>I don't know if she is the Goddess of "Love". IMO she is the goddess of
>"Lust".
I don't think Lust, but the shattering oneness of orgasm. Lust is a means to destroy the self, and I suspect that's part of Uleria's "demon" rap -- she is about Love and Oneness and Harmony to the exclusion of everything else. There's a Clive Barker story (somewhere in the first three Books of Blood) about a guy who gets possessed (or something; it's been 15 years or so) and becomes so eroticized that he tries to fuck everything -- people, trees, buildings, etc. I see extreme Ulerianism like that -- it's an urge to meld completely with everything (now that I think of it, there's a lot of Barker stories with that theme; maybe he's a Ulerian). As Mr. Quadros points out, this is OK, beneficial even, for an individual, but destructive to society.
In some ways, Uleria seems like the untimate individualistic, selfish cult (in contrast to the community-oriented cults of normal Heortling society). Maybe this has something to do with Uleria being a Cosmic Court deity; she is so far before Time and even the distinctions between Self and Other that characterize the end of the Green Age that distinctions between partners, marriages, even species are irrelevant. What Uleria offers in a return to Oneness, and that's annihilation. Hell, maybe Uleria is at the heart of some Mystic philosophies. At any rate, her followers are likely to be more like rather sinister self-annihilating cultists (the Brethern of the Free Spirit or maybe Heaven's Gate) than feel-good hippy prostitutes.
Peter Larsen
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