Greek classical religion in the works of Pierre Louys- ‘Bilitis’ & ‘Aphrodite’

Sir Laurence Alma Tadema, A Dedication to Bacchus, 1889

In his two major works, his pastiche of Sappho’s poetry, The Songs of Bilitis, and in Aphrodite, his recreation of Hellenistic Alexandria, the writer Pierre Louys created a very personal and largely ahistorical version of Greek religion. He imagined female acolytes who served the goddess Aphrodite with orgiastic ceremonies; he described the maenads on Cyprus celebrating the gods Dionysos/ Bacchus and Astarte with ecstatic lesbian rites and, he described in detail how Aphrodite’s temple in Alexandria was surrounded by the booths of sacred prostitutes who had been trained in the temple’s school and who welcomed all to enjoy sex in honour of the goddess- regardless of gender, race or any other quality. Louys imagined it- and by so doing held up a mirror to his own times and society.

In 1900 the American literary critic, novelist and poet Vance Thompson (1863-1925) wrote French Portraits: being appreciations of the writers of young France. He devoted a chapter in the book to the ‘Paganism of Pierre Louys.’ Thompson’s summary of the young French writer remains valuable, even a century and a quarter later. The poet was described as “at once the apologist and apostle of the antique modes of life… The Greece he loves is… the later Greece of the ‘free morality.’ Indeed, Monsieur Louys has fled thither to escape Calvin. He has taken refuge there from the law of Geneva.” Thompson rightly recognised, I think, that in his books, which frequently involved fantasy and utopias, Louys was escaping bourgeois, Protestant Europe and its stifling morality:

“He is a neo-pagan, who loves pleasure, he avers, that he may know virtue. He repeats the old Greek saying that love is the most virtuous of all sentiments, and he means love in all its moods and tenses. He dreams of a world where the passions may walk in beautiful unconscious nudity. ‘Among certain barbarous peoples,’ said the astounded Herodotus, ‘it is considered shameful to go naked.’ Louys would gladly recapture this fresh, sublime wonder of the historian. He would strip off the Genevan robe in which modern society hides itself. He longs for the frank love that dwelt unabashed under the blithe old skies, before Judaism had invented a new sin and a new virtue. He says : ‘Modern morality is mistaken; love and nudity are proper objects of contemplation.’ He traces the modern invasion of hideousness to the protestant cult that made the body disgraceful and love a shameful thing, to be hid and denied. His neo-paganism is a sort of faith at once materialistic and mystic; it is a renewal of the old carnal religion on the pretext of adoring the divine beauty.”

For all his idealism though, Louys may have been deluding himself. Thompson suspected that there were in fact just as many puritans and prudes in ancient Greece as in modern France. He could well have been correct: “Fiction like history records only the exceptional,” as he observed, “- merely because there is no trace in scandalous history of their virtuous contemporaries, it is absurd to assume that there was no virtue in Athens. Indeed the very emphasis laid upon the free amours of the Athenians is evidence enough that they were exceptional. So usual must have been the puritanic conduct of life in Greece that those who stepped outside it became notable by that one act.”

Thompson therefore declared that “In Aphrodite… Pierre Louys has written a beautiful book- a book frankly non-moral, a paean of the flesh, splendidly eloquent. [But] it is a corrupt book. Its corruption lies in the fact that it is false to the very ideals that thunder in the index. It proclaims the essential purity of nudity- and tricks out its girls in all the shamelessness of sought and subtle apparel; it proclaims the frank nobility of human love and then permits you to peer at it sneakingly through the spy-hole of a curtain. The apostle of paganism sees only in the antique life la grande sensualite and forgets that it had ideals both of mysticism and beauty… Greek life was not so simple as Pierre Louys would have you believe. It was not alone love, nor was love only the peopling of the world.”

All these criticisms may be fair, but I think we can still admire Louys for daring to imagine a different world, what he considered a more desirable world, in which our assumptions, preconceptions, moral codes and ingrained rules, did not apply (and of course, this was even more the case when he wrote). He wanted to liberate love and sexuality; in both The Songs of Bilitis, and in Aphrodite, for example, he imagined a marriage ceremony for female partners that was inconceivable at the time he wrote. He wanted all individuals to be able to express their sexualities uninhibitedly and, in his writing, he celebrated this, treating same-sex attraction as entirely normal and unremarkable. Diversity and equality were concepts he promoted, even if he’d never heard the terms.

The freedom and instinctiveness of he allowed to his human characters merely reflected the conduct of the gods- deities such as Dionysos and Diana. References to the gods and minor divinities (the nymphs and naiads) are scattered throughout the Songs of Bilitis, for the deities are ever present. For example, Bilitis and Selenis, whilst watching their flocks, sing a “pastoral song, invoking Pan, god of the wind of summer.” The nymphs are continually nearby, watching us, in pools, rivers, woods and fountains.

In his works, Louys is obsessed with sex and eroticism- celebrating all sorts of fetishes and perversions as everyday and acceptable. For him, it seemed, pleasure was the cardinal aim. Nonetheless, this can mean that sex starts to shape every aspect of his imaginary past. In Bilitis, for example, the poet and her girlfriend worship Astarte alongside Aphrodite, praying to her as the “perpetually fecund… chaste and lascivious, pure and fruitful.” Later, when Bilitis is mistress of a brothel on Cyprus, the symbol of Priapus is placed beside the house’s marble bath so that the guardian of orchards may also watch over the courtesans’ bodies “the opened poppies of our lips, the violets of our eyes… the firm fruit of our breasts…”

Sacrifice to these gods can involve flowers (from Bilitis to the hamadryads, seeking their aid) and branches of olives (from Bilitis and her friends to Persephone, asking her to spare a sick friend); in Aphrodite we see flowers, coins, clothes and jewellery all being offered to the goddess. Animals are also sacrificed- such as doves and hares to Aphrodite. Sacrifice often involves items far more intimate to the individual- in one case, a young woman’s virginity, in another her whole life- as when a girl devotes herself to the goddess by voluntarily placing herself in the temple school. When the goddess’ help and encouragement is sought, we see her being petitioned by girlfriends Rhodis and Myrtocleia for the reassurance that she too loved women alongside Adonis and other males.

As Vance Thompson said, Louys may have recreated an ancient past that gave undue emphasis to one particular aspect of their morality- the extent to which it was not bounded by certain preconceptions that we have tended to take for granted for centuries and still challenge today. His is a daring and radical classical society, one that provokes us to thought by those fundamental differences.

For more details of all of the works of Pierre Louys, see my bibliography for him. For details of the work of Alma Tadema and others, see the essays on my books page. A full, annotated version of this essay can be downloaded from my Academia page.

Sir Laurence Alma Tadema, Venus & Mars, 1888