underpinning the Trojan War (Menelaus-Helen-Paris) was a shadow image of the love triangle that the Greeks made of the original Ishtar/Tammuz myth (Ares-Aphrodite-Ankhises). In the Homeric version, Ishtar is separated into Aphrodite and Ares (Love and War). But the story wasn’t originally a conflict. From this basic conflict, though, the Trojan War springs – with Aphrodite’s own war-like nature and her need to support and nurture the agricultural elements featured center-stage.

Maybe someone else has written about this. I need to see if I can find a treatment on this concept.
*****

My questions to you learned folk:

Have you seen this concept elsewhere? (If so, where? Sources, please, so I can follow up with my own research.)

Does it ring true? (It certainly did for me, but I think that is obvious.)