Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/599

 had ears to hear? Surely that the beloved of the gods may hope for wedlock with them in death.

It was certainly in this sense that Clement of Alexandria understood certain other mysteries of Aphrodite, though, needless to say, he puts upon them the most obscene construction. After relating in terms unnecessarily disgusting the legend of how by the very act of Uranus' self-mutilation the sea became pregnant and gave birth from among its foam to the goddess Aphrodite, he states that 'in the rites which celebrate this voluptuousness of the sea, as a token of the goddess' birth there are handed to those that are being initiated into the lore of adultery ([Greek: tois myoumenois tên technên tên moichikên]) a lump of salt and a phallus; and they for their part present her with a coin, as if they were her lovers and she their mistress ([Greek: hôs hetairas erastai]) .' Thus Clement; but those who are willing to see in the mysteries of the Greek religion something more than organised sensuality will do well to reflect whether that which Clement calls 'being initiated into the lore of adultery' was not really an initiation into those hopes of marriage with the gods of which we have already found evidence in the popular religion, and whether the goddess' symbolic acceptance of her worshippers as lovers does not fit in exactly with that bold conception of man's future bliss. The symbolism indeed, if Clement's statement is accurate, was crude and even repellent, but its significance is clear; and those who approached these mysteries of Aphrodite in reverent mood need not have been repelled by that which modern taste would account indecent in the ritual. Greek feeling never erred on the side of prudery; men were familiar with the Hermae erected in the streets and with the symbolism of the phallus in religious ceremonies, and tolerated the publication of literature—be it the comedy of Aristophanes or Clement's own exhortation to the heathen—which neither as a source of amusement nor of instruction would be tolerated now.

The particular mysteries to which Clement alludes in this passage seem to have been concerned with the story of Aphrodite's birth, and though it is difficult to conjecture how that story can have been made to illustrate and to inculcate the doctrine of the