Aphrodite still powerful symbol

Press, 1 February 1986, Page 27

Aphrodite still powerful symbol

NZPA-Reuter Aphrodite’s Baths, Cyprus Fading legend and tourist brochures sustain the mystique and mythology of a once great cult surrounding Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Rigorously suppressed by early Christians, the fertility cult has been almost erased from memory on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, although the goddess whose name gave rise to the word “aphrodisiac,” remains a powerful symbol. At Aphrodite’s Baths, near the south-western city of Paphos, a woman tourist sprinkles herself with sparkling water from the rock pool. A blackclad village grandmother, standing nearby, whispers: “Now she will stay young for ever.” A record 800,000 tour-

ists last year ( Visited Cyprus, where legend says Aphrodite, known to the Romans as Venus, was “born from the foam” near Paphos. The Greek poet Homer referred to the birthplace in his “Odyssey.” Further along the coast pilgrims from throughout the ancient world came to worship in Aphrodite’s main shrine. The Greek historian Herodotus, and later the angry early Christians, wrote that Cypriot women would give themselves to the service of Aphrodite by lying with strangers at. the temple in “sacred prostitution.” These sites, and a second century B.C. marble study of Aphrodite in the Cyprus National Museum, are the main relics of a legend freely milked by modern-day

tour firms. Researchers say that even the few Aphrodite place names are relatively new and that the “Island of Love” tag used by tour firms has little to do with conservative Cypriot society. A Cypriot cultural society has proposed that the annual “Aphrodisia” festival be. revived in Paphos after a break of near 1700 years. During the sea-centred festival, pilgrims gathered to march to Aphrodite’s temple for rites, including singing by girls at a bed made for Aphrodite and her lover, Adonis. Adonis, legend has it, was killed in a boar hunt but would return from the dead for one day each spring — a privilege the gods granted to Aphrodite. Researchers say that the modern day "Kata-

clysmos” seaside festival in the spring is connected with "Aphrodisia.” Cypriots traditionally celebrate the festival by sprinkling each oth6r with, water, taking boats out to sea and gathering on beaches for “chattismata” — the hurling of versified insults.

Some students believe Aphrodite lore has survived in some versions of devotion to the Virgin Mary. Aphrodite has also been linked to Saint Helen, who founded a fourth-century monastery on a peak called Olympus, said by an ancient traveller to have been a former Aphrodite temple site. Although such links have been described as fanciful, some writers say the worship of a female deity passed in an unbroken line from Neol-

ithic fertility goddesses to Aphrodite, and even to the Virgin Mary. “She really was the goddess of 1001 names,” says lan Meadows, a Briton, who is publishing a book on the Babylonian goddess Astarte. “She (Astarte) was adopted by the Greeks and became the Hellenic Aphrodite.” A British writer, Colin Thubron, in his book “Journey into Cyprus,” says the island is strewn with remnants of Aphrodite’s cult, kept alive by villagers who ascribe some of her qualities to the Virgin Mary. “Such beliefs,” says a Cypriot archaeologist, Paul Flourentzos, “may have more to do with the continuation of tradition than with Aphrodite as a particular goddess... to say that Aphrodite lives on is a simplification.”