APHRODITE - Greek Goddess from the Sea

APHRODITE


The foam-born Aphrodite was the last and the most splendid of the love Goddesses of Western Paganism. Also she was the purest (not in the puritan sense) as Aphrodite personified love and nothing but love. Earlier love Goddesses had often been battle Goddesses as well, or wisdom Goddesses, or what have you. Aphrodite carried no such superfluous luggage. She was erotic, beautiful, uninhibited, desirous, desirable, unpredictable, overwhelming and single-minded. She was love itself, with full orchestra - everything from the high strings to the percussion-section. She was all these things without qualm or apology.

The classical story of her birth takes us back to the beginning, to the pre-Olympian Gods. When Cronus, on his mother Gaia's orders, castrated his father Uranus, he threw the severed genitals away so that some of the blood fell on the Earth, and from this sprang the Furies, the Meliae (ash-tree nymphs), and various giants. But the genitals themselves fell on the sea, and from them sprang Aphrodite. Not all her legends agree. Homer describes Aphrodite as the daughter of Zeus and the Nature Goddess, Dione. Hyginus, writing many centuries later, says she was born from an egg which dropped from the sky into the Euphrates and was brought ashore by fish. Doves kept it warm, and it hatched out Aphrodite (writing in Latin, he called her Venus).

Aphrodite was no warrior, in the general tradition (though she was so honoured in war like Sparta). The only time she was wounded in battle -- a narrow scratch on her hand when she was defending her son Aeneas - she left Apollo to look after him and fled back to Olympus, where Dione treated the scratch. Hera and Athene were predicably sarcastic, Zeus smiled and told her she was not meant to concern herself with war; she should "attend to the sweet tasks of love". (However) The famous Judgement of Paris was ... a foregone conclusion.

Zeus asked the Trojan Paris to award the golden love-apple (a quince) inscribed "for the Fairest" to one of those three Goddesses (Aphrodite, Hera, and Athene). Hera offered him kingship, Athene victory in war, and Aphrodite merely unfastened her tunic and her girdle (quite enough in it itself) and then offered Paris the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, wife of Menelaus. She won the quince,. The destruction of Troy, and of Paris himself, was Hera and Athene's terrible revenge. Aphrodite's victory was thereafter complete. Even Hera, when she wanted to win back Zeus's love, was not too proud to borrow her magic girdle, against which Gods and men were powerless.

Aphrodite as Goddess evolved over a period of well over a thousand years in the Middle Eastern countries before becoming enshrined in Cyprus and the Greek Pantheon. She began as Inanna in Sumer, Queen of the Gods; the Semitic Ishtar, Goddess of the Earth and Moon; Astarte/Ashtoreth in Phoenicia, and Syrian Atergatis, the Wisdom Goddess. These Goddesses were all love and fertility Goddesses also. They all, except for Ategatis, were accompanied by Gods who were seasonally dying lovers.

Aphrodite became one of the Twelve Olympians of classical Greece and was given by Zeus to the lame smith god Hephaestus as his wife. She brought many things from her Middle Eastern homeland, but the original theme of the sacrificed and reborn vegetation god changed its emphasis to that of a tragic love-story.

Aphrodite has been described as something of a 'dumb blonde' who could have done with a little of the wisdom of Athene, or the responsibility of Hera, to make her wholly acceptable. But this is to overlook the Greek genius for specialisation, and what may be called 'aspect-purity', in their deities. Ares, for example, was not softened into a noble warrior; he was a destructive menace. No one god symbolised the perfect man, and no one Goddess the perfect woman. For example, the Egyptian Isis included within herself the qualities of Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite, in balance with each other and thus could be said to represent the ideal of womanhood. The Greek approach was to contemplate each aspect in isolation, undiluted by other aspects, the better to understand its true nature - the implication being that the human task was to strive for one's own balance of these fully understood aspects, without disowning any, and thus to achieve one's own perfection.

Quite apart from her adventure with Ares (to whom, somewhat surprisingly, she bore a daughter Harmonia), it was scarcely to be expected that she would be faithful to Hephaestus. To Hermes she bore the strange Hermaphrodite, who united with the nymph Salmacis to become one body, 'neither man or woman, seeming to have no sex and yet to be of both sexes'. To Poseidon she bore Rhodos, bride of Helios the Sun, after whom the island of Rhodes was named. The father of her son Eros was variously named as Ares, Hermes or Zeus himself. Eros was a charming but irresponsible child whose love-arrows could cause chaos and whose targets were often cruelly chosen. Even his mother had to punish him sometimes, but usually he was her obedient companion, and together with her attendants, the Charities (the Three Graces - themselves as much Love Goddesses as inspirers of art), he helped with her toilet. Her son by Dionysus was the serio-comic Priapus, who was originally a fertility god of the coasts of Asia Minor. He became popular in Greece and Rome, and installed (carved out of fig-wood) in every orchard, garden and fishing-harbour. Prudent maidens, taking offerings to him, approached him from behind. A cruder and simpler personification of the same force as Eros, he was regarded with humorous affection but taken very seriously; after all fecundity depended upon him.

Aphrodite had human lovers, too, the most famous being the Trojan shepherd Anchises to whom she bore Aenaes. Her most significant divine lover was of course Adonis. Aphrodite was said to have fallen in love with the beautiful youth and begged him to give up his passion for hunting, in case he should met his death. He ignored her advice and was killed by a wild boar. (Symbolically, the boar was Aphrodite herself.) This became a favourite subject for Greek poets and artists, but the vegetation-god theme was never as central as it was in Phoenicia. Although the Greek Aphrodite inspired the mating urge in all creatures, not only in men and women, that urge in itself was her basic concern, its resultant fecundity much less so. The patronage of childbirth or of harvest she left to other Goddesses.

Aphrodite was naturally adopted as patroness by Greek prostitutes. In Cyprus and in Greek colonies on Sicily, her holy girls served in her temples. On the mainland, copulation was becoming a private rite, and the only temples of Aphrodite staffed by sacred prostitutes were those at Corinth. There is evidence that loving couples also made appropriate use of her temple enclosures, which tended to be more garden-like than those of other deities.

After the ritual purification at the entrance and the offering within the temple itself, couples would withdraw to one of the secluded benches in the garden to please the Goddess by pleasing each other. Her temples and shrines were in every city of Greece and its colonies. She extended her rule to Rome too, where she completely took over the comparatively minor Goddess Venus. Thanks to the Roman imperial foundations, Venus has been the name by which she has mostly been called. Her best known statue, Aphrodite of Melos, is called 'Venus de Milo' and her loveliest painting is Boticelli's 'Birth of Venus'. Shakespeare lyricised over 'Venus and Adonis'. But it was really Aphrodite they and countless others carved, painted or wrote about, and it is time she got her real name back.