Sweet Aphrodite, Lady of Love

This Beltaine season we are thinking of the lover goddess, and what more famous love goddess could there be than Aphrodite?

Born of the foamy seas fully formed as a sexy lady, Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love and beauty. She is graceful, gorgeous and completely irresistible. She represents the creative fertile powers of nature, and the intoxicating ecstatic essence of both true love and lust.

She is unusual in that she was one of very few Olympian Gods to be married. Perhaps raw sexy lady power was a bit much for changing patriarchal attitudes in Ancient Greece so they married powerful ladies off to the chaps to keep them in line. The problem is you can’t contain a Love Goddess in a marriage – she’s just got too much love to share around. As a result, Aphrodite had many lovers and was super unfaithful, despite the face that her hubby Hephaestus the blacksmith (who was not much of a hottie, Zeus married her off to him so that everyone else wouldn’t fight over her) made her loads of gorgeous jewellery, including her fabulous magic girdle which made the wearer irresistible.

There is a most wonderful passage about Aphrodite written by my favourite artist, Thalia Took. Here it is:

The Tale of Aphrodite

I was born of blood and storm.

I am the unmothered daughter of dismembered Heaven, his sex scythed from him and cast into Ocean by his youngest, most beloved son. Out of the wind-whirled waves, from the gore and spume on the surface of the sea, I emerged. Strange beginnings, for such beauty as mine. But do anger, betrayal, and violence not find a home in love?

In this world of Gods and Kings, fathers and soldiers, where blood-handed heroes are given heaven’s honors, and Zeus, naming himself Law, commands by open threat of violence—how shall Love survive? When humanity’s birthright of beauty goes unrecognized, and when mothers pass to their daughters that a woman’s loveliness increases her value, yet is in itself vanity—how shall Beauty prosper? Love cannot play fair in such an age of iron brutality. Strategies and subterfuge, punishments and desperate deceits are the tricks I must turn.

And such tricks I have. My soft skin is white as the Heavenly lily, flushed with the rose of Earth. My hair is bright gold as the risen sun on the first morning of the world, and my eyes would shame the sapphire skies. My glance annuls the unlawful oaths of marriage while promising sweet secret pleasures. The stem of my waist is sinuous as the ever-renewing serpent, my slender hands clever and wicked. As the dawn-kissed domes of far temples so are the holy mounds of my breasts, and as the perfumed asphodel so do the petals of my sex guard Immortal Elysia. Grace and glamoury, invitation and persuasion, single-mindedness and strength, these are every one my received gifts.

For my favors, men erect tall towers; women beg to borrow a sliver of my shining. To win my rewards wars are launched, soldiers slaughtered, fair cities pulled down, navies built and burnt. My promises suade even the wills of the Immortals, and what I desire seeks me.

War, Madness, Deceit—these have all been my lovers. How else shall it be in this world?

You can check out more of Thalia’s amazing writings on goddesses and all her paintings at her website http://www.thaliatook.com/

Aphrodite was a real big deal in ancient Greece and a very powerful and beloved goddess worshipped all over the country. Her worship was thought to have been introduced by the Assyrians, perhaps as the Syrian fertility and love goddess Atargatis. Aphrodite’s biggest cult centre was Cyprus, near to where she was thought to have been born, and was thought to have been founded in 1500BC. Famously, devotees were required to be present as the sacred sexual priestess and “…sit in the temple of Aphrodite and have intercourse with some stranger once in her life”. (Herodotus wrote this in 5th century BC, and he thought it was a “foul custom”). Throughout Greece, Aphrodite was known my many different names to show her many different faces to the people. She was known as Cytheria (Lady of Cythera), Acidalia (Named after a spring she liked to bathe in), Aphrodite Pandemos (Aphrodite of the people) and Aphrodite Urania (Heavenly Aphrodite).

This is a fab blog post about the modern worship of Aphrodite, and the rest of the site has some fab stuff on it too. https://aphroditerises.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/so-what-does-a-priestess-of-aphrodite-do/