The power of Aphrodite

BY BARNABY DEVITT

The Ancient Greeks worshipped the goddess Aphrodite.
What that means is that the Greeks respected the power that sexual energy can have over people’s thinking. They considered that energy a divine force in all of us. They didn’t actually bow down and worship statues or anything like that. Of course, Sigmund Freud elevated the Greek’s respect to a science that saw sexual energy as the underlying cause of all human interaction.

But it was the Greeks who first warned of the horrible consequences of the repression of sexual energy. In two of his most important plays, the Greek playwright Euripides warns us of that danger.

In “The Bachae,” Pentheus, the king of Thebes, has forbidden the worship of Dionysius (a more contemporary and male equivalent of Aphrodite). In one of the strangest and most dramatic reversals in literature, Dionysius asks Pentheus if he wouldn’t like to see women in ecstatic dances. Pentheus, who has been uptight and puritanical to this point, admits he would like to see them. Dionysius tells him he must dress in women’s clothing and hide in a tree to watch. Pentheus follows Dionysius to the rituals as if in a trance. He hides in a tree but Dionysius reveals him as an intruder to the women, and the women tear him apart, led by Agave, Pentheus’ mother. The conclusion of the play is horrifying. The temple collapses with a crash, and Agave enters with Pentheus’ head on the tip of her spear believing she has killed a mountain lion. She shows it to her father and he slowly shows her she has murdered her son. Dionysius teaches us there are terrible consequences resulting from sexual repression.

At the opening of “Hippolytus,” the goddess Aphrodite tells the audience that Theseus’ son, Hippolytus, has sworn an oath of chastity and refuses to revere her. She swears she will be revenged. The Greek audiences understood this immediately to mean that Hippolytus was unnaturally repressing his sexual desires and this could have tragic consequences. What happens next is that his father’s new wife falls in love with him and when he is shocked by her advance and leaves, she accuses Hippolytus of raping her and then commits suicide. When the father returns he curses his son and causes him to be swallowed by the sea. Once again, a lesson on the dangers of sexual repression.

Do these tales have any special relevance for us, other than as cautionary tales for the dangers of celibacy for Catholic priests?

It is interesting to note that all the suicide bombers that we know anything about were religious fundamentalists and strongly misogynistic. They hated and feared women.

Mohamed Atta, the Operations Director of 9/11, wouldn’t shake the hand of one of his thesis advisors because she was a woman. In his will he said he didn’t want a pregnant woman to come to view his body. He didn’t want women to come and apologize for his death. He wanted the person who washed his body to wear gloves so as not to touch his genitals. He did not want a woman to visit his grave.

Abdul Mutallab, the Christmas underwear bomber, also would not shake hands with women, according to fellow students that knew him in London. He delivered a lecture at his mosque on why women should wear the hijab, the full body covering. Like Mohamed Atta, he had cut himself off from his family.

There are certainly legitimate complaints about the colonial and imperialist role the United States has played in the Middle East. We have supported corrupt dictators like the Saudi princes in exchange for cheap oil, and we offend Muslim sensibilities by having large military bases close to Mecca and Medina. We have supported Israeli oppression of Palestinians, and our military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children. Until we honestly come to grips with those grievances they will serve as fertile ground for nourishing new terrorists and suicide bombers, and those warriors will be heroes in the land of Islam.

Treating the sexual repression of these men separately from the context of the political struggles in the Middle East is fruitless. It is treating the symptoms without treating the cause.

A woman friend of mine thought the way to deal with this would be to send women over there to have sexual intercourse with them. I don’t think that would work. The men wouldn’t be seduced and it would confirm their notion that the West is hopelessly degenerate, even though something like that was common in the Ancient world. In Ancient Greece and Rome there were vestal virgins who would sleep with young men who visited their Temple to Aphrodite. My guess is that these “vestal virgins” were not really virgins. The term was probably a marketing device. They were probably older women seeking companionship. There’s no mention anywhere of a vestal virgin having to leave the temple after losing her virginity. So, it would probably not be successful as an instrument of U. S. foreign policy to send an ultra-modern Peace Corps of wild women to the Middle East to soften the young warriors’ hearts.

We should not try to impose our cultural values on the Muslim world. Our notion of democracy might not be their notion. Our capitalist system might seem cruel and heartless. Our notion of family might seem immoral. However, when they come into our culture, we have a right to expect certain standards in human interaction. The same friend who was proposing missionary work to the Middle East was instrumental in getting the Minnesota Legislature to pass a law that outlawed female circumcision in Minnesota. A number of Somali women were showing up in Emergency Rooms in the Twin Cities because of botched ritual circumcisions (the cutting off of the clitoris and the labia major, sometimes with a crude stone knife). Outlawing this ritual was an interference in the religious and cultural practices of the Somali, but it was a practice so clearly harmful that it justified abolition. We have no right to tell them how to live in their own country, but we have every right to expect that they will respect our standards of social behavior in this country.

Female circumcision is a great sin against Aphrodite. It says the sexual energy of women is evil and has to be controlled. The deep misogyny of the suicide bombers is closely akin to the sins against Aphrodite by Pentheus and Hippolytus and is a portent of tragedy. The religious fundamentalism that wishes to control women, whether it is the wearing of the hijab in Islam or the outlawing of abortion by Christians, is a doomed and self-destructive strategy.

There is a belief in some extreme fundamentalist Islamic sects that 72 virgins await the martyred warrior in paradise. There is no basis for this belief in the Qur’an, but it is probably a useful selling point to convince sexually naïve and hormonally supercharged young men that their repressed sexual energy will have a heavenly release after they blow themselves up.

How much better it would be if we all simply recognized and respected the power of Aphrodite and sexual energy, and we found ways to express that energy in ways that were not socially destructive