Cupid is a drug!

Diana the huntress would have far less trouble keeping her nymphs in check if she had a counteractive potion to Cupid's arrows.Many disasters in mythology could have been prevented if we had the ability to fashion an anti-love potion like the New York Times article seems to suggest. Juliet may have survived their love had they not been tempted by the trickery of a magical potion. The whole premise of a love potion has fascinated us for most of our history.Potions and elixirs, the philosopher’s stone etc, are all popular reoccurring themes in literature. If you do a general search on Google for “potions” you come across the term Pharmakon fairly often. The term Pharmakon comes from Greek and is used by Plato in his dialogues to discuss the ambiguity of words. Pharmakon itself has multiple meanings, the two most popular being a poison and the other a beneficial medicine. We find the same double meaning in our modern word “drug”. You can find a pretty interesting discussion of the word from Plato’s Phaedrus (I found a copy in the Norton Anthology of Critical Theory).Just as Plato and Socrates debate the value of the word and the dangers associated with pharmakon, we have to consider the dangers and benefits of having a society that can control its own lusts and desires by chemical means. This same debate seems to be fought by Diana and Aphrodite when they begin to argue the virtues of both chastity and love and the affect that Cupid has on both. Here I like to think of Cupid as the actual love potion (he has the ability to both cause love and stop love in mythology). Aphrodite and Diana are left to evaluate his actions as either good or bad. Diana most definitely sees Cupid’s affect as inherently bad for chastity and purity while Aphrodite considers Cupid’s arrow to be something beneficial and medicinal to all people. sorry if you see html code,tried to get it all out.

Blog 1: Misery Loves Company

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play deeply indebted to Lyly’s Galatea, the folly of lovers in the forest can be traced back to the nectar of a flower, “love-in-idleness.” As Oberon explains to Puck:

The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees. 

     (2.1.176-178)
                                    

The following images are from late sixteenth and early seventeenth century emblem books depicting Cupid: first as a dominating and even violent agent and, second, like an Alchemist’s apprentice who merely fans love’s flames.

Whitney, Geffrey. A Choice of Emblemes, and other devises, For the

moste part gathered out of sundrie writers, Englished and Moralized.

And divers newly devised. Leyden, 1586.

Daniël Heinsius, Quaeris quid sit Amor (c. 1601)

For this blog, I want you to consult a recent NY Times article, in which medical science seems to be assuming the role of Cupid, or Puck, by devising similar "potions" to deepen and/or revive love, or alternately, to function as an antidote to unwanted desire. 

NY Times: Anti-Love Drug May Be Ticket to Bliss

The article suggests that a vaccine might make it possible to inoculate ourselves against “love-sickness.”

Please use the article or emblems (or both) as prompts for discussing the role of love in Galatea. Some questions to consider: What does it mean to think of love as a disease or infection? Does love work as a disruptive, or destructive, force that operates though suffering, punishment, bewitchment, or deception? Is love something that we need to be cured of? Or, does love, as a destabilizing force, open a space for radical possibility? Finally, are there any conclusions you draw from the fact that Galatea (and A Midsummer Night’s Dream) was performed for the Virgin Queen?