Aphrodite the earth-born Kore is also sea-born, as became an island Queen, but more than any other goddess she becomes Ourania, the Heavenly One, and the vase-painter sets her sailing through heaven on her great swan[813]. She is the only goddess who in passing to the upper air yet kept life and reality. Artemis becomes unreal from sheer inhumanity; Athene, as we have seen, becomes a cold abstraction; Demeter, in Olympus, is but a lovely metaphor. As man advanced in knowledge and in control over nature, the mystery and the godhead of things natural faded into science. Only the mystery of life, and love that begets life, remained, intimately realized and utterly unexplained; hence Aphrodite keeps her godhead to the end. For a while, owing to special social conditions, and, as will be seen, owing to the impulse of Orphism, her figure is effaced by that of her son Eros, but effaced only to re-emerge with a new dignity as Mother rather than Maid. In the image of Venus Genetrix[814] we have the old radiance of Aphrodite, but sobered somehow, grave with the hauntings of earlier godheads, with shadows about her cast by Ourania, by Harmonia, by Kourotrophos, by Eirene, by each and every various form of the ancient Mother of Earth and Heaven: ‘Of Rome the Mother, of men and gods the pleasure, Fostering Venus, under heaven’s gliding signs Thou the ship-bearing sea, fruit-bearing land Still hauntest, since by thee each living thing Takes life and birth and sees the light of the sun. Thee, goddess, the winds fly from, thee the clouds And thine approach; for thee the daedal earth Sends up sweet flowers, the ocean levels smile, And heaven shines with floods of light appeased. Thou, since alone thou rulest all the world Nor without thee can any living thing Win to the shores of light and joy and love, Goddess, bid thou throughout the seas and land The works of furious war quieted cease.’ HERA.