ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century antiquarianism, which researched pagan fertility-cults as an analogue for contemporary sexual liberation, seems to constitute a civil “counter-public” sphere independent of state actors. In fact, reacting against what they perceived as Wilkite misrule in the political and sexual spheres alike, the antiquarians practiced their own form of exclusion. Erasmus Darwin’s encomium to the Portland Vase in The Botanic Garden shows how the mystification of Eros goes hand in hand with fetishism of the commodity. By contrast, William Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas seizes on one property of Eros known to the antiquarians-hermaphrodism-as a metaphor for the sterile self-enclosure that has corrupted human sociality.
