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Excerpt from Homage to Venus Dione. It was Hesiod who preserved for us the more primitive legend of Venus born from the waves of the sea. This is the Oriental story (lakshmi too is born of the churning of the ocean) and it is also the more pro found, in spite of its crudity or perhaps because of it. The ancient East had many intuitions of the nature of things; and modern science often does no more than clothe in precise language what the symbolism of mythology had already apprehended and expressed. The Heavenly Seed falling into the Sea of Matter is a pregnant allegory that persists even in the minds of materialists. Yet this is but half the story. For Venus is not the Goddess of Life but the Goddess of Love. And love is the conjunction of individual Opposites. Venus arose from the foam at the water's edge, a creature of sea and earth. From the whirl pool of life as it broke upon land, Love was born. Ever since the first dawn of thought gleamed upon the dark landscape of the instincts, man has regarded woman with a mixture of attraction and awe. Woman as the Gate of Life; Woman as the Object of Desire: between these two poles have his emotions swung. She was at once the great Mother and the Universal Mistress; and in both capacities charged with mm. The body of woman has always been heavy with magic, mysterious as life itself. Somehow it was more deeply imbedded in Nature than man's own body, more responsive to its rhythms. And if individual woman, how much more the Great Goddess. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition