Monday 25 August 2014

Soulmates, Romance and Love at first sight: pagan myths

Where does idea of a soul mate come from? Somewhere out there is the perfect partner for me simply waiting to be discovered. Love at first sight? Lifelong commitment?
Not from Tennyson's latter day medieval romance: The Lady of Shallot or the original French courtly romans. 
   I'm guessing that love was an essential part of the first stories; certainly well-developed at the time of Classical Greece with dramatic suicides for the sake of love and lives on in sentimental and serious films. Was babyish Cupid with a bow worshipped in early times? We probably still give the little infant too much room to cause chaos. 
   So the mythology of love is pagan in origin, pre-Christian by a long way. Marriage ceremonies in church were a late invention to link choice of partner with Christian theology. And yet now the church fervently promotes marriage and is slowly getting up to speed with people changing their minds and choosing a suitable gender.
   If romance is a fiction devised by druids around a fire how come computers play such a part in dating nowadays? Can the age-old mysterious chemistry really work via binary clockwork?
   Dating is accompanied by a storm of hopes, dreams, memories and associations. The colours, smells, the setting are all capable of being aggrandised by our passionate hopes for transformation and belittled by our post-modern sarcastic cynical minds.
If there is a magic it is in how somewhere real and earthy can be both heaven and hell at different times.

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