“And thus, the Titans & titanesses made love without passion And so did the Gods & Goddesses. They only had Longing[Pothos], Love[Eros] & Reciprocal Love[Anteros] between them, but no Passion. And this fact accounted for the unimaginative number of offspring that some of them had. And the unimaginative tendency of Gods & Goddesses to take aunts & uncles, sons & daughters & even granddads & grandmas to wife or to husband. So much so that some Gods & Goddesses preferred to produce offspring asexually, even without Love. As Hera begot Hephaestus.”

“All the intrigues of the Gods & Goddesses were the works of Eros, of course. And as the Gods & Goddesses relaxed & lay limp, after the union of love, Love himself wished that he could relax & lay limp too. But he could not, since he was at odds with himself. He tried to figure out what went wrong & concluded that it all went wrong at the beginning, with the Big Bang.It was those aspects of himself, Eros[Love], Anteros[Mutual Love] & Pothos[Longing], which first united the Sky & the Earth in the primordial egg in the union of love. But it was Himeros who uncoupled them as Passion was fickle & capricious. And Chaos, naturally, followed Passion.”

“Eros, who was awakened when the girdle was cast aside, thought it unfitting that the Goddess of Love should turn herself into a Goddess of War, since that post was already filled by Athena. On the other hand, a battle between the Goddess of Love with the God of War also did not make sense, as they should either make love or make war & indulge either in love-games or war-games. For how could one party make love whilst the other make war at the same time? For it took two parties to either make love or make war.And thus Eros decided to turn Mars into the God of Hate to see whether a battle between Love & Hate could produce Chaos, since Love & Chaos were one & so were Hate & Chaos. And thus Eros sent Phobos & Deimos to Mars, to turn the God of War into the God of Hate.”

“And it was said that when Love reunited with Passion, all the terrible things that were done out of love, without passion, or out of passion, without love, came to an end. And it was also said that from that moment on, all the Gods, Titans, Giants, Nymphs & Mortal people began making love with passion.The 6,000 offspring of Oceanus & Tethys were usually explained as the result of making love without passion, or sometimes, as the result of passion without love. But when Love reunited with Passion, Oceanus & Tethys ceased having offspring altogether.”

“And, whilst talking about making love,it was only a short while ago that Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, got to know what love was. And once having experienced love-making, she had turned herself into the Goddess of Love-Making & could not stop making love.And thus, Eros yearned to be reborn as Cupid, the God of Love, so he too would be able to find out what love-making was all about, and become the God of Love-Making.”

“Hera said that Hephaestus was the one who made the lovely chariots for Zeus, Poseidon & Hades. Also the one for Helios, the Sun God. And if she married him, he might make one for her too. But she did not tell the young Goddess of Love why none of the Goddesses wanted to marry him in the first instance & that he was ugly & a cripple. She also omitted to tell her that Hephaestus, having created the first woman, Pandora, from clay, had neither the patience nor the inclination to woo & pamper women, let alone put up with the changing moods of the young lovely Goddesses at Olympus. And that even the warlike & down-to-earth Athena had dropped him like a ton of bricks.As Aphrodite did not appear to have any choices, she nodded her head & thus accepted Hera as her future mother-in-law. And this explains one of the greatest mysteries in Greek Mythology: why the loveliest & most beautiful of the Goddesses would agree to marry the ugliest of the Gods. For this mismatch would not have happened if not for Hera.”