If you grew up in a Mediterranean or Latin American or Irish Catholic cultural setting, the notion of finding oneself by becoming part of the life of the community is so natural, that it has long since ceased to even be a notion. One would no more define the love that ties the community together, than one would take the time to explain what breathing was. Though, to an outsider, one might explain that there is immediate family, extended family, and then there is the family of families that is the community. And that the morality of this family is defined, not by a rigid set of arbitrary rules, but by mutual respect and earned trust, and an appreciation of the rights and needs of each individual and each relationship in the community. There is no illusion that a simple set of rules can capture this, but instead there is an elaborate and ever evolving body of custom that has grown out of millenia of balancing human needs, that is more lived than explained.

But at the heart of it is trust, and concern, and loyalty. The refusal to betray one's own, even for a "higher" purpose. Artemis might call for the sacrifice of the innocent to appease her - which is why she is not the one we worship. She is too cold and cruel for the liking of those who have fully come into the warmth and light of civilised life. But the Aphrodite we worship, who absolutely should not be mistaken for the Babylonian goddess Ishtar (she whose cults employed the "sacred whores" mentioned earlier), would never sanction or tolerate such a betrayal of trust. She is the one who helps us find each other, and helps to bring us together. If we had to nervously look over our shoulder at each moment, wondering if we were to be the next victim of someone else's "higher cause", how much togetherness could we feel ?

If one thinks that this issue is centuries away from being currently relevant, watch the eagerness with which so many parents will push for sending their own sons into battle, to their possible deaths, in order to achieve some desired geopolitical goal. The willingness to offer our own up in sacrifice, has hardly disappeared. Some of us have merely successfully deluded themselves into thinking of the betrayal of the trust of one's loved ones, as if it were, or even could be a form of noble self sacrifice. They willfully forget who it is that does the dying, and who will get some possibly craved sympathy and attention from the neighbors, should the death of the one they agreed should be forcibly send off, actually occur.

Some have gone so far, in rationalising this sort of masochistic selfishness, as to argue that the one killed is the fortunate one ! That the ones left behind, are the ones who deserve our sympathy. And so, in subcultures in which one is usually told to quit "whining", on most occasions when sorrow might be expressed, the parent who 'loses' a child, is given permission to cry, and a lifetime of sorrows may finally find voice, without the mourner feeling shame. Indeed, this belief tells us that the customarily uncaring others, finally are to validate their expression of sorrow, and show some sign that they actually care about the parents, as human beings.

In this way, the death of the child they have effectively agreed to the sacrifice of, brings them needed emotional rewards that they could not otherwise know, and creates a conflict of interest between the son, and the parents who he should have been able to trust. As the parents engage in the intrinsically subconscious process of weighing their child's needs against others, this conflict can't help but undermine their loyalty to him, and he can't help but feel it. In this way, the coldness of the society that inspires the masochism, acts to preserve itself. Gradual social evolution won't do away with it. Rather, someone has to have the bad taste to bring it out in the open, regardless of the rigid dictates of "ettiquette". (Distinguished from custom, in that custom comes with a philosophy underlying it, while ettiquette is there purely "because we say so"). And, once in the open, it must be faced, consciously, and actually thought about, those thoughts being acted on.

So long as those who do so are ignored, progress in dealing with this sort of problem is impossible. It is for this reason that social progress is so often achieved, in so many places, through violence rather than discussion. As violence is not dependent on the rightness of the cause it serves, for its success, this route to progress is one subject to frequent reversals, making for an abundance of senseless tragedy along its destructive way. Far better that we should open our own ears, than each others' veins.

The goddess I imagine, is one who would call on us to do the former, knowing that the latter is ultimately the only alternative.

So, how are we to envision Aphrodite's character ? It is not enough to merely say "look at the stories" because the stories conflict with each other. One must pick and choose.

One should remember that the "gods" of Olympus weren't the simple, static figures that one sees in the sanitised version of mythology one encounters in grade school, but visions of divinity with cults and rituals of their own, whose conception evolved in time. I would suspect, revealing different sides of a far more complex and ever changing reality in the process. Early on, as the conception of our Aphrodite occurs to those who have heard of Ishtar (the Babylonian goddess of love and war), there are images of Aphrodite the warrior. Now, one might say that knowing of Ishtar, brought the people close enough to an image of Aphrodite (by showing them the approximation to be found in a dark charicature of her), that the truth of her was able to reach, and pull their spirits in toward her. Having said so, one might think of Aphrodite the Warrior as merely being an image along the way, true to no goddess, but merely a curious combination of two of them that was envisioned along the way.

I would agree that that vision, like any human vision of the divine, was, to a degree a false one. Clearly so, as we seek to envision those who go beyond our understanding. But I imagine it to be an aspect of the truth. To ask whether the true Aphrodite is the one who cries out in pain when wounded, or the one who rides off into battle to defend the ones she cares about, is to miss the point. It is to confuse masochism with courage, or a submissive willingness to allow others to dispose of one's life as they see fit, with heroism.

Aphrodite, as I picture her, does not ride off because she does not value her life, or well being. She rightly treasures both. Nor does she do so, because she has been pressured to do so, or would feel guilty if she didn't, for it would be noone's place to be so presumptuous as to make such a demand of her, and she knows that she is not the property of others, and maybe not even of herself, and need not apologise for taking care of herself. She has not been pushed, because those who love and care for her, try to talk her out of harm's way, rather than into it, as she tries with them. (Consider Zeus' words to her during the Iliad, after she comes to the defense of her son, Achilles, and her words to Adonis, before he goes out on his last hunt). Rather, she is drawn in, by her concern for those she protects, out of her love for them, recognising that her acceptance of risk is, in and of itself, an evil which she accepts only as an alternative to what is, to her, the greater evil of seeing harm done to those she cares about.

This concern comes, not because others have taught her to feel it, but because in coming to understand herself, she found that it had always been within her, as part of her own inner nature. Much as we help our children find that truth within themselves, by keeping them from following the selfish path that, while involving less struggle at the moment action is first taken in life, is a false path that leads to greater hardship for all when it is pursued.

In this, we see the difference between the conception of love, in our devotion to Aphrodite, and that of Pauline Christianity. In part, the recognition that in conditioning others to give to us, we have done the equivalent of taking from them, the distinction between the two being a legalistic formality that is a reflection of the arbitrary choices made in constructing our language, unrooted in any moral reality. We do not so much ask, as offer, doing so because of the importance of the other to us, not out of some bloodless sense of duty. But - on seeing another sacrifice for ourselves, or others - out of love for the one sacrificing, we seek to talk him out of doing so, until it is clear that this choice is so right for him, that our words will fall on deaf ears. As we would expect him to do for us. And each, so approached, is to accept that effort in the spirit of love in which it is offered, without that unwarranted anger encouraged by the exaggerated and distorted image of self found in radical individualism.

Most crucially, the difference is to be seen in the recognition that the joys and hardships of life should best be shared equally, as far as our individual differences allow, rather than seperated, the latter being dropped on the shoulders of a few "special" individuals, conditioned to believe that they should play the role of martyr in life. If one of us should start to play that role, we will not allow it, but insist that he share some of his burdens with the others. We will act to undo the wrong a bad tradition has done to his soul.

Nor shall we treat ourselves, or allow others to treat themselves, as expendable, but we shall recognise that each individual is irreplacable, with a duty not only to others, but to himself as well. These seemingly conflicting goods, when viewed in the context of a whole society, may be seen to be two inseperable sides of the same coin. What good is it for me to concern myself with your well being, if you then render my efforts on your behalf futile, by harming yourself on behalf of another ? If I truly care about you, how can I be accepting of that ? For that matter, if each of us thinks nothing of the others, what sort of lives may any of us hope for ?

What is called for is not altruism or selfishness, but balance.

What we see in the standard Christian call for the encouragement of altruism, as opposed to the understanding and acceptance of it, is the desire to take a short cut, in order to realise short term goals. Yes, if we shanghai our young men, and force them into battle at gunpoint, that does make today's battle easier to win. If we convince our neighbor that he sins, if he doesn't devote every waking moment to our favorite charity, today, our immediate goals will more easily be met. But what sort of society are we helping to create, each time we use another as a slave, directly or indirectly - as a means to our end, and not his own ?

In failing to value each other, and seeking to hide our indifference behind a hypocritical claim that we do so for the spiritual benefit of the one so put on, we promote both the uncaring social attitudes that made our charity necessary in the first place, and the dishonesty that keeps our social ills from seeing the open discussion necessary for their meaningful alleviation. In the process, we diminish ourselves in each other's eyes, and our own, as we scramble for excuses to make to justify our refusal to make those inhuman sacrifices, that we feel compelled to pay lip service to the needfulness of making. "Yes, we all should be spending our weekends doing yardwork in Cabrini Green, but, uh, my kids have to get to Tuba lessons, so why don't you go, and how terrible of you if you don't". As we do so, we strengthen the conscious expectation that such unreasonable requests will be honored, and help to make our world a slightly more repressive place.

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