Alma Genetrix, or “Nourishing Ancestress” in English, is cobbled from the first two lines of my favorite Latin work De Rerum Natura, a first-century BCE poem written by the ancient Roman poet Lucretius (99-55 BCE).
It’s also a nod to my research interests. I graduated with my Ph.D. in early modern literature and classical reception from Rice University in 2020. My dissertation, titled Theophanic Reasoning: Science, Secrets, and the Stars from Spenser to Milton, investigates the philosophical and literary influence of Lucretius’s indirect descendent Giordano Bruno on early modern English literature, from approximately 1590 to 1670.
Before continuing, please know that I realize how pretentious this all sounds, but hear me out.
OK, so who’s Lucretius?
Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, is an epic poem about nature. It’s also a poem about the atomic origin of the cosmos. As a poet, Lucretius is primarily interested in educating his readers on how atoms (from the Greek atomos, meaning indivisible) are the foundational building blocks to our physical world.
If not an outright defense of atheism, Lucretius advises his readers that even if the gods do exist, those entities have no interest in our lives. It is for this reason that the poet also touts the futility of currying favor with the gods.
It’s also the reason why I’ve chosen to honor this philosophical outlook in this Substack, its namesake. For me, it’s important to remember (if not exceptionally difficult in praxis) that the forces of the universe are not concerned with my actions as a minuscule meat-husk throttling through the universe on a wet ball around one star of billions.1
Despite this branch of nihilism, however, Lucretius is not a cynical man. Rather, he takes this worldview as warming comfort. If the gods do not care, he reasons, we are free to live our lives without worrying that our actions have cosmic, karmic consequences.
It also doesn’t mean that this functional atheism sucks the beauty from the world. In fact, it enhances it.
To illustrate, in an ironic turn, the poems’ speaker invokes the Roman goddess Venus to demonstrate his naturalist philosophy in the first lines of the epic:
Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas,
alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa
quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentis
concelebras, per te quoniam genus omne animantum
concipitur visitque exortum lumina solis.
O mother of the Roman race, delight
Of men and gods, Venus most bountiful
You who beneath the gliding signs of heaven
Fill with yourself the sea bedecked with ships
And earth great crop-bearer, since by your power
Creatures of every kind are brought to birth
And rising up behold the light of the sun.2
As the “ancestress” of Aeneas—the mythic hero who founds Rome and to whom Vergil will eventually dedicate his literary career in The Aeneid—Venus is described as “alma” or “nourishing,” one who nurses, or mothers, her consorts. She is the mother of Rome, both as a city and an idea. Her reign beneath “the gliding signs of heaven” allows Venus to “fill” herself into the sea and functions as the “great crop-bearer” for the earth.
From this naturalized deity of desire all exists and all is created.
If you’ve heard of Lucretius it’s probably because of Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt’s popular book The Swerve (2011). In it, Greenblatt argues that Lucretius’s atomism and its rediscovery in the Italian Renaissance provided the basis for modernity as we know it.
Barrels of ink has been spilled about the veracity of Greenblatt’s claims, but that’s not the reason for my fascination with Lucretius’s understanding of Venus.
Rather, what captivates me about Lucretius’s poetic representation of the Romans’ goddess of love is her raw power and agency over the minuscule lives of man. Not to mention the fact that this raw power is a feminine force with which to be reckoned.
For Lucretius, the ultimate arbiter of the natural world is not Zeus or Jupiter. No, it’s Desire herself, the one who brings “creatures of every kind … to birth.”
As humans, we don’t owe our deference to these destructive figures of masculine force. Rather, it is the feminine agency of regeneration—the autonomous desire to live in the first place and continue living beyond it—that gives us the gift of this existence.
As Lucretius puts it, we as humans—and all “creatures of every kind”—have Venus to thank for “rising up” day after day to “behold the light of the sun.”
I can’t think of an entity or idea more powerful, inspiring, or motivating than that.
Wherefore Venus?
These descriptions show how Venus in De Rerum Natura also operates as a metonymy for the self-perpetuating force of desire, copulation, and reproduction in the universe.
me·ton·y·my | məˈtänəmē | noun
the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing
Her presence in the universe compels and infuses her subjects from the tiny particulate atoms to what those particles will eventually become in aggregate: animal, vegetable, mineral.
From Lucretius’s perspective, the entire world is conceived through Venus alone. His reason for doing so is because desire can be distilled down to our atomic core, our essence. Moreover, desire—this internal appetite, voracious for love, sex, and power—drives our very being, our core. It is both innate and pre-programmed. We might as well enjoy it while we’re here, he reasons.
Without desire, the poem’s speaker argues, our species (and others) would have no interest in, well, existing. And without reproduction, the drive to regenerate powered my desire, none of us—none of you, who are sitting here reading this post—would exist either.
I’ve named not only this Substack, but also my photography Instagram, after Lucretius’s Venus for these reasons.
Welcome
This entry is a rambling introduction to this outlet, to be sure. But alas, here we are.
Welcome to this Substack.
As a recovering academic and burgeoning narrative nonfiction writer, I’ll be recounting the various poetic forces that knock around in my head from time to time.
I will also be sharing some reflections on my various travels across Europe from the past few years. Some posts will be about old memories, some of them will be entirely new.
What I’m particularly focused on is sharing my creativity and passion for the world around me in ways that I have been unable to offer in the past, whether due to constraints on both my time or energy, or the chaos that accompanies a trauma-entrenched upbringing.
Nonetheless, I think we are better people when we create and engage, so I’m excited for is the process of sitting down to write, edit, and share.
Thank you for allowing me to create and engage—to write, edit, and share—with you.
—ALM
The visual of this philosophy would be impossible without citing its inspiration, the mysterious anonymous advice blogger Dear Coquette, who captivated me from the moment I found their blog on tumblr in 2011; see http://dearcoquette.com/on-wisdom/.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. Ronald Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Book 1, lines 1-5.