Apsaras

Apsaras appear in Mario’s argument about the historical and erotic destiny of art. He recalls them alongside the Corai as beings drawn from ancient human dreams, placing them within a lineage that begins with prehistoric imagination and culminates in the attempt to reshape living bodies and minds.

Mythic Figures of Human Invention

Mario presents Apsaras not as independently encountered creatures but as creations of the human imagination. He describes humanity as having once extracted them from its dreams, making them examples of the moment when symbolic invention began to separate the hominid of the Quaternary from the animal. In this account, Apsaras belong to the evidence of what human beings add to the universe rather than merely inherit from it.

From Cave Images to Living Art

The reference to Apsaras forms part of Mario’s broad progression from early images to modern artistic ambition. He places the dream-born figures beside ochre and smoke figures on cave walls, suggesting that ancient acts of representation opened a path toward future forms of creation. Yet the old arts of color, curves, sound, stone, bronze, and paste are described as no longer sufficient for the creative passion of the present age. Mario’s claim is that art has moved toward the shaping of living bodies and minds, with eroticism becoming the only art capable of carrying human invention beyond the stars.

Nature, Culture, and the Erotic Imagination

Apsaras occupy the cultural side of a contrast between what God or nature has made and what human beings construct. Mario celebrates the human planet as it has been filled with cities, architecture, music, painting, sculpture, and engineered forms, treating artistic creation as a force that replaces unworked nature with a human-made world. The Apsaras therefore function as an early image of the same impulse that, in Mario’s present-day philosophy, seeks to reconstruct the human being itself: to free humanity from biological inheritance and allow it to give itself new laws.

Narrative Significance

Because Apsaras are mentioned within Mario’s speech rather than shown in a separate scene, their importance is conceptual. They condense his belief that humanity becomes fully human through imaginative transformation, while also foreshadowing his more radical claim that eroticism is the modern continuation of art. Their dream-born, mythic status links the remote past to Mario’s program for remaking embodied life, turning a brief allusion into a bridge between prehistoric representation, cultural self-creation, and the book’s erotic philosophy.