". . . . At a certain date a new god was added to the Society Olympus . . . Oro was his name, and he may be compared to the Bacchus of the ancients. His zealots sailed from bay to bay, and from island to island; they were everywhere received with feasting; wore fine clothes; sang, danced, acted, gave exhibitions of dexterity and strength, and were the artists, the acrobats, the bards, and the harlots of the group. Their life was public and epicurean; their initiation a mystery . . . A freemasonry, an agnostic sect, a company of artists, its members, all under oath to spread unchastity, and all forbidden to leave seed -- I do not know how it may appear to others, but to me the design seems obvious."
"Nymph? Goddess? Vampire? Yes, she was all of these, and none of them. She was, like every woman, everything that the mind of a man (let us define "man" as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself) -- that the mind of man wished to imagine. She was there forever, and she had never existed! Under all these masks there was only another woman, every woman, like a lay figure in a dressmakers shop, waiting for the poet to clothe her, breathe life into her. In understanding all this for the first time I began to realize with awe the enormous reflexive power of woman -- The fecund passivity with which, like the moon, she borrows her second-hand light from the male sun . . . ."
-- "Justine", Lawrence Durrell
God Appears and God is light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night,
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of Day.
-- Wiliam Blake