So I'm saying goodbye to my vacation and I'm watching this lovely sunset over Newport Beach, California:
and I'm listening to four crazed girls debate the perfect names for the yachts they will one day all own, and I'm also listening to my mother-in-law rail against the media because of its paltry attention to a certain Iberian tennis god, and my thoughts turn, of course, to Aphrodite, who got me into this mess in the first place. The Greek goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite was born of the sea and the perfect sunset. Her parentage is actually a bit vague (probably because the Greeks co-opted her from the even more ancient Sumerians, who called her Inanna). Of all the stories about the origins of Aphrodite, however, the best one is this:
Long before Zeus and the Olympians, the world was ruled by Gaia, mother earth, and Ouranos, father sky. Ouranos was a lusty fellow, so lusty, in fact, that Gaia could not even deliver the children she was impregnated with because Ouranos would not leave the poor girl alone. Ouranos didn't care. He hated his offspring. But Gaia loved her children and, also (can you blame her?) she was sick of carrying the growing brood inside her. So, she gave a sharpened flint to her son Kronos and, when Ouranos came a-calling, Kronos reached out from inside his mother, grabbed his father's balls, sliced them off and threw them into the sea. Eventually, long after the murder of Kronos by his own son Zeus, Aphrodite was born of Ouranos's seed and the sea itself. One day she just walked out of the Mediterranean, right around Paphos, Cypress.
Pretty grisly origins for the goddess of love, wouldn't you say? But love can be a pretty grisly business, and sunsets and the sea are an eternally dangerous combination, so dangerous that there is only one thing guaranteed to ward off Aphrodite's spell if you and your honey should happen to find yourself on a boat, on the sea, at sunset: a gaggle of girls and at least one mother-in-law obsessed with tennis.
(As for the yacht names: so easy: Finnegan's Wake.)
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