The Thread
SEA FOAM, HORROR AND BLOODY GORE: OUT OF THIS ARISES APHRODITE
Road tripping in the land of Aphrodite
In preparation for a trip to Greece, instead of using the traditional approach of reading maps and guidebooks, my son Jack, 12, and I read the myths. We did apply ourselves to more practical planning methods but added ancient Greek wisdom to make things more entertaining. Jack said things like: ʻWe shouldnʼt fly when it is too hot nor at too high an altitude, and we must check the aeroplaneʼs wings are not made of wax. Think about what happened to Icarus.ʼ And: ʻEveryone must take along a ball of string in their hand luggage in case we get lost in a labyrinth.ʼ
We used many sources to ensure we were well-informed: Homer, Ovid, Apuleius, Ted Hughes, Steven Fry, the collective unconscious, Wikipedia and the Percy Jackson movies. Each had conflicting advice for travellers. Although we decided to not look directly at any woman who had snakes on her head while we were in Greece, we did think Medusa got a raw deal. After all, it was Poseidon, the god of the sea, who seduced her, and he didnʼt get punished with snakes. We learnt, in turning our attention to these tales, that their lessons endure. Medusa has become a figurehead for the #MeToo movement. Even though her head is no longer attached to her body.
For as much as we mostly try to live by the rules of Western rationalism, also brought to us by the Greeks, the myths have a way of seeping into everything. Once we got to Athens and wandered among the people and the statues, both headed and headless, and stood upon the Acropolis with the caryatids, the female figures doomed to hard labour, holding up the Erechtheion, the myths seemed very much alive, as much an aide to our understanding as any guidebook.
It was so hot we felt we would definitely melt if we even walked up the small hill to the Acropolis, never mind flying closer to the sun. We found the way up a confusing maze of tiny cobbled streets and sleeping cats and dogs, and you need some way of navigating successfully. Google maps,
Kythira is THE BIRTHPLACE OF APHRODITE, goddess of beauty and love. The island is full of dark crevices, BURSTING WITH SENSUAL FLOWERS, dripping with honey
probably, is just as good as string. We could see why Athena won the patronage of the city with her gift of the sacred olive tree. For shade and food and putting in martinis. The Parthenon is dedicated to her, a structure with such a beautiful combination of marble curves, shapes, pillars and statues as to seem not just a building but a divine being, present and alive.
As we drove down the mainland from Athens the myths came with us, metamorphosing the mundane into the exceptional. We looked for the god Pan in mountainous Arcadia; we were glad to find no babies left out at the foot of Mount Olympus. For us a normal cow, standing in a field on the way through Argos, was not an unremarkable sighting. It could be Zeusʼs lover, Io, transformed into a cow by his irate and jealous wife Hera, who then sent a stinging insect to chase her into the ocean – now the Ionian sea. She then swam and wandered as far as Turkey, crossing into Asia through the Bosphorus (literally ʻcow crossingʼ).
When we got to the bottom of the Peloponnese, we crossed the sea to the island of Kythira. And here our experiences became more alarmingly vivid.
Kythira is, according to the myths, the birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and love. The island is spectacularly beautiful, full of dark crevices, bursting with bright unapologetically sensual flowers, dripping with honey. And the sea is sparkly and aqua, with exquisite patterned pebbles on the floor and millions of super cute, merry, silver fish dancing about.
We visited beach after beach and swam for hours, and then one day we decided to swim from Kaladi beach, round to Palaiopolis, to the exact spot where Kythirians claim Beauty was born. It was a fair way and as we approached, the water started to seem thicker and a bit saltier, and Jack started to look a little peaky. Then he said: ʻMom, I feel a bit weird.ʼ
For the story of her birth, mostly in this telling according to Steven Fry, goes like this: Once upon a time there was Gaia (The Earth) and Uranus (The Sky). Gaia and Uranus had 12 magnificent sons and daughters. Then they had some less magnificent children: The Cyclops triplets (ugly and one-eyed) and the Hecatonchire triplets (Fury, Long-limbed and Sea Goat). Each of these violent creatures had 50 heads and 100 hands. Gaia loved them nevertheless, but Uranus did not. He just couldnʼt stand them. So he shoved them back into Gaiaʼs womb.
Gaia was angry. She wanted revenge on Uranus. She made a sharp sickle and found an accomplice – Kronos, her son. Kronos crept up on Uranus and reportedly without a momentʼs moral hesitation, swept the sickle up and sliced his fatherʼs genitals off his body. Then he picked up the severed bits and he threw them, bloody and slippery, across Greece. And they landed, plop, in the exact place (36.224047, 23.061508) where Jack and I were swimming.
From the fizzy whirlpool of the blood and semen of a tossed-out gonad, writes Fry, out “of the spindrift of surf and seed emerges the crown of a head, then a brow and then a face. But what kind of a face? A face far more beautiful than creation has yet seen or will ever see again. Not just someone beautiful but Beauty itself rises fully formed from the foam.”
The resting place of patricidal castration, was also exactly where Love and Beauty were born.
Aphrodite then lifted herself from the spray and transported herself via shell to Cyprus.
I said: ʻJack, Beauty comes through suffering.ʼ He said:
ʻLetʼs go.ʼ So we turned around and swam back to the beach.