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de vivre, the goddess’s yes energy that animated heaven and earth. Fictional heroines may be loved for their bovine placidity and gravitas, but the women who inflame men are live wires. Vitality creates an aphrodisiacal whirlpool around a woman. The goddess created out of superabundance, a sacred power surge, and all her avatars radiated the same ultraélan. Ninon de Lenclos, the empress of courtesans, took for her motto “Joy of spirit is the measure of its force,” and Lola Montez careened through life exclaiming, “I must live before I die!”
    This aliveness, if genuine, emanates from inner health, a full to brimming psychic wholeness and “plentitude of being” like the deity’s. Sirens have been endlessly typecast as neurotics and sick souls, but they were saner, if anything, than other women. They gave off that “plus-feeling of power,” that assurance, creativity, complexity, and rage to grow we associate with robust egos. Great swaggering queen bees, they had self-concepts to match the deity—the stuck-up mistress of the universe, the life principle, and the “eternal image of the whole.”

Impact, Drama
    Whatever her fascinations, physical or psychological, the seductress pizzazzed them up. Eros is the great stirrer-upper, a mover, shaker, and drama maker. When the sex goddess of ancient Sumer made an entrance, the earth trembled, the kettledrums rolled, and men stood dumbstruck. “Clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars,” she drove in on a chariot drawn by lions, bearing a staff entwined with snakes and brandishing her eagle wings like parasails.
    Love that lasts never neglects the old éclat; it needs wake-up calls and limelight to stave off the natural drift to satiety and blahsville. It needs vital tension, a kaleidoscopic play of sedate and elate. The grandes amoureuses were doyennes of dazzle, showboaters, and scene stealers. Too muchness was the goddess’s signature, “all that’s fascinating, terrible [and] overpowering.” They kept things in motion and threw off électricité, the star power that sends shock waves through a room. When Richard Burton first saw Elizabeth Taylor on a pool chaise, he hyperventilated. “She is famine, fire, destruction and plague, she is the dark lady of the sonnets, she is the only true begetter . . . in short, too bloody much.”
    Although we’ve been groomed to supporting roles and self-deprecation, the women who enthralled men and kept them on their toes punched up their style with drama, self-parade, and excitement. The sex goddess didn’t sit out the ball in her all beige personality; she was “shinning bright and dancing.”

Summary: Art of Seduction
    These ancient seductive arts are so effective, so fire-powered that they work without a blanket application. Seductresses practiced them piecemeal and selectively and seldom employed the full spectrum of spells. Lou Andreas-Salomé, for instance, hated music and cosmetics, Eva Perón lacked a sense of humor, and Martha Gellhorn and Grace Hartigan refused to mother men. Seduction is an art, not a science, requiring different mixes for different men and a fingertip feel for mood, timing, and hidden tastes.
    Then, like any human endeavor, the best-laid assaults can go awry. Some men are just siren-resistant, slow on the sexual uptake, well married, cryptogay, or scared, and would push the snooze button if Cleopatra climbed into bed with them in a G-string and pasties. Similarly, no “right” combination of physical and psychological moves delivers the goods every time.
    Nevertheless, the seductresses and their lovecraft provide a premier field guide to sexual empowerment—time-proven, reality-tested, and grounded in ancient wisdom. It’s a liberation front waiting to happen and death to male dominance. Enchantresses blow the hatches. They subvert patrilineal succession, female monogamy and submission, and give women the scepter and throne.

Seductress: Resistance
    Obviously patriarchy