Anteros: The God I Had Never Met

On an unexpected encounter, the mystery of love returned, and the quiet courage of allowing something beautiful to matter.

September in London…was evening,the light already going thin, the traffic turning its slow circle around the fountain….I was walking through Piccadilly Circus, with no particular destination and the rather agreeable sensation of belonging nowhere for a little while.

London was doing what London does so beautifully: rushing, performing, seducing, remaining gloriously indifferent to the private affairs of the human heart.

And there, above the square, I noticed him. A silver-winged youth, balanced upon one foot, his bow extended towards the world.

Ah. Eros.

I smiled. Being Greek, and a woman whose work concerns the mysteries of Tantra, I have always held a particular affection for Eros. Not the charming troublemaker of Valentine’s cards, but the ancient force that awakens the senses, disturbs our carefully arranged identities, and reminds the body of something the mind has rather conveniently forgotten.

I moved closer. The statue seemed suspended between flying and falling, caught in that exquisite instant before an arrow leaves its bow.

Curiosity led me to look up the monument.

Anteros.

I read the name again. A Greek woman, raised amongst the names of gods and philosophers, standing in the middle of London discovering a member of her own mythology.

I knew Eros, naturally. But Anteros? How had I missed him?

The figure crowning the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain is affectionately known as Eros, though Anteros is its established classical identification; Alfred Gilbert also described his creation as an allegory of charitable Love, in honour of Lord Shaftesbury.

Yet the Greek name had already captured me.

Love returned. Love answered.

And quite unexpectedly, beneath those silver wings, I recognize something rather familiar…

When Eros arrives without an invitation

Some encounters enter our lives politely. Others appear to have misplaced the doorbell entirely.

Most ones belonged to the latter category. It had not been planned, pursued, or particularly desired. Only a meeting — and then something shifted. The conversation changed. The silence became comfortable. Time behaved rather strangely.

In Tantra I have come to recognise the extraordinary intimacy that arises when two people meet without trying to become something for one another. The body softens. Attention deepens. One is no longer attempting to arrive somewhere else.

I recognised Eros in that experience. Not the Eros of conquest, but the Eros of awakening.

What I had not precisely understood was what might be asked of me afterwards…or did I..?!

The brother who lets him grow

There is a delightful parable, preserved by the philosopher Themistius, concerning the birth of Anteros.

When Aphrodite bore Eros, the child was beautiful — but he would not grow. His mother, perplexed, sought the wisdom of Themis, goddess of divine order.

The answer was remarkably simple. He may be born alone. He cannot grow alone.

So Anteros was born. In the presence of his counterpart, Eros flourished — his wings grew, his stature increased. And whenever Anteros wandered off, Eros collapsed back into infancy on the spot.

Eros is the awakening. Anteros is the answering.

Which is to say that eros was never a possession. It is a circuit, and a circuit either completes or it does not.

The morning after a beautiful mystery

A profound encounter is rather easy to honour while it is happening. The difficulty begins afterwards — when ordinary life returns with its trains to catch and its charming practicalities.

The mind arrives with its clipboard.

What exactly was that? Was it mutual? Was it merely chemistry? And if it meant something, what on earth am I supposed to do now?

For a woman practicing Tantra, the irony was not lost on me. I can speak of presence and surrender and the intelligence of the body. Yet when a living experience invited us to practice those principles beyond the safety of a beautifully prepared space,something wonderfully human occurs.

It retreated into explanation.

Perhaps it was simply an unusual evening. Perhaps I had been carried away by the atmosphere. Perhaps it would be foolish to attach significance to something so unexpected…mind says.

We made it smaller. Not because we had misunderstood it, but because allowing it to keep its full size would have required something of us. An honest conversation. A vulnerable admission. The willingness to find out whether it had a life beyond the moment in which it appeared.

We was not ready to find out. So we did what the mind does when the heart has wandered into unfamiliar country.

We called it perspective.

The altar the foreigners built

Here is the part of Anteros that the guidebooks leave out.

Pausanias records a second altar to him, near the Academy in Athens, raised by the city’s resident foreigners — and the reason is not charming at all. Timagoras, a metic, loved Meles, an Athenian. Meles, scornful, told him to climb the highest rock and throw himself from it. He did. And Meles, standing over the body, understood what he had refused, and threw himself after.

They did not build that altar to the god of happy reciprocity. They built it to Anteros as the avenging spirit of love refused.

The same god. Two faces. Not a contradiction — one law, read from either side.

I thought about that standing in the traffic noise… because we had assumed the cost of our tidy little explanation would be absence. Absence would have been mercy. What came instead was the return: months later, an ache with no object, a grief arriving on an ordinary Tuesday with nothing attached to it.

Not vengeance in the petty sense. Something more impersonal than that. A current sent out and not answered does not evaporate. It turns back on the one who withheld the answer.

And that, I think, is why the Greeks made it a god rather than a feeling. To give something parentage and an altar is to say: it has its own agency, it arrives on its own schedule, and it is not yours to dismiss. You may decide an encounter meant nothing. The god is not bound by your assessment.

Grounding, and its counterfeit

There is a distinction….

To ground an experience is not to diminish it. Grounding lets something extraordinary enter ordinary life without losing either its beauty or our discernment. It is the ability to say: something beautiful happened; I do not yet know what it means; I need not invent a future for it, nor pretend it was nothing.

Minimising is quite different. We minimise when the significance of an experience threatens to change something. We intellectualise. We explain. We place it in a tidy box marked pleasant, but irrelevant — and then wonder, rather mysteriously, why it keeps visiting.

In my private sessions people come asking to be opened.

Yet the opening is most often already done. Somewhere behind them — a year gone, or ten, or one evening that hath never wholly ended — Eros came unbidden, as is his custom, and showed them a self they had not yet been made known to. Then the world resumed its business, and the hour went unanswered.

Not refused. Unanswered — which is the crueller thing, for refusal at least is a reply.

And what is left unanswered does not depart. It keeps the house. It walks the rooms at odd hours, rises as a restlessness that hath no name, and comes upon us in the middle of unremarkable afternoons. Anteros, waiting at the door for his half of the bargain.

So we seek a second awakening to settle the first. It is a tender arithmetic, and I love them for it. But the sacred keeps no substitutes, and no room, howsoever gently held, can make again what was given once.

What the containment offers is quieter: not a new fire, but leave for the old one to be answered at last — in the body, where it first came to rest.

We ask, almost always, for the very thing we are already carrying.

Not another god. Only the courage to cease calling the one who came nobody.

Often the experience itself is not the frightening part. It is the man we might become if we allowed it to matter.

In the Phaedrus, Plato describes the beloved discovering an answering affection — love reflected back, an image of love returning. I find the mirror the most beautiful part of it. Perhaps certain encounters do not exist to introduce us to another person at all. Perhaps they introduce us to ourselves: the man who does not need to perform, the heart that had forgotten how to trust and finds itself unguarded.

We had been so preoccupied with whether the connection would continue that I nearly overlooked the transformation it had already begun.

We had mistaken the absence of a future for the absence of meaning. They are not the same thing.

Back beneath the silver wings

London had carried on without me, of course. The buses passed. The illuminated screens continued their relentless invitations to want things…

And above it all stood the little god I had never met — the quiet counterpart to all that wanting, in a city so accomplished at stimulating Eros. The god who asks what happens after desire has awakened.

Anteros never required a grand declaration. He required the small courage of one true sentence.

That mattered to me. I would like to understand it.

Or, where circumstances made continuation impossible: I am grateful for what happened, and I will not pretend it was ordinary simply because it could not last.

The answer need not be dramatic. It need only be true.

We had been looking for Anteros in the other person. The first answer was always mine to give — not to whether we were meant for one another, but to whether I would honour what had happened within me.

An inner monologue occurs in my head…I smiled.

Well, darling. Fancy meeting you here.

Eros is the moment the heart opens. Anteros is what we choose to do with the opening. And perhaps the most beautiful mystery of all is that when love cannot find its way back through another person, we may still allow it to find its way back through ourselves.

What arrived in you this year that you called small, so that you would not have to answer it?

♥ — Ophelia