Rapture, unadulterated bliss as the sweat trickles down the back of my thighs,
Not sighs, but groans as small hands grip the sheets, holding onto anything, splayed so vulnerably before you...
Eyes bound by black silk, sensory overload as once, twice, three times filled...
With the essence of your love....and still you continue, the God that you are.
Nothing seen, only felt, hips rocking back and slammed into the delicious pleasure that surmounts....
A place inside, justified by the warmth of your ever giving flesh...my unyielding tones scream out,
Nails scratch, teeth bite...
And that is just the beginning.
Soft scratching down a panting back comes, almost uninvited...
My movement stilled, a groan from swollen, overused lips ensues,
Shivering, shaking with need,
But given only rapid heartbeats and tender touches of love.
I nearly cry, justified in the intense overuse of my flesh,
Marked by the wars of passion, heeding nothing, needing nothing but More...
Face pressed into the bed, incoherent pleas arise,
For movement to begin again.
I try, but firm hands grasp my trembling thighs....as you remove yourself to taste our pleasure,
Nearly rendering me completely and absolutely yours,
Guided by the primal needs within, as teeth settle against my most sensitive flesh...amidst the licking, lapping testaments of desire,
The heat builds, utterly, completely, as tears do fall.....this time, with relief as the explosions of bliss render me senseless.
As the silk is removed from my star filled eyes, I can see nothing, but you.
~Ode, to a God, of insurmountable love for a mortal.~
A blindfolded Cupid.
Cupido or Eros (Latin or Greek for "desire"), also known as Amor (Love), was the blind (or blindfolded) bowman who was the god of erotic love, attraction, and affection, and the fourth day of every month was sacred to him. As the enemy of chastity, he was represented by Publius Ovidius Naso (“Ovid”) as a contrast to the virgin goddess of the hunt Diana and to her brother Apollo, the lovelorn patron of poetic inspiration (both archers as well). Ovid blamed Cupido for causing him to write mere love poems instead of higher-status epics. His statue might appear in household shrines for private devotion, but no clear distinction seemed to exist between figures for veneration and those displayed as art or decoration. For the early Greeks he was the subject of a minor cult, and eventually was worshiped in a fertility cult in Thespiae, but for the most part he had no independent religious or literary existence, perhaps why he proved to be such a plastic, protean figure for millennia. In early poetry and art he was depicted as an adult male or a slender, winged youth who embodied sexual power, and a profound artist, but from the Hellenistic period onward he was increasingly portrayed as a chubby boy. On gems he was shown amusing himself with adult play, throwing darts, catching a butterfly, flirting with a nymph, or playing a horn. He is also shown wearing a helmet and carrying a buckler. He carried a torch (because love inflames passion) and a bow and arrow (because love wounds), but he was blindfolded (or blind) because of the blinkered, arbitrary nature of love. A person wounded by Cupid's sharp, golden arrow would be filled with uncontrollable desire, but if struck by his blunt, lead arrow, one would feel strong aversion. (Ovid related that Apollo taunted Cupid as an inferior archer, but Cupid retaliated by shooting him with a golden arrow while shooting the nymph Daphne with the lead one, dooming Apollo to eternally pursue Daphne and perpetually dooming Daphne to flee his advances.)Much later, James I of Scotland said Cupid actually had three arrows: gold, for a gentle "smiting" that is easily cured; silver, for a more compelling desire; and steel, for a love-wound that can never heal. Theodulf of Orleans, in the 9th century, wrote that Cupid's quiver symbolized his depraved mind, his bow was trickery, his arrows poison.
ReplyDelete“Cupido” was a sexualized alias for many galdiators, since in Roman culture the term was associated with both power and erotic attraction and was the philosophical equivalent of the Greek “pothos,” a focus of reflections on the meaning and burden of desire; moralists often criticized cupido gloriae ("desire for glory") and cupido imperii "(desire for ruling power"). The 1st-century BCE poet/philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (“Lucretius”) used the word to represent the impulse of atoms to bond and create matter as well as human lust and the animal instinct to mate. In the 16th century Michaelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s painting "Victorious Love" showed a brazenly naked Cupid trampling on emblems of culture and erudition representing music, architecture, warfare, and scholarship.
ReplyDeleteOnce Venus sent Cupid to aid her uncle Pluto, the god of the Underworld, to fall in love. After Pluto was struck by Cupid’s arrow he arose from the volcano Etna and spied Proserpina, the daughter of Ceres the goddess of grain and agriculture, whom he abducted and forced to live with him. Ceres prevented any fruits and vegetables from growing and searched everywhere for her daughter, making a desert at every step. Eventually, Pluto relented and allowed Proserpina to leave the Underworld for part of the year. Later, a jealous Venus ordered Eros to cause the mortal Psyche (“Butterfly” in Greek, the deification of the human soul) to fall in love with the world’s ugliest creature, but instead Eros fell in love with her himself; Psyche disobeyed his instructions not to look at his divine form, and he abandoned her. To appease Venus and gain her support in recovering the love of Eros, Psyche went to the Underworld to obtain some of Proserpina’s beauty, but on her way back,in an effort to enhance her own appearance, she opened the box and fell into a coma. Cupid rescued her by returning the sleep to the box, and Jupiter made her immortal so she could marry Cupid. They bore a daughter, Voluptas or Hedone (meaning physical pleasure, bliss).
Theocritus in the 3rd century BCE recounted that Cupid was stung by bees when he tried to steal their honey and he ran crying to his mother to complain that such a small creature shouldn't cause so much pain, but Venus pointed out that the same was true for him as well. The German Enlightenment writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing enlarged on the tale by then having Cupid transform himself into a bee: "he lurked beneath the carnations and roses / and when a maiden came to pick them, / he flew out as a bee and stung her."
He was also shown with dolphins, which were also associated with Dionysian religion, to represent the soul 's origin from the sea, the medium from which life was fashioned, with love as the soul's desired destiny; Cupid riding a dolphin conveyed not only how swiftly love moves but that he could be a reassuring presence on love’s wild ride . On the other hand, a sleeping Cupid became a symbol of absent or languishing love in Renaissance poetry and art.
In the earliest Greek sources he was one of the primordial gods involved in the creation of the cosmos. Parmenides (ca. 400 BCE) claimed he was the first god to come into existence, but in the 2nd century Pausanias claimed that he was the youngest of the gods, the son of Aphrodite (Venus) -- but also that he welcomed Aphrodite into the world. Earlier (ca. 700 BCE) Hesiod had placed him fourth after Chaos, Gaia (the Earth), and Tartarus (the Underworld). Aristophanes (ca. 400 BCE) posited Chaos, Tartarus, and Darkness (Erebus) as the first beings; Nyx laid a germless egg in the bosom of Erebus, from which arose Eros “with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest.” (Other Nyx-Erebus progeny included Hypnos [Sleep] and Thanatos [Death].) Eros then mated with Chaos in the depths of Tartarus to bring forth the other early gods. Other authorities ascribed his parentage to various pairings, including Nyx and Aether (the upper air) or Eris (Strife) and Zephyrus (the gentle west wind, the harbinger of spring). In many accounts, the primordial gods came into existence asexually, with Eros causing them to separate from themselves that which they already contained, but after his "birth" deities were begotten through male-female unions; Marcus Tullius Cicero claimed there were three Cupids: the son of Mercury and Diana, the son of Mercury and Venus, and the son of Mars and Venus -- these were the winged Amores (Erotes), who embodied the various aspects of love. Particularly in ancient Roman art, these cupids were associated with fruits, animals, or other attributes of the four seasons or the wine-god Dionysus, symbolizing fertility. (In Elizabethan England, Christopher Marlowe wrote of "ten thousand Cupids," and Ben Jonson said "a thousand several-coloured loves...hop about the nuptial room." However, the Romans almost always regarded Cupid as the son of Venus though with various fathers, sometimes Vulcan but usually Mars (Ares), the god of war, especially after Gaius Iulius Caesar Octavianus, the adopted son and heir of his maternal great-uncle Gaius Iulius Caesar, defeated his rival Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra VII Philopator at Actium in 31 BCE and then ascended the throne as Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Thus Cupid transferring the weapons of Mars to his mother Venus became an important motif of Augustan imagery, and iin the Aeneid, the reign’s chief mythologizer, the poet Publius Vergilius Maro (“Virgil”) depicted Aeneas as the son of Venus; Cupid, disguised as Aeneas’ son Iulus, beguiled Dido of Carthage into falling in love with Aeneas. Aeneas went on to found Rome, and Iulus (or Ascanius) became the ancestor of the Julian dynasty.
ReplyDelete