Anaduomenê

A Character Study in Aphrodite's voice.

Anaduomenê. She who was brought up from water. Not one of my favourite names, but I love them all in their way.

Anadoumenê, the goddess who surfaced from the foam.

The loam of Ouranos' genitalia lobbed off by a mad son to save a beleagered mother. Many falsely claim there is nothing more to Aphrodite than the act of love making, lust is my raison d'être, these throngs would be as correct as Ouranos was to steal the Cosmos from Holy Mother. From the maternal force which listened to the first heartbeat of the universe as a whisper, and then a song.

Eurynome, Creatrix of the cosmos. The spirit and the sound of a maiden deciding to become mystic mother coddled the first whisper of a heartbeat. The first potentiality of a Cosmos within which to love and nurture. She made it so with a word.

Not present there myself, I like to think it was a lullaby. Since I woke to the strains of one. So many people forget I was there near the origin point of the Realms, for what is a Cosmos built without love? Without an expansion of the desire to keep and guard that heartbeat, to give succor and challenge. Early were the days, new and frightening and tossed about in the echoes of a Creatrix who didn't know what power was, as there were so few definitions. So few plans and few ideas worthy of coming to fruition.

I came so near the beginning, chopped flesh and pouring blood from a child who decided to defend their mother.

Chronos got a bad rap after eating all his kids. After having a few thousand of them myself, I can almost see why he did it.

Lies! Lies and slander, I can't.

I couldn't bear watching my children become stomach acid. If I couldn't kill Deimos and Phobos at birth, if I couldn't end the panic and the clash and the infamy and the horror of my consort, I'm not the sort of parent who could take lives for power.

Therein lies the trick. The easy exhalation and the matronly coo months after.

Love emanated forth from the panicked cries of a mother attempting to give birth, and a child who wished to protect her. Often the gruesome nature of my inhabitation of the universe was overlooked. Nothing but the sea foam, a collection of bubbles taken later by Hans Christian Andersen into the motif which created mermaids and kissing princes.

I was born in fury.

I was born in the heat of battle, Chronos desperate to free himself and his siblings from his mother's capped-off inner places, before she was confronted again by a selfish lover. And therein lies love. While many attempt to take love and create from it a docility, a subservience, those who focus only on the softness of contented lovers, or the giggles of a baby's kissed cheek, they do not know me.

They do not know me, and I hesitate to wonder if they will.

I am love.

I am born of the fury and the stress and the fire behind a child's eyes, when they see their beloved parent beset, when they see injustice and they take up arms to deal with it.

For Mother's Sake.

Anaduomenê, goddess who came forth from the waters, the placental fluids after Gaia finally found her aching release and Ouranos was pushed further, too far into the sky, until his body lingered only in the memories of ancient names. And as the children spilled from the cave of the Mother, I stepped off a shell and touched foot to sea foam. Perfect skin to land, as if the act of violence was not steeped into me, a wary and consummate part of who and what I am. Of the radiance within my smile, the tip of a chin or flash of warm, honey coloured eyes.

I stepped off the sea and became a goddess of love, the goddess of easy sighs and cantankerous exhalations.

I stepped off my progenitor's blood, child of no mother but the act of the blade, and found the world forever changed.

Anaduomenê, goddess who was set upon the waters. The waters in those days, if we can call them days and not ages, when Chronos was trapped beneath the vault of Gaia, were Chaos.

And thus, I who am Love, settled upon the waters, the caustic black waters.

I floated incorporeal part Creatrix part created, the emanation of an idea which spurred Eurynome to ask only one question, and the thought spurred onward, emanating the echo and the reverberation of a Cosmos created from the whisper.

From the sigh.

From the easy exhalation of a presence which knew nothing, untamed in the chaos of the infinite waters.

Love.

Love in its whispers is a quandary of might and compassion, we know it only when we know fiercely. When sensation gives way to dopamine hits or warrior fevers or the gentility of time without a battle, before the next charge.

Although many painted me as a gentle beauty, wicked in my cuckold-crafting and as lecherous as the world's whore, I admit at times I can be those things. Lecherous and adulterous and petty. I can release affection on those who would not otherwise expect it, and in my youth I did. Capricious and prone to intensities found few other places in the histories of the Realms.

The Hellenes attempted to detract from me. To pull me down into Zeus's tidal waves of expectations and cradle songs. Neuter my power so ancient it pushed past to the original source the gods clawed to understand or claim as their birth rite.

I touch each dimension. I seed each Realm, yet I am not the pieces but the whole.

Anaduomenê.

Goddess of the waters, who emanated from the foam and the loam and the sea.

A flitter of bubbles, and the slender ankle of a woman who perched upon the land to view a dominion I was never to own, but absorb with all fine modes.

I am Anaduomenê.

I am the goddess of blood, the emanation of an act of passion and preservation for the mother of the world, for the world itself. I am the scream and the retch and the knife blade and the blood stains which flow like rivers for the blood in Ouranos' veins was water. The caustic, black waters, which became one with the essence of Oceanus, which fed rivers and streams and water ways like Ymir, whose echo I remember in the back of this skull of mine.

I am Anaduomenê, consort of War. Or, War is my consort, Ares bows at my heels.

We do trend to go for someone who reminds us of what we found passionate and protective. Am I a liar? Is love false? Maybe at times, a love we thought was eternal is a temporary thing, a passing fad before I got bored sans the clatter of shields. My beauty comes from the desire for extremes. And I am known to be an angry, capricious goddess.

A force of nature, created before nature was true in its birth.

I was the act of creating nature, as Chronos and his siblings remained trapped by their father's phallus in the depths of Gaia's caves.

And I am neither submissive, nor am I passive.

If you will not pick up your sword to defend those you wish to love, do not call my name.

I require too many sacrifices for all but the adamant to worship and receive blessing. There are other goddesses, tamer more homely goddesses. Try Hestia, or Hera, or Frigga. Try a hearth-goddess for domesticity and quiet delights.

Anaduomenê is not genteel.

I rise from the sea.