United States or Canada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
On the other hand, in the higher thought he was made the representative of the production of universal animal life, and rose to the rank of a great god. +403+. The Greek deities with whom Priapos was oftenest identified were Dionysos and Hermes both gods of fertility.
For Anaitis did not really think that, as went natural endowments, her Jurgen had much reason to envy even such a general favorite as Priapos, say, from what she knew of both. So it was that Jurgen honored custom. "Because these beastly nature myths may be right," said Jurgen; "and certainly I cannot go so far as to say they are wrong: but still, at the same time !"
Priapos is the only male myth who comes here in anything like the semblance of a complete human being: and I had infinitely rather he stayed away, because even I who am Jurgen cannot but be envious of him." "And why, pray?" "Well, where I go reasonably equipped with Caliburn, Priapos carries a lance I envy "
+402+. The most interesting figure of this character is Priapos, an ithyphallic deity of uncertain origin; his special connection was with Lampsakos, and he may have been an Asian creation.
I know that Nacumera will fall, that some day in your native land people will say, 'That aged woman yonder was once the wife of Demetrios of Anatolia, who was pre-eminent among the heathen. Then they will tell of how I cleft the head of an Emperor who had likened me to Priapos, and how I dragged his successor from behind an arras where he hid from me, to set him upon the throne I did not care to take; and they will tell how for a while great fortune went with me, and I ruled over much land, and was dreaded upon the wide sea, and raised the battlecry in cities that were not my own, fearing nobody.
Aphrodite would naturally be chosen for the female side, and the ithyphallic Hermes is appropriate for the male side possibly the Hermes pillar with Aphrodite bust was the earliest form. The representations of Hermaphrodites show a male body with female bust; the name Aphroditos would rather suggest a female body with male additions. Other Greek bisexual figures are forms of Priapos and Eros.
The allurements of Priapos complete the sweet charm of abounding Nature." The two Greeks walked on in silence, with slow step, along an avenue of slender cypresses at the end of which opened a grotto, its rocky walls draped with ivy, allowing a greenish, diffused light to filter through its openings.
The sounds from the fields, the stirring of the people outside the villa in the houses of the slaves, and even the cries of the exotic birds on the terrace seemed to come from a distant world. Between two clumps of rose bushes stood an image of Priapos carved from the trunk of a tree. The rustic god was smiling with a lewd expression, arching his hairy breast and thrusting his abdomen forward.
Little is known of his cult beyond the fact that he figured in marriage ceremonies in a peculiarly indecent way; by later writers he is sometimes identified with Priapos. The Romans adopted the cult of Priapos as well as other phallicistic forms of worship; his original character appears in his rôle of patron of gardens.
But meanwhile from the East there strayed swarms of enigmatic faces; the harlot handmaids of her Celestial Highness Ishtar, Princess of Heaven; the mutilated priests of Tammuz her lover; dual conceptions that resulted in Aphrodite Pandemos, the postures of Priapos, the leer of the Lampsacene, and, with them, forms of worship comparable, in the circumadjacent beauty, to latrinæ in a garden, ignoble shapes that violated the candour of maidens' eyes, but with which Greece became so accustomed that on them moral aphorisms were engraved.
Word Of The Day