"If there is any truth in this conjectural explanation of the custom, we readily understand why other Asiatic goddesses of fertility were served in like manner by eunuch priests. These feminine deities required to recieve from their male ministers, who personated the divine lovers, the means of discharging their beneficent functions: they had themselves to be impregnated by the life-giving energy before they could transmit it to the world." (The Golden Bough, p. 406

We learn today that Ovid's Metamorphoses has inspired more art than any other work besides the Bible; little surprise being as Ovid is so intensely visual a writer. And then we have instances of literary works inspired by art that is inspired by myth, such as WH Auden's poem Musee D'Arts, from Brueghal's(sic?) painting of the death of Icarus.

As an ongoing assignment, we are to devote at least one sentence to each particular story from each book of Ovid. As there are over 250 distinct stories, this comes to 250 sentences, roughly. And all are burgeoning with life, because to the mythological world everything is alive. Anima, the Latin for "soul" gives us "animated" and "animal" after all. Relatedly, we are to read Chp. 7 of Eliade and do a blog on it.

And the significance of the Triple Goddess(subject of a book by Robert Graves), personified as the Mother, the Maiden and the Crone. These are, significantly, three stages which virtually all women pass through. Therefore, all women are embodiments of the Goddess. Or as page 626 of Finnegans Wake puts it, "Allgearls is wea. At times. So."

I never would've thought I was divine, but then it seems we learn something new everyday.