SAPPHO: THE TENTH MUSE

In the Anthologia Palantia, Plato is credited with saying: “Some say the muses are
nine - how careless - behold, Sappho of Lesbos is the tenth”. In a similar vein, a
poem attributed to Dioscorides hails Sappho with an invokation that says “greetings
to you lady, as to the gods; for we still have your immortal daughters, your
songs”. Famously too, the great statesman Solon, a contemporary of Sappho, is said
to have heard a boy singing one of her songs, and asked him to teach it to him, so
that he might learn it and die.

Who was this womyn who could garner such divine-like praise? Sappho lived in
approximately 600 BCE, on the Aegean isle of Lesbos. Born in the coastal town of
Eressos, her mother’s name was Kleis, a name she later gave to her daughter, while
her father was named Skamandronymos. She also appears to have had three brothers
called Erigyins, Charaxos (who was actually mentioned by Herodotus, in his
Histories), and Larichos, who held office in local Mytilene government. Such was
the extent of her families’ involvement in politics that at one stage Sappho had to
seek temporary refuge on the island of Sicily.

Her name, in the original Greek, was Psappho, but we know her today by the
Latinized version of her name. It appears to have meant, or to have been synonymous
with, lapis lazuli, a stone of some magickal significance. Lapis is commonly
associated with water, the primordial element of creation, and with the Goddess. In
Egypt, it was known as the Stone of Truth and was sacred the goddess of fate Maat,
while in China it was considered to be one of the Seven Precious Things.
Importantly, too, the Sumerian goddess of death and the underworld, Erishkigal,
slept naked in a vast palace of lapis lazuli. In the early translations of the
Bible into English, the word sappur was mistranslated as sapphire, but originally
this word meant holy-blood. This sappur referred, not to the stone we know today as
the sapphire, but to the lapis lazuli, as a symbol of the blueblood of the Dark
Goddess, and of Her protection of matrilineal inheritance. As lapis lazuli, then,
Sappho was an incarnation of the goddess, and an embodiment of the wise blood that
permeates all life, and all beauty and allows poetry to be written, and the songs
of the kozmos to be sung.

There are no exact representations of Sappho from her time period, so we have no
idea what she looked like. There are, however, a number of busts attributed as her
from later period in Greek history. The earliest known rendition of Sappho is an
annotated picture on a Grecian vase from the sixth century BCE. She is shown
wearing traditional Greek dress, and holding lyre; though it has seven strings,
Sappho was famous for inventing a 21-string lyre.

The general consensus is that Sappho founded or became the head of a school of
learning and religion. Her poetry refers to a close circle of friends and
associates, that she describes as hetairai, literally mean companions. This word,
though, has sexual connotations, because in Athens, a similar word referred to the
male, and female, prostitutes that would attend the meetings of older Greek men. It
is known that Greek education was pederastic, in that older men would teach young
boys through a personal and often sexual relationship. We can suggest then, that
Sappho employed a similar practice at her school for girls, hence the use of the
word hetairai to describe her friends and pupils. It is important to point out that
there was nothing exploitive or abusive in the type of relationship, and it is only
its lack of social context that would make emulation in today’s world ill advised.
This form of sexual teaching also bears out one of the scientific theories for the
presence of a gay-gene in the make-up of humanity. It has been argued that a gay-
gene provides people who are able to teach and assist young people, unencumbered as
they can be with families of their own; although it is, of course, erroneous to
suggest that every homosexual does not have children, or a desire to have a family.
It is also vitally important to clarify that the ancient practice of the prostitute
did not carry the same double-standard stigma that it does in the modern world.
Often prostitutes in the ancient world were sacred prostitutes, who lived within
the precincts of the temples, and were honoured for their vital role in society. In
fact, the modern derogatory word whore was originally a sacred title for a
priestess of a goddess, derived from the word horae; just as other slang words were
originally sacred, such as bitch, cunt, or even old wives’ tale. It is only in
today’s world based on patriarchy that the once sacred office of the prostitute
could be degraded and criminalized, while the buyers and abusers of this ancient,
and still sacred, art-form often have the law on their male, and thoroughly
patriarchal, side.

The exact nature of Sappho’s school is not a recorded one; in fact it relies more
on common record than any historical one. However, there is an account by a male
compatriot of Sappho, Alcaeus, in which he describes a religious and seemingly
sexual festival. He tells of how he lived in a remote area of Lesbos during a time
of political turmoil, where, in a sacred area, Lesbian women walk about trailing
their gowns and being judged for their beauty, while the wondrous sound of the
women’s sacred cry every year echoes all around”.

Alcaeus, who elsewhere addressed Sappho as “0 weaver of violets, holy, sweet-

smiling Sappho,” appears to have witnessed a festival of some importance, in which
the part played by womyn was paramount. We can also tenuously deduce an almost
lesbian aspect in the beauty competition, where it seems to be have been judged by
women of Lesbos, and not by men.

Lesbos, even it would seem, in Sappho’s day, was regarded as an island on which
lesbianism was widespread. Originally, before Sappho grew to her legendary stature,
lesbianism was known as tribadism, while lesbians were referred to as tribads.
Aside from Lesbos, the island of Leucas was also regarded as a lesbian retreat, as
the very first illustrated book of tribadic sexual positions, in Greece, if not the
entire world, was reputed to have been written by a Leucadian womyn, Philsenis.
Also Plutarch, the historian and commentator, echoed the Athenian belief that
tribadism was more common in rival Sparta, and mentioned that “at Sparta love was
held in such honour that even the most respectable women became infatuated with
girls”.

Certainly, the lesbian elements in Sappho’s poetry are proof of the presence of
lesbianism or tribadism, in ancient Greece, and further, of Sappho’s own sexuality.
This however, as we shall see, has not hindered attempts at hiding and removing
this central element in her work. However, the briefest perusal of her poetry in
its unadulterated state will quickly confirm, not only her sexuality, but also her
celebration of it.

From her poetry, we know that Sappho had, as her lover, a beautiful womyn called
Anaktoria. She left Sappho, becoming now far distant, and so Sappho was left with
only memories of her pleasing, graceful movement, and the radiant splendour of her
face. The only other lover of Sappho that is mentioned by name is a womyn in
Lucians satirical “Dialogi lieretricil” called Leaina. She is described as being
loved by the rich woman from Lesbos, and that they shared a home doing heaven knows
what with each other.“ This story is highly apocryphal though, and of course
satirical, and so nothing great need be read into it.

The clearest example of Sappho’s passion and depth of love occurs in Fragment 31,
where she speaks to a womyn she is madly, but apparently unrequitedly, in love
with. She speaks of the she feels towards anyone who is able to sit near to her,
and to hear her delightful voice and seductive laugh. And then describes how:
Even when I glimpse you for a moment
My tongue is stilled as speech deserts me
While a delicate fire is beneath my skin -
My eyes cannot see, then,
When I hear only a whirling sound
As I shivering, sweat
Because all of me trembles;
I become as moist as grass
And nearer to death...
But all must be ventured...
This is without doubt the finest example of lesbian desire ever put to paper. It is
also a poem that illustrates just how patriarchy will seek to reinterpret and
blatantly misrepresent anything that challenges its preconceived view of the world,
Despite the obvious emotion that Sappho expresses towards the poem’s object, it was
common up until only recently to describe the poem as a wedding song, with the
bride and groom being the couple Sappho watches; this is regardless of the fact
that there are no hints of affection between the man and the womyn. In another
gross misinterpretation, the object of Sappho’s affection is taken to be the man,
who because of his “natural superiority as a man”, is making her question her
homosexuality; the fantasy of every red-blooded and homosexually- threatened man.
This interpretation has often been compounded by the misreading of Sappho’a
reference to being “more moist than grass” as the less erotic “greener than grass”.

The reason for this misreading, other than that it fits the jealousy scenario, is
that it is sexually explicit in such a way to strike fear into the hearts of anyone
who prefers to think of women as desire-less. It can be read as either the vaginal
moisture that occurs in arousal, or as Germaine Greer argues, the kind of ecstatic
and maenadial liquefaction that is characteristic of the uninhibited female libido.
“Sappho’s poem presents pretty well the state of mind-body that causes twelve-year
old teenyboppers to liquefy all over the chairs at pop-concerts, to sob and scream
and wet themselves... Though the wholesale liquefaction by love-sick females is
well known to pop-concert promoters, who have to undertake to re-cover the seats
after rock concerts, it is not discussed in polite society... The spectacle of
uninhibited female libido is terrifying. Greer does not suggest, however, that
Sappho remained in a state of perpetual adolescence, but that this element of
female sexuality was more familiar to the ancient Greeks than it is to us now. So
“if it was accepted as a part of female sexuality, the capacity for incontinent
emotional riot may well have endured into maturity”.

THE FRAGMENTS OF SAPPHO

As we have already seen, Sappho’s family had an important role in the local
politics, which were fraught with turmoil and rivalry and were obviously of some
financial worth. Sappho herself, however, does not appear to have held much
interest in either money, or politics, and says as much in Fragment 16:

For Some - horsemen; for others - infantry;

For some others - it is ships which are, on this black earth,
Visibly constant in their beauty. But for me,
It is that which you desire.
To all, it is easy to make this completely understood
For Helen - she who greatly surpassed other mortals in beauty –
Left her most noble man and sailed forth to Troy
Forgetting her beloved parents and her daughter
Because the goddess led her away.
Which makes me to see again Anaktoria now far distant;
For I would rather behold her pleasing, graceful movement
And the radiant splendour of her face
Than your Lydian chariots and foot-soldiers in full armour.
What poetry we have by Sappho comes only in fragments much as this one above. She
is said to have composed enough material to fill nine books. Greek scholars,
working in Alexandria, Egypt, during the Hellenistic period collated this body of
work. The first book had all her songs based on four line stanzas; known as the
Sapphic stanza now, such is Sappho’s fame. And we also know that the ninth book
contained all of her songs, such as those for weddings, that were not based on the
Sapphic stanza. All up, it has been calculated that the nine books contained 6,300
lines of poetry, approximately 300 songs. Unfortunately, along with many of the
great works of the ancient world, Sappho's nine books were destroyed by the Church,
which with good reason deemed them obscene. Tatian, the 2nd century Christian
writer, for example, called Sappho a “love-crazy female fornicator who even sings
about her own licentiousness” Pope Gregory VII, in the 11th century, is said to
have personally ordered that Sappho’s work be burned. But besides her
homosexuality, the Church had another reason for destroying the works of Sappho,
and that was her uninhibited love and celebration of the goddess Aphrodite. It must
be remembered that this goddess was more powerful, and more of a threat to
Christianity, than the diminutive and patriarchal title of goddess of love would
suggest.

Because of this wilful destruction, most of Sappho’s poetry then, was retained only
in the often inaccurate, quotes of historians; until the early 1800s, when
fragments of papyrus and manuscript used in the wrapping of mummies of the
Hellenistic era were found in Egypt. These fragments although often in a tattered
and dog-eared state, contained many missing pieces of poems for which there had
previously only been quotations or single line excerpts. But of the original nine
volumes, all we have left today is 200 often- incomplete fragments. The loss of
these works was aptly expressed by the modern American writer Willa Carter, who
said: “If of all the lost richness we could have one master restored to us, one of
all the philosophers and poets, the choice of the world would be for the lost nine
books of Sappho.”

SAPPHO AND APHRODITE

The only complete song of Sappho that we now have is her Hymn to Aphrodite. There
is a kind of magic in this because Sappho’s relationship with the goddess was a
remarkable one. Whereas the gods, in a conventional framework, were in a position
of power that had to be entreated, Sappho’s use of her stanza-form, and her love-
like relationship, brought them, or rather the goddess, closer. Her style of
writing poetry, in contradistinction to what had gone before, embraced the
personal, it celebrated the pain and emotions of being human, and then spoke to the
gods. This style was ascending in nature, whereas previous styles had been written
from the viewpoint of the gods, (condescending to humankind. Sappho’s prose is a
form of magick, then, and her works are keys to unlocking god-forms, and the
kozmos, with just the utterance of a few words.

The Aphrodite that Sappho knew and loved was not the familiar image we see in the
paintings of Sandro Botticelli (despite his undeniable skills, he was dealing, in
this instance, with stereotypes) or even the ephemeral goddess she became to
Athenian Greece. Instead, she was an all-powerful, and originally matriarchal, form
of the goddess. Her power was one of unabashed and unfettered female sexuality, and
lust, not the romanticized and saccharine concepts that she is now associated with,
and also continues to be every time the word “Venus” is used in a stereotypical and
dismissive fashion.

She was a goddess who fell in love with the youth Adonis, but when Persephone,
goddess of the underworld, also fell in love with him, it was decided that he would
stay one-third of each year by himself, another with Persephone, and the other with
Aphrodite. Consequently, he would be gored to death, every year, by a boar sent by
Aphrodite. This emulates a myth cycle found throughout Europe and the Middle East
in such goddess-consort duos as Cybele and Attis, Ishtar and Tammuz, and Inanna and
Dumuzi. This cycle also finds a northern application, where the dying god was
Balder, and the queen of the underworld was Hela. If we recall the chthonic imagery
associated with Sappho’s name of lapis lazuli, as found particularly in the
Sumerian Erishkigal, and the Egyptian Maat, we are able to argue that Sappho can be
understood, in a manner of speaking, as the dark, and chthonic, aspect of
Aphrodite.

Further, if we consider the frequent motifs of absence, loss, and departure in her
poetry, and replace Adonis with Anaktoria, we can see Sappho as providing an
esoteric, lesbian, form of the ancient mysteries. Perhaps it was something like
this that was taught at her school on Lesbos, in a combination of matters sexual,
religious, and magickal.

DEEPER MYSTERIES
We have seen hints of a connection between Sappho and the dark goddess that move
her importance even beyond that of lyrical poet and lesbian icon. Her name relates
to the blueblood of the goddess, and to the lapis lazuli that is used to decorate
the halls of many underworld goddesses (including Erishkigal, Maat, and Hela). We
have also just seen that there was more to Aphrodite (the goddess who appears most
consistently in Sappho’s poems), than just a simple goddess of love. What then are
we to make of this suggestion of some greater significance, of some mystery taught
at Sappho’s school on Lesbos?

It has been suggested that Sappho was not one particular womyn, but rather a title
for a particular kind of high priestess. This would not be without precedent in the
ancient world. For example, the many Marys in the new testament point to a group of
priestesses, who were dedicated to the dark goddess (the name Mary being the same
as Maya-Maia, one of the Hindu-Greek names for the dark goddess), and who were
behind the sacrifice of her mortal consort, Jesus; who is the same as Attis,
Tammuz, and Adonis. Whether we wish to accept the premise that Sappho was not one
womyn, which some may argue is a move to belittle her (just as it has been argued
that the goddess was divided into many aspects as a way to disempower her; in
itself a matter of opinion), the idea that she was the priestess of a mystery
religion is still valid.

In at least two of her poems, Sappho uses ritual description as a metaphor,

employing a similar scene of young womyn around an altar. The first tells of an
altar of love:

And their feet move

rhythmically, as tender
feet of Cretan girls danced once around an
altar of love, crushing
a circle in the soft
smooth flowering grass
The second poem is even more evocative in its imagery, with everything that
suggests the twilight world of the dark goddess, which is entered through ritual:

In the spring twilight

the full moon is shining:
Girls take their places
as though around an altar
Considering the hints of the death of the sacrificial king that we have already
seen implied by the Sappho-goddess matrix, it is no great leap to suggest that the
rites on Lesbos were somehow related to this. There is a suggestion of this in
Sappho’s poetry, where she talks of an unnamed consort who is lost to someone
called Rosy-cheeks. This Rosy-cheeks has often been thought, in accordance with the
heterosexual context so frequently applied to her work, to be some rival of Sappho,
when actually the name was a title of the death goddess. The consort who was lost
to Rosy-cheeks was, therefore, the sacrificial king of that year, whose passing was
ritually mourned through poetry and song. The song for the sacrificial king is
found in almost all instances of this ritual: the prophet Ezekial famously refers
to the wailing laments for Tammuz made by the womyn of Jerusalem (the wailing or
howling was called alalu by the Babylonians, and houloi by the Greeks).

One classical myth of the sacrificed king shows a direct association between this
rite and the island of Lesbos. The semi-divine poet Orpheus was the lover of the
nymph Eurydyke (universal dyke), who was in reality, a form of the dark goddess as
matron of fate and justice, like Hela and the Egyptian Maat. Several tales are told
of him, but the one that concerns is that of his death, where, after his loss of
Eurydyke, he wandered through the wilds of Thrace, carrying only his lyre which he
played constantly. A band of Maenads came upon him, and the frenzied womyn tore him
to pieces, and cast his head into the river Hebrus. The river carried it along
until it came to rest on the shores of Lesbos, completely undamaged by the journey,
and still singing. The Muses found the head and buried it in the sanctuary of the
island. Orpheus’s lyre was also kept as a holy relic in the temple on Lesbos, and
was considered taboo and not to be touched. When Neanthus, the son of the Tyrant of
Lesbos, once played it, he was torn to pieces by a pack of dogs; whether they were
real dogs, or the priestesses of Lesbos, the sacrifice to the goddess is again
unclear.

Sappho, then, was the goddess-priestess of the blueblood of the goddess and the
blue lapis lazuli of her underworld, who sent the sacrificial king on his way to
Persephone-Eurydyke. She was the guardian of the gateway between this world and the
next, and so it is significant that in depictions of her, she is often portrayed
goddess-like, seated or standing near two columns. Columns and pillars were an
innovation on the archaic cave, which represented the vulva of the goddess, the
passageway between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Pillars also
played an important part in the sacrifice of the king, being the structure on which
he was so often killed. The cross of Jesus is the best example, while others are
the Djed pillar of Osiris, the world tree of Odin and Attis, while even the
scarecrow placed in fields to protect crops is an echo of this tradition.

The Gate

SAPPHO'S JOURNEY THROUGH HERSTORY AND HISTORY

Sappho underwent a form of apotheosis, as she became not just a poet, but a muse.
We can see the beginnings of this in Plato’s remark about her being the tenth muse,
but with the passage of time her goddess-like status became all the more pointed,
as her life became the stuff of legends, while the facts became less relevant. This
is not necessarily a bad thing, it is no different from say the evolution of the
real-life Iron Age figure of Odin into a god, or a similar process that lead to the
creation of a Jewish messiah, known today as Jesus. An idea of the mythological
characteristics that would become attributed to Sappho can be seen in the work of
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). In De Claris Nulierbus: Concerning Famous Women, he
gives a description of Sappho that has little reliance on facts, but instead
illustrates her growth into a goddess:
"The poetess Sappho was a girl from the city of Mytilene in the island of
Lesbos. No other fact has reached us about her origins. But if we examine her work,
we will see that she was born of honourable and noble parents, for no vile soul
could have desired to write poetry, nor could a plebian one have written it as she
did. Although it is not known when she flourished, she nevertheless had so fine a
talent that in the flower of youth and beauty she was not satisfied with writing
solely in prose, but, spurred by the great fervour of her soul and mind with
diligent study she ascended the slopes of Parnassus and on that high summit with
happy daring joined the Muses, who did not nod in disapproval. Wandering through
the laurel grove, she arrived at the cave of Apollo, bathed in the waters of
Castalia, and took up Phoebus’s plectrum. As the sacred nymphs danced, this girl
did not hesitate to strike the strings of the cithara and bring forth melody. All
these things seem very difficult even for well-educated men. Why say more? Through
her eagerness she reached such heights that her verses, which according to ancient
testimony were very famous, are still brilliant in our own day. A bronze statue was
erected and consecrated to her name, and she was included among the famous poets.
Certainly neither the crown of kings, the papal tiara, nor the conqueror’s laurel
is more splendid than her glory."

But with this evolution into legend, Sappho became successively recast -both
celebrated and vilified- and her life and love was retold to spare patriarchal
sensitivities. By the Roman age, Sappho had been relegated to mere heterosexuality,
and attributed an obsession with a young boy known as Phaon. When her affections
were spurned, according to this tale, she leapt to her death off the White Rocks of
Leukas. It is relevant to note that this plot device is still a favourite one of
modern filmmakers, who have a tendency to kill their homosexual characters with
alarming frequency. The story of Phaon is widely regarded as apocryphal, since the
mythical Phaon appears in other similar legends. In one incident he was the lover
of Aphrodite; while Aphrodite was herself said to have leapt from the White Rocks
of Leukas for the love of a young man, in this case the golden youth Adonis.
Another invented male may be person given as Sappho’s one-time husband, Kerkylas of
Andrea. It has been noted that his name is similar to the Greek word for penis,
kerkos, while his home, Andros, alludes to the Greek word for man, suggesting that
the name is a pun, that he was “Dicky-Boy from the Isle of Man’. Alternatively,
this may suggest that the father of Sappho’ a daughter Cleis may have
metaphorically been just a penis, or more literally, a donator of sperm; a practice
that is certainly not without parallel in some modern lesbian relationships.

But the Roman’s conversion of her sexuality was not the last attempt to remould
Sappho into a respectable figure for patriarchy. After a period of absence, Sappho
reappeared during the Renaissance as an aristocratic and learned matronly figure,
albeit virginal, and with not a trace of her lesbianism. In 1584, the French court
historian Andre Thevet compiled his True Portraits of Illustrious Men, which
included biographies of Homer (some mean feat, considering the lack of information
on the poet’s history) and Sappho Lesbienne. He vehemently denied any links between
the Sappho he wanted to portray as a predictably married, and “honourable” poet,
and the other Sappho, of whom Thevet said “the horror of whose crime it rather
behoves me to suppress than to mention here’. Because Thevet favoured censoring
Sappho, it was not until 17th century France that the greatest revisions, of both
her life, and her work, occurred. As in modern society, the heterosexual male, of
which the system of patriarchy is an embodiment, is both titillated and threatened
by lesbianism. On the one hand, the video of two heterosexual women acting in a
lesbian way is sure to be on heavy rotation at the video store. But on the other
hand, genuine lesbian women, who may not fits preconceived image of either lesbians
or women in general, pose a threat to the patriarchy’s control over matters sexual.
Lesbianism is the greatest threat to patriarchy because it, in the mind of
patriarchy, suggests that 1) women are, indeed, sexual beings, and 2) they do not
need the penile protrusions of men to satisfy them, emotionally, or sexually. And
so, it was this double standard of fascination and dread that was at the core of
French translations of Sappho’s work. Separate editions were produced for men and
women, the male editions featured enough of Sappho’s erotic work to titillate the
intended male audience, while the editions for womyn, made to be read in parlours,
were free from any sexual suggestions. After all, French manhood would not wish to
expose their women to something that could quite likely make them redundant.

By Victorian times, Sappho had been elevated to a state of Marian purity, in which
being as moist as grass, and her other sexual metaphors were either expunged or
explained away. One of the most popular explanations for Sappho’s use of highly
affectionate language was that, as a headmistress of a girl’s school on Lesbos, her
songs were merely chaste send-offs sung to her pupils as they left to be married.
Even with a trite explanation like that, one is still left intrigued by the level
of affection between a, supposedly, mere teacher and pupil.

At the same time though, the Romanticist movement of Byron, Shelley, and Dante and
Christina Rossetti embraced Sappho, but it could be argued, for all the wrong
reasons. Instead of celebrating her depth of love and devotion, they embraced the
scandalous aspect of Sappho, along with her mythical self-destructiveness, as
characterized by the Phaon myth. However, a sense of the respect Sappho eventually
gained can be found in a description of her by one of the great Victorian poets,
the pagan-inclined, and viciously anti-Christian, Algernon Charles Swinburne:
Judging even from the mutilated fragments fallen within our reach from the broken
altar of her sacrifice of song, I for one have always agreed with all Grecian
tradition in thinking Sappho to be beyond all question and comparison the Very
greatest poet that ever lived. Aeschylus is the greatest poet who was also a
prophet; Shakespeare is the best dramatist who was also a poet, but Sappho is
simply nothing less - as she certainly is nothing more - than the greatest poet who
ever was at all. Such was Swinburne’s love for Sappho that in the sublimely titled
Anactoria, he used her as the voice that rails against a certain Hebraic god:

Him would I reach, him smite, him desecrate,

Pierce the cold lips of God with human breath, And mix his immortality with death.
While the words placed in Sappho's mouth by Swinburne may have been harsher than
those the Lesbian poet usually used, it would not be the last time that she would
speak through, and to other poets from her place deep in the past.

Awed by her brightness...

EVEN LATER SOMEONE WILL REMEMBER US

So wrote Sappho in Fragment 147. V., and this prediction, against all the odds, did
indeed come true. The influence of Sappho on modern writers has been remarkable.
Her honesty, love and sheer talent has echoed down through the centuries and still
touches people in the most profound ways. Within mgickal circles, the Order of Nine
Angles produced the cassette work SAPPHO: fragments, a musical rendition of the
most striking of the Sappho fragments. It fused ancient Greek music with modern
nuances, producing a profound and moving interpretation of Sappho's poetry, and
allowing the emotions behind the text to be experienced as if it was Sappho herself
who was singing them. The music was complemented by its literary partner, with new
translations of the poetry by David Myatt, and five colour paintings by Christos
Beest, representing phrases from the fragments. These were complemented yet further
by a performance at the Gwent College of Art (by Sister Lianna, Christos Beest, and
Wulfran Hall) in which the fragment images were projected onto a screen, as the
music was played through an amplified-system; the audience response was reported to
have been positive but low-key.

The recurring sense of unrequited love, and of emotional desolation, in Sappho’s

poetry is not unlike the isolation experienced by many womyn, and homosexuals, in
the earlier part of this century. And it is this sentiment that is expressed in the
poetry and the art of several of Sappho’s modern literary descendants.

One of the most prominent was Amy Lowell, an eccentric womyn who scandalized Boston
society by amongst other things, smoking large black cigars. Born in 1874 to one of
Boston’s most distinguished families, she was not afforded the formal education
that her brothers received, but made up for it with her own acumen and
perspicacity. Lowell was an important proponent of Imagism, the modernist poetry
movement so named by Ezra Pound; though in her time, her reputation was greater
than that of Pound. Imagism was typified by short, precise poems, influenced by the
Japanese form of haiku, and so the poetry of Sappho had much in common with it.
Lowell compiled one of the major representations of Imagist work, a three-volume
anthology, Some Imagist Poets, and also gave enthusiastic lectures on modern
poetry. Like Sappho, though, she suffered the slights of patriarchy because of her
lesbianism, along with her weight, demeanour, and other matters irrelevant to her
ability to compose excellent poetry; the jealous Ezra Pound, who never got on well
with Lowell, even took to referring to Imagism as Amy-gism.

Her affinity with Sappho can be seen in one of her non-Imagist poems, The Sisters,
in which she celebrated her feminine literary heritage (which, along with Sappho,
included Elizabeth Barret Browning and Emily Dickinson). The most compelling
segment says:

There’s Sapho, now I wonder what was Sapho.

I know a slender thing about her:
That loving, she was like a burning birch-tree
All tall and glittering fire,
and that she wrote
Like the same fire caught up to Heaven and held there,
A frozen blaze before it broke and fell.
Ah, me! I wish I could have talked to Sapho,
Surprised her reticences by flinging mine
Into the wind. This tossing off of garments
Which cloud the soul is none too easy doing
With us today. But still I think with Sapho
One might accomplish it, were she in the mood
To bare her loveliness of words and tell
The reasons, as she possibly conceived them
Of why they are so lovely. Just to know
How she came at them, just to watch
The crisp sea sunshine playing on her hair
And listen, thinking, all the while ‘twas she
Who spoke and that we two were sisters
Of a strange isolated little family.
Like many of the lesbian poets that were to follow her, Lowell seemed able to
channel the spirit of Sappho through her poetry, and some of her imagery seems to
come straight from the lyre of the tenth muse.

You-you-
Your shadow is sunlight on a plate of silver;
Your footsteps; the seeding place of lilies;
Your hands moving, a chime of bells
across a windless air...
I drink your lips,
I eat the whiteness of your hands and feet.
My mouth is open,
As a new jar I am empty and open.
Like white water are you who fill the cup of my mouth,
Like a brook of water thronged with lilies.
from: In Excelsis
Red and trembling with blood
Heart’s blood for your drinking
To fill your mouth with love
And the bitter-sweat taste of a soul.
from: Absence
When one considers Ada Dwyer, Lowell’s lover of ten years, it is understandable how
she was able to write of such unadulterated, and all-consuming love and desire. The
beautiful young actress was, unquestionably, Anaktoria to Amy Lowell’s Sappho.

Yet another womyn involved with Imagism, and in fact engaged to Ezra Pound at one
time, was the bisexual Hilda Doolittle, or H.D, as she was often known. Born in
1886, H.D, like many homosexuals of her time (both male and female) married out of
convenience, but she left her husband, the Imagist Richard Aldington, after the
birth of her daughter, Frances Perdita, in 1919. (Frances was named after Frances
Gregg a womyn H.D had had a brief affair with]. After a leaving her husband, H.D
lived for much of her life with the writer Winifred Ellerman, who preferred to be
called Bryher, and who too had married out of convenience; twice in fact, but both
times never consummated. Bryher supported H.D and Frances, even going to the extent
of adopting the young girl as her own, while she also financed H.D’s travels to the
USA, Egypt, and most importantly, Greece.

H.D’s admiration for Sappho can be summed up in an excerpt from her essay The Wise
Sappho: “I think of the words of Sappho as these colours (red, scarlet, gold), or
states rather transcending colour yet containing (as great heat the compass of the
spectrum) all colour. And perhaps the most obvious is this rose colour, merging to
richer shades of scarlet, purple, or Phoenician purple”

Using the Sappho fragments, H.D. published a collection of poems called Heliodora,
in which a line of Sappho’s was expanded upon to form a complete poem, as if Sappho
herself had penned it. An example, taken from Fragment 36, begins with Sappho’s:

I know not what to do:

my mind is divided.
Which was then elaborated upon, explored, and further developed, by H.D.:

I know not what to do,

my mind is reft:
is song’s gift best?
is love’s gift loveliest?
I know not what to do,
now sleep has pressed
weight on your eyelids...
In another of her poems, Moonrise, H.D revisits some of Sappho’s familiar imagery,
in what appears to be an invokation of a hunting lunar goddess much like Artemis
(who, with Aphrodite, was the most important goddess on Lesbos):

Will you glimmer on the sea:

will you fling your spear-head
on the shore?
what note shall we pitch?
we have a song,
on the bank we share our arrows;
the loosed string tells our note:
0 flight
bring her swifty to our song.
She is great,
we measure her by the pine trees.
Other important lesbian poets drew upon the rich heritage provided by Sappho. Renee
Vivien, (1877-1909) made the first French translation of the Sappho fragments,
taking them from the original Greek, which she had learnt specifically for that
purpose. In an autobiographical novel, the heroine Vally (modelled upon Vivien’s
real life lover, Natalie Barney) expresses Vivien’s admiration for Sappho: “the
only woman poet whose immortality equals that of statues is Psappha [Sappho], who
didn’t deign to notice masculine existence. She celebrated the sweet speech and the
adorable smile of Atthis, and not the muscled torso of the imaginary Phaon.”

Renee Vivien’s devotion to Sappho became a central tenant of her work. Many of her
titles reflect, the influence of Sappho (Toward Lesbos, Sappho Lives Again, and
Landing at Mytilene), while in her poem Like This Would I Speak, Sappho became
apotheosized as a goddess of lesbian love.

Sappho, her restless fingers on the sleeping lyre,

Will marvel at the beauty of my lover...
Sappho will shower us, in her fervent breath,
With the odes whose melodies charmed Mytilene.
And we will prepare the flowers and the flames
We who have loved her in a century less beautiful.
Sappho will serve us, amid the gold and silk
Of soft cushions, nectar mixed with joy.
She will show us, in her graceful manner,
The Lesbian orchard that opens to the sea..
Another modern era poet who could claim descent from Sappho was the Prussian born
Mary Madeleine, or Baroness Von Puttkamer (a title she received when at 19, she
married General Heinrich Georg Ludwig Freiherr (Baron) von Puttkamer). She was born
in 1581, in Eydtkuhnen, East Prussia, and at the age of 15 and 16, began writing a
unique form of lyrical, sensual and fiercely erotic poetry and prose. Much of this
early work of short stories and novellas was published in the 1900 collection that
made her name, Auf Kypros (On Cyprus). Her work that followed included In Seligkeit
und Sunden (In Bliss and Sin, 1905), Katzen (Cats, 1910), Krabben (Crabs, 1910),
Die rote Rose Leidenschaft (The Red Rose called Passion, 1912), Die drei Nachte
(The Three Nights), Pantherkatzchen (Panther Kitten, 1915) and Taumel (Ecstasy,
1920). Much like the poems of Sappho, Madeleine’s work created a paradox for
critics, who could not deny her talent as a poet, and her skill in rhyming skill,
and use of brightly coloured imagery, but still described her highly sensual work
as "shameless", "lascivious," “lewd”, and "lecherous."

Mary Madeleine also used Sappho as a source of lesbian-inspiration. In Foiled

Sleep, she revisits the emotions Sappho experienced upon hearing “that seductive
laugh, that makes the heart beneath ‘my breasts to tremble”.

Ah me! I cannot sleep at night;

And when I shut my eyes, forsooth,
I cannot banish from my sight
The vision of her slender youth.
She stands before me lover-wise,
Her naked beauty fair and slim,
She smiles upon me, and her eyes
With over fierce desire grows dim.
Slowly she leans to me. I meet
The passion of her gaze anew,
And then her laughter, clear and sweet,
Thrills all the hollow silence through.
O, siren, with the mocking tongue!
O beauty, lily-sweet and white!
I see her, slim and fair and young.
And ah! I cannot sleep tonight.
Finally, a poet who could almost claim direct descent from Sappho, Olga Broumas
(born 1949), born on the island of Syros, one of the Greek Cyclades, expresses
Sappho’s sentiments in the most explicit style yet. Her celebration of lesbian
desire echoes that of Sappho, but with a sense of pride that overrides the feeling
of isolation that both the Lesbian poet, and her lesbian descendants, frequently
expressed:

I work
in silver the tongue-like forms
that curve round a throat
an arm-pit, the upper
thigh, whose Significance stirs in me
like a curvi form alphabet
that defies
decoding, appears
to consist of vowels, beginning with 0,
the 0-mega, horseshoe, the cave of sound.
What tiny fragments
survive, mangled into our language.
Broumas often makes use of themes and images from Greek mythology, and, like
Sappho, uses them as metaphors for her own situations. She reinterpreted the story
of the rape of Leda by Zeus into a tale of lesbian desire by changing the sex of
the swan (the form Zeus assumed). But most remarkably, while reviewing notes she
had made on Sappho, Broumas found a two-verse epigraph that she assumed must have
been from one of Sappho’s fragments. But it is not from any of them. It seems
instead that Sappho took the opportunity to write yet more, through her modern
inheritors. Perhaps one day, when more fragments are found, this will be among
them:

She who loves roses must be patient

and not cry out when she is pierced by thorns.
* * *