Grace’s Reviews > Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire > Status Update

“Venus is no longer creating civilization, not even just being contained by it; civilization is reveling in her castration—the armless Venus feeds a ruin lust.”

“Venus was (now) a thinly veiled excuse for disturbing and degenerate sexism and racism.”
()- my own notes

“Venus was becoming not an immortal Olympian, but a flesh-and-blood, Western European matriarch.”

“Even in astrology, ‘Venus dominates Mars, never vice versa.’”

“Because Aphrodite-Venus was about to become a metaphor, no longer for ambition and for prurient passion, but for purist philosophy.”

“So, counter intuitively, in the monotheistic climate of Christendom, Aphrodite survived a faith revolution—in no less a guise then the Virgin Mary herself.”

“Aphrodite-Venus was coming to represent some thing that should, by rights, be kept under wraps—the hedonistic possibilities of Tryphé, the luxurious good life.”

“But the tug of love over the goddess between her new adopters, the West, and her motherland, the East, would continue-“

“Venus, with her violent origins and her choice of the war god Ares-Mars as a lover, was an appropriate deity for Rome to take up with.”