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Lusus is the supposed son or companion of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and divine madness, to whom Portuguese national mythology attributed the foundation of ancient Lusitania and the fatherhood of its inhabitants, the Lusitanians, seen as the ancestors of the modern Portuguese people. Lusus thus has functioned in Portuguese culture as a founding myth.
Usage examples of "lusus".
As he listened he thought of his eldest son, partly imbecile, all but a lusus naturae, separated from his wife immediately after marriage, through whom there could never be succession--he thought of him, and for the millionth time in his life winced in impotent disdain.
Superstition seems, indeed, to be, next to the making of stoneweapons, the earliest method of asserting his superiority to the brutes which has occurred to that utterly abnormal and fantastic lusus naturae called man.
I was a lusus naturae, she affirmed, as a village schoolmistress: she was sure my previous history, if known, would make a delightful romance.
It is found that what used to be called lusus naturae, or freaks of nature, are just as much subject to laws as the naturally developed forms of living creatures.
You are a miracle of nature madam, a lusus naturae, as the Ancients had it.
Charisse regales us with tales of her exploits at Lusus Naturae, a tiny software company that is trying to make computers understand when people talk to them, and her art, which is making pictures that you look at on a computer.
I had never been on a world as settled, as crowded, as interior as Lusus, and I could have easily spent a month exploring the bustling Hive I glimpsed from the concrete-channeled river.
It would soon be over -- at least for a while -- for vastly different reasons, but I had no warning -- except for a backache that had been with me since before leaving Lusus -- of that as I diffidently approached the well, if well it was.
The inner city-world of Lusus was much as I remembered it from my brief sojourn there: a series of Hive towers above the vertical canyons of gray metal.
But Lusus was used to off-worlders and our two foremen would do well as long as they had money.
But Lusus was one of the few Pax worlds to have returned to universal credit cards and Aenea did not have one of these in her backpack.
And my own solo odyssey, I thought: the kayak farcasting from Old Earth to Lusus and the cloud planet and all the other places.
No one even regarded him as a possibility: fratricide has been held as inconceivable, a lusus naturae, since the days of Cain.
Appalled by the secret menace to human life that she had been scared to think of the ease and the safety in which she had been allowed over twenty odd years to carry agonizing death to so many of her kind, and convinced from the inhuman nature of her practices that she was a lusus naturae, her judges, following sentimental Anglo-Saxon example, might have given her asylum and let her live for years at public expense.
After much debate, they concluded unanimously, that I was only RELPLUM SCALCATH, which is interpreted literally LUSUS NATURAE.