Word: goddesses
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...first all went well. Sculptor Hansen designed a classic Goddess of Liberty. It was duly approved by the Park Service, and Hansen went to work. But Hansen soon began to worry about the shaft on which his new statue was to be placed. Not only was it a Victorian monstrosity, he charged, it was also an unsafe base for his new Liberty. At the top of the shaft, he said, is a gunmetal core which had repeatedly attracted lightning...
...citizens of modern Salem, however, saw newspaper photographs of the sculpture and protested. The nude bronze figure was a far cry from the sunbonneted frontierswoman they had envisioned. Said a Salem housewife: "I would have a difficult time explaining to my young children why we would have a heathen goddess on our courthouse lawn and why she doesn't wear clothes." Result: the committee responsible for the selection withdrew their Venus before she even got to town...
...first coined money, and Greeks fought Trojans over Helen of Troy (though prosaic modern historians insist that they really fought for control of the Dardanelles). Near one city alone-Izmir, the ancient Smyrna-are mosaics from the cave where sightless Homer strummed his lyre, cliff statues of the earth goddess Cybele, and a wall built by Alexander the Great...
...Shrine of Lady Luck. Praeneste, often mentioned by the classical writers, was an ancient religious center 23 miles east of Rome in the Sabine hills. Sacred to the goddess Fortuna, it was the Roman world's bulkiest, solidest shrine. It throve for a thousand years, reaching its peak about the time of Christ, and was the last pagan center to be suppressed by Christianity. When Lady Luck was still lucky, her intricate complex of sacred buildings covered an area a dozen times bigger than St. Peter...
Visitors can walk through stately halls and a network of chapels and oracle rooms, still paved with mosaics, where worshipers asked the advice of the goddess. The temple must have been, also, rather like a pagan Lourdes, where pilgrims prayed for relief from bodily ailments. The many shops that cluster thickly around the shrines supplied votive offerings of clay, marble, silver or gold shaped realistically to represent afflicted parts of the human body. Some of these grisly, pathetic objects still remain after 14 centuries...