Goddesses of Beltane: Goddess Aphrodite - Greek Goddess of Love, Beauty, Pleasure & Sensuality
Goddess Aphrodite is the Greek Goddess of Love, Romance, Beauty, Passion, Pleasure, Sex, Sensuality and Fertility. Her name comes from aphros which means “from the foam” and dítē "bright" in Greek.
She has an endless number of epithets - possibly the most of any Goddess I've seen! - mostly centred around her various functions overseeing the art of armour and sexy time (which include Aphrodite Peitho - Goddess of Persuasion and Aphrodite Praxis - Goddess of Success, Orgasm) but probably her main ones are Aphrodite Ourania, Heavenly Goddess and Aphrodite Pandemos, Goddess of All the People which illustrates the interesting dichotomy of this Goddess - she is of the heavenly cosmos yet also a Goddess of the common people.
Born of sea foam and water around Paphos, Cyprus - allegedly directly out of the sea when Kronos’ severed genitals hit the water - she was brought to earth on a conch or scallop shell which is symbolic for feminine genitalia. In many representations of her she is depicted nude wearing a scallop shell like a fig leaf.
Like Athena, she is motherless - where Athena is born fully-fledged grown Goddess from Zeus’ head, Aphrodite is also birthed forth, fully-fledged from Kronos’’ genitals (as also were the Furies). Where Athena embodies the independent thinking, logical aspect, Aphrodite represents the independent sensual, creative and feeling aspect. (Unlike many of their Eastern predecessors, the Greeks were famous for embodying more singular aspects in their Goddesses and Gods - thus where one of Aphrodite’s Eastern predecessors, Astarte or Inanna, was the Goddess of love, beauty, sensuality, war, fertility and a ‘great mother goddess’, by the time we get to the Greeks, they’ve neatly compartmentalised and concretised these aspects in more individual Goddesses - Aphrodite was the embodiment of love, sensuality and sexual fertility (but not so much its resultant offspring).
Indeed, though she did have many divine and human children from her various unions, including famously Eros, Hermaphroditus and Aeneas, she was never ‘A Mother Goddess’ and the patronage of childbirth and harvest she left to other Goddesses like Demeter.
She extended her rule to Rome, too, where she completely took over the comparatively minor Goddess, Venus who ended up sharing many of Aphrodite’s aspects, though with certain elements distinctive to her.
Exuding feminine energy, Aphrodite evokes the creative and heart-renewing powers of the water. She was a divine Queen in Lemuria, and reigned over all matters of love, romance and relationships. Her temple contained a huge rose quartz crystal. (1)
She is associated with red roses, myrtle trees (these were planted at her temples and shrines), quinces, apples, pomegranates, water-mint, sparrows, doves, swans and shells - particularly conch and scallop shells.
She is a Goddess of Beltane as this festival is associated with couples, love-making and renewed passion for life. There is some connection with the festivals of Aphrodite and Dionysus held around May and containing orgiastic rites.
HER MYTH
There is of course a great deal of mythology surrounding Aphrodite. There are many stories regarding her birth, her betrothal to the lame forge god, Hephaestus, who was chosen for her by Zeus and her many love affairs - with the gods Ares, Hermes and Adonis and the mortal, Anchises. But the most enduring myth is that surrounding the Judgment of Paris.
Zeus asked the Trojan Paris to award the golden love-apple (in Greece actually a quince) inscribed ‘For the Fairest’ to one of the three Goddesses at the party - Aphrodite, Hera or Athena (in certain tellings of the myth, the Greek Goddess, Eris, had thrown said quince into the room apparently in revenge for not being invited to the party)
To convince Paris to choose her, Hera offers him kingship and power, Athena offers him victory in war and Aphrodite, so the legend goes, merely unfastens her tunic and her girdle and then offers Paris the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, wife of Menelaus.
Of course, she wins the quince, Paris elopes back to Troy with Helen and her husband Menelaus declares war. The destruction of Troy, and of Paris himself, was Hera and Athena’s terrible revenge.
WORKING WITH HER
Aphrodite is probably the Goddess who is the most heavily represented in art and media throughout the ages that connecting to her true essence requires some serious surrendering of all that we think we know (or have been conditioned to believe) about her.
Aphrodite often gets portrayed in popular culture as the Marilyn Monroe of Goddesses and has even been described as something of a ‘dumb blonde’"(2). It is often this limited archetypal expression of her as ‘the seducer and the harlot’ that Western culture tends to narrowly focus on.
She is mostly celebrated as the embodiment and personification of human beauty, and all the ‘trappings’ of beauty - seen as the one “most skilled in the cultivation of beauty, the use of cosmetics and perfume, of ornament and gorgeous dress” (3). Aphrodite is the representative of The Goddess as beautiful, sexy, nude, accessible and endlessly package-able from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Venus razor ad campaigns. There is a surface side of the luscious and oft-represented Aphrodite that is popular and marketable and a bit, well…shallow.
That’s because it’s reductive.
The Goddess over the last several millennia has been reduced and boxed into patriarchal culture - no longer an expression of the huge kaleidoscopic breadth of wild and powerful feminine archetypes, She has been reduced to thin, shallow stereotypes that serve the patriarchal culture’s binary requirements of women.
Just as after the neolithic period, Goddesses were firstly subsumed into the worship of masculine patriarchal, war-faring sky gods, their huge and all-encompassing spheres of power reduced to initially being alongside the gods as many Goddesses were partnered up with these gods in the myths, then increasingly subordinated to the male gods and then eventually suppressed and driven underground altogether (with the rise of the Brahmanic male-trinity religions that replaced the Maiden-Mother-Crone trinity of the pagan and feminine Earth-worshipping religions). Likewise, women’s roles in society became increasingly reduced to a painful duality - Mother or Lover. Once Christianity took hold, we were of course only left (barely) - Goddess-wise - with Mother Mary: the virginal, sexually chaste, modest, sacrificial, unconditionally loving, wife and mother.
The other side of the Feminine binary? ‘The Lover’ archetype. Sexual love and passion was increasingly pushed into the world of the courtesan (occurring in patriarchal Greek culture before even the rise of more puritanical Christianity). Aphrodite was the Goddess par excellence of this world - one of her epithets is literally ‘Aphrodite Hetaira’ - a Goddess who protects courtesans (hetairai) and ‘Aphrodite Porne’ - Goddess of prostitutes.
‘The Lover’ side of the binary endured throughout history, though was increasingly schismatised with the rise of the Christian church - Aphrodite had temples in every city of Greece and its colonies ‘few of which remain for she was the particular target of Christian iconoclasts, who hated the ‘lusts of the flesh’ even more than they did ‘idolatry’ (4). Despite all attempts to suppress her, her enduring influence as the acceptable-to-patriarchy ‘Bombshell Goddess’ of love, sex and beauty remained in place across the world and Aphrodite/Venus remained the most well-known Goddess perhaps, an inspiration for many writers, poets and artists for centuries.
So does she help with sex, love, magnetism, attraction, seduction, the art of amour and union? Absolutely.
But she is SO 👏 much 👏 more 👏than 👏that. Whether we’re looking for love, already in a partnership or absolutely not interested in sex or romance we can absolutely still work with Aphrodite.
SELF-LOVE & SELF-WORTH
In essence she can help us heal our self-worth, our body-image, to see ourselves as beautiful and our bodies as a temple for our soul. Not in order to ‘get’ or magnetise anyone (though that may well be a by-product), but because we deserve to just feel good in ourselves. To enjoy and take pleasure and delight in our own experiences on the earth - particularly recognising our bodies as portals for divine feminine energy (regardless of sex or gender - it just requires being open to receiving her healing energy). Aphrodite naturally and entirely delighted in her own loveliness as a Goddess and she can help you do the same.
She helps us to connect to that delicious, divine-feminine, pure self-love - not egotistical love, or love of what we’ve achieved, or love based on admiration from lovers or the external world. She can help us cultivate a lasting, steady INTERNAL feeling of love for ourselves - pure, unabashed, radical love for love’s sake.
Call on Aphrodite in this way and she will help you heal your heart chakra and feel an increase in love in your heart toward yourself and everything you delight in. Her mirror will reveal your true beauty - and not external beauty by narrow, Western standards - but your true soul’s eternal beauty and radiance.
As Sophie Bashford channels Aphrodite in her card in her Goddesses, Gods & Guardians deck:
“Beloved, see yourself as I see you: as an everlasting expression of the divine. Heal those old wounds of “not beautiful” or “not loveable” - look into my mirror and see your true essence. Your relationships echo your relationship with yourself and the Goddess. As you practice loving yourself, so you’ll see this rebirth of self-love reflected back to you by your partner, friends, family and the entire world.”
So yes, she is about relationships and loving partnerships, but fundamentally at her core she is about cultivating a healthy and loving relationship with our own self first as the foundation for any other relationships.
SACRED UNION
Goddess Aphrodite can support us with becoming ‘the Beloved’ within. She can help us to heal, integrate and find union between our inner masculine and inner feminine self. She supports us with the desire of the soul not just the body. The union with a soulmate that we may be seeking is a physical manifestation of the soul’s desire for union with the divine.
As Sophie Bashford says in her Aphrodite oracle card, Aphrodite heals our defences against accepting love. Aphrodite asks us to treat romantic love with respect, for it’s a sacred practice. Our partners are divine teachers, bringing opportunities to learn everything about our own heart.
Aphrodite in this aspect is perfectly encapsulated in this oracle card from the beautiful and feminine (and very Aphrodite-esque) Rose Oracle deck by Rebecca Campbell (5):
PASSION & CREATIVITY
Can Aphrodite help us with passion in terms of sexual passion, libido or cultivating sexual magnetism? Yes and you can certainly call on her for support with this and to guide you to the most supportive healing rituals or therapies to help heal any blocks or sacral chakra wounds around sexual enjoyment and passion.
But this sacral passion is a power not just reserved for expending on and enjoyment in sexual relationship but also a power we can cultivate within to spark and cultivate our own creative passions and projects. In order to want to pursue anything - whether it’s a person, a creative project, some work, a hobby or practice it helps to fall in love with it.
That feeling that we can get at the beginning of a creative project, when we are so filled with creative inspiration for an idea that is alluring - calling us to devote our time and energy to this passion (passion coming from the Latin word ‘padi’ meaning sacrificial suffering) - that’s Aphrodite energy. As Jean Shinoda-Bolen says in her section on Aphrodite in Goddesses in EveryWoman:
“Creative work comes out of an intense and passionate involvement - almost as if with a lover, as one (the artist/creatrix) interacts with the “other” to bring something new into being. This “other” may be a painting, a dance form, a musical composition, a sculpture, a poem or a manuscript, a new theory or invention, that for a time is all-absorbing and fascinating.” (6)
It is as creatrix that Aphrodite is associated with flowers (the generative organs of vegetal life) and with fruits (the progeny) (7). The three Graces named Joyous, Brilliance and Flowering are her attendants - linking to her in her creatrix, fertility aspect and illustrate the wonders the Goddess can offer if she chooses to smile on our petitions.
RITUALS TO CONNECT WITH APHRODITE
Indulge in a rose petal bath - light some candles, put a couple of drops of rose essential oil into the bath, put some Goddess music on and allow yourself to deeply relax and enjoy the moment. You’re worth it.
Rose quartz is the main crystal associated with Aphrodite - it helps with healing the heart chakra, can help with fostering a sense of self-love and self compassion and healing and cultivating loving relationships. If you have any blocks to self-love or have recently suffered heartbreak, lie with a piece of rose quartz on your heart for least twenty minutes. Feel the soothing energy of the rose quartz sink into your heart - repeat as often as needed until your heart feels healed. Other crystals associated with her include peach moonstone for its connection to feminine energy, other sacral chakra crystals along with other pink or green heart chakra crystals.
Buy yourself flowers! Having fresh flowers around you can raise your vibrational frequency, as does admiring the beauty of nature. Again - you’re worth it.
Create an altar to Aphrodite and decorate it with fresh roses, scatter rose petals around, shells - particularly conch or scallop shells, cinnamon sticks and rose quartz. etc
Cook a romantic feast - just for yourself or a romantic partner/date - include scallops and oysters, curry or spiced food believed to contain aphrodisiacal properties and other sweet aphrodisiacs such as chocolate, figs, strawberries for dessert.
Celebrate yourself, your body, your beauty and sensuality - go dancing (good ‘Aphrodite-esque’ solo practices include something like belly-dancing or burlesque and partner practices would include sensual dances like Argentine Tango, blues dancing, Rumba or Zouk) or even light some candles, put on some sexy music, dress in something that makes you feel like the Goddess you are and shimmy about your house to some music you personally find sexy or passionate whilst cooking (if you have a lot of built up body shame etc this might bring up a lot of resistance or feel REALLY stupid! That’s natural! Give yourself a couple of songs just allowing all those ego judgments to arise and to give yourself time to drop out of your mind and into your body - then just allow your body to move you the way it wants to - that’s Aphrodite energy expressed.
REFERENCES
1) Goddesses, Gods & Guardians by Sophie Bashford
2) The Witches’ Goddess - Janet & Stewart Farrar
3)The Goddess - Mythological Images of the Feminine - Christine Downing
4) Farrar
5) Rose Oracle Deck - Rebecca Campbell
6) Goddesses in EveryWoman - Jean Shinoda -Bolen
7) Downing