Aphrodite and Adonis
both lamentation & flowering on Easter Sunday
On this Easter Sunday, surrounded by beehives whose new queens have been taking their marriage flights, and a thousand blossoming irises and roses here in the garden, with a world on its side all around us, I suddenly remembered this piece that I wrote some years ago in Crete, in the heart of the Paschal season. I share it today with great passion in my heart, with aching prayers for this world, and with hope.
As a little note, I do not believe that deities like Adonis are simply earlier forms of Jesus— I deeply honor and am called to the mystery at the heart of Christ’s heart and Mary’s heart— but I do believe that many of the rituals and earthen threads suffusing Christianity have profoundly beautiful and syncretic Near Eastern and Mediterranean roots, and that there is room for all of this to sing through on this day of resurrections. For more of my writing about Easter itself in Crete, you can revisit this old favorite of mine.
With love and red eggs and prayers for miraculous healings and turn-arounds and transformations and liberations and justice of all good and holy kinds
Sylvia
P.S. a recording of this post can be found at the bottom of the page. xo
Aphrodite & Adonis
from The Venus Year
+ + +
Ten thousand years ago, the Queen mourned her lover on a mountain peak, among the season’s last anemones. Their petals were his blood falling where the boar had pierced him. Their petals were his body as he fell away from her in the center of a spring sky.
Queen of Honey, Queen of the Almond Blossom, Queen of Quince and Queen of Wild Pear, Queen of Red Heather Pollen and Queen of Despair, you know the labyrinth’s dark turning. Queen of the Stone, oiled with rose. Queen of the Spring, sprinkled with nectar from the throne.
At the center of your life you will lose him. At the center of your power you will fall to your knees, crying out, over his bones.