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ALL GODDESSES ARE BEAUTIFUL BUT APHRODITE is the goddess of beauty. All goddesses love but Aphrodite is the goddess of love. All gods and goddesses guide and inspire from within but Aphrodite, named Venus by the Romans, possesses from within. She is a 'close god unable to keep her distance'. She invades our most secret places, she stirs yearnings more visceral and more consuming than any other god. Of all blessed gods and mortal men only three Olympian virgins, Athena, Artemis and Hestia, can successfully resist her power. 'She even leads astray the mind of Zeus (Jupiter) himself, the lover of lightning, the greatest of all... and when she wants to she can deceive that sage heart of his easily, and make him even mate with mortal women.' She embodies the wonder, the magic, the power of primordial femininity. 'Earth's archtypal Eve. All Womanhood.' She sinks men into the deepest morass of sensuality and lifts them to the exaltation of cosmic union.

This duality of Aphrodite's nature is splendidly depicted in the myth of the union of her son Eros with Psyche (Soul). The condition for their love was that they could unite only in darkness. When Psyche succumbs to her need to know, she lights a candle and in its light sees her lover in all his glory. And Eros cries out, 'Love cannot live with suspicion,' and flies away. What is suspicion and curiosity at one level is, at another level, the soul's compulsion for light and consciousness, its unwillingness to be kept in the dark in a love relationship. As a result of her costly curiosity, Aphrotide imposes a number of tasks on Psyche before she can be reunited with her lover Eros without any restriction. Her final test is to enter the Underworld and there put into the box that Aphrodite has given her a drop of Persephone's beauty, the soul beauty of the depths. Psyche performs this task with success and is allowed to ascend from secret anonymous love towards personal and divine love merged into one. Psyche's marriage to Eros is the only wedding to be witnessed by all the gods and goddesses on Mt. Olympos. And none other but Aphrodite herself danced at the great feast Zeus three for the union of the two happy lovers.

Aphrodite is the goddess of the elemental mysteries of love as well as of its final unveiling to the light. Socrates was the first to name the two Aphrodites in Plato's book, Symposium:

No one, I think, will deny that there are two goddesses of that name -- one, the elder, sprung from no mother's womb but from the heavens themselves, we call the Uranian, the heavenly Aphrodite, while the younger, daughter of Zeus and Dione, we call Pandemus, the earthly Aphrodite. It follows, then, that Love should be known as earthly or as heavenly according to the goddess in whose company his work is done.

According to Socrates, mortals should pay homage to both goddesses of love. For whoever falls in love and feels the instincts shared with the beasts know full well that they are also shared with the gods. Even the spiritual side of Aphrodite is inextricably connected with the physical side of love, for the goddess was born from the genitals of Uranus, excised by his son Cronos and tossed into the sea. And she emerged, full-grown, into life from the depths of the ocean and the airy foam.

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And the Hours in their golden diadems

received her with joy,

clothed her in ambrosial garments,

and placed a well-wrought crown, beautiful and golden,

on her immortal head

and flowers of copper and precious gold

in the pierced lobes of her ears.

The heavenly Venus arising from the foam of the sea has provided an unlimited source of inspiration for countless poets and artists from time immemorial and it is likely to be so for many generations to come. But there is no doubt that it is the earthly Aphrodite who, through rapture, magic spells, incantation and desire, has reigned supreme in the lives of men. In the Danaid of Aeschylus, the goddess of love and beauty shamelessly extols her power:

The holy heaven is full of desire to mate with the earth, and desire

seizes the earth to find a mate; rain falls from the amorous heaven

and impregnates the earth; and the earth brings forth for men the

fodder of flocks and herds and the gifts of Demeter; and from the

same moistening marriage-site the fruit of trees is ripened. Of these

shings I am the cause.

Aphrodite (Venus) represents sexuality free of ambivalence, anxieties and inhibitions. In other words, it is natural and quintessential love that is unbridled and is not concerned with the myth of virginity or its loss. She makes love to her young lover, Anchises, in broad daylight, under the mid-day sun. She is the only goddess who takes pride and glories in her nakedness, the only one artists love to portray nude in sculptures. She is also the goddess of all the arts that enhance beauty and the act of love. She arouses the senses with perfumes and incense, love-charms and potions, the use of oils and cosmetics and all the lore of aphrodisiac drinks and foods. The Chinese, who are obsessed with aphrodisiacs from every imaginable source, sometimes going to impossible lengths to obtain them, are the unconscious devotees of the cult of Aphrodite. She is the goddess of the cosmetics industry that has brough unimaginable wealth to many people, the goddess of courtesans and of the courtesan in all women.

The father of psycho-analysis, Freud, qualified the instinct embodied in the earthly Aphrodite as the source of all instinct. He dwells very little on the Urainian aspect of the goddess for modern man tends to concentrate rather on the physical libido for it is more tangible and more compelling. Each archetype, each god and goddess has a dark side, like the Ying and the Yang, but which complement each other. But in Aphrodite, magic brightness merges into swampy darkness. Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus commands our admiration and thrills our imagination while at the same time conjures up the spectre of venereal blight. Socrates' heavenly Aphrodite has for counterpart modern neuroses, power-games, treacheries, all in the name of love. In ancient Greece, she was 'golden', 'glowing' Aphrodite, but she was also known as the 'dark one' with clear reference to the secret source of all pleasure and evil, the dark recesses of the Mons Veneris, that entrap all men, the weak and the mighty alike. She is the 'killer of men', for a touch of modernity one would say tongue-in-cheek, 'the killer of presidents', 'the unholy'. She was closely associated with the Minoan 'goddess of wild things' and the Oriental goddess Ishtar, whose rites at Babylon, Byblos and Bambyce were notorious for the thousands of women who took part in the rites of sacred prostitution in dedicated temples. Even Alexander the Great was not immune to their charms and hundreds of his warriors fell prey to their irresistible appeal. Pindar had a euphemistic term for them; he called them the 'daughters of persuasion'.

Other mythical and historical characters like Circe, Calupso, Cleopatra embody Aphrodite the enchantress, the snare-knitter, the goddess men most fear and yet are inexorably attracted to for their own demise. She promises you her orgasmic ecstasies but usually delivers much pain and sorrow. She presents herself in the guise of a trustworthy friend, of a loving admirer ready to soothe and succour but secretly she is your enemy and only wants to eat you up and lose your soul. Those who try hardest to resist, those who imagine themselves immune to her power, are the ones on whom the goddess' wrath descends most vigorously: 'Do not imagine you can abdicate', W. H. Auden's Venus warns. 'Before you reach the frontier you are caught.' Just read what Shakespeare writes in his immortal poem, "Venus and Adonis"

"Fondling," she saith, "since I have hemm'd thee here

Within the circuit of this ivory pale,

I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer:

Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale;

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,

Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie."

Unless you are still wet behind the ears you will know what Venus means when she entreats Adonis to 'stray lower, where the fountains lie', and however much Adonis tried to escape her rapturous advances, Fate had already decided an unhappy outcome for him. So, ye men out there who are about to embark on the perilous journey to Aphrodite's favourite retreats, beware you do not lose your souls in the process of whiling away the time in the arms of forbidden love. There is always the morning after to reckon with and the bitter taste of unrequited lustful love.

The myths of Aphrodite are full of retaliations against those who forget her. She punished Daphnis, a Sicilian shepherd who won the hearts of numphs and muses but insisted that love had no power over him; she caused the women of Lemnos, who neglected her, to exude a foul odour which repelled their husbands; and she destroyed Hippolytus. In her opening speech in Euripides' Hippolytus she explains why:

Great is my power and wide my frame among mortals and also in

Heaven. All men that look upon the light of the sun, all that dwell

Between the Euxine Sea and the boundaries of Atlas are under my

Sway: I bless those that respect my power; and disappoint those who

Are not humble towards me. Yes, even the family of gods have this

Trait: they are pleased when people respect them. I shall demonstrate

The truth of this forthwith. Theseus' son Hippolytus, born of the

Amazon and brought up by temperate Pittheus, is the only inhabitant

Of this land of Troezen who declares that I am the vilest of divinities.

He spurns love and will have nothing to do with sex... It is his sinful

Neglect of me for which I shall punish Hippolytus this very day.

And you all know how by Aphrodite's scheming, Phaedra, Theseus' wife, is smitten with a fearful love for her stepson. 'Moaning, and distraught with the pricks of love, love undeclared,' she is dying. Aphrodite's revenge is to reveal Phaedra's passion to her husband: Hippolytus is killed by his father's curses when a sea-monster rises from the water, frightens his horses and dashes his chariot to pieces.

Hippolytus is a myth, you might argue, but he is still alive and moving among us in the men and women fighting against the lure of secret passion. Will-power serves no purpose whatsoever when Aphrodite has her mind set on her victims. To resist her is as futile as trying not to inhale air. You can only do so at the risk of meeting a horrible death. But Aphrodite herself is not immune either to the wounds she inflicts and the passions she inspires. She is the longing she causes as well as the cause of the longing. As already suggested above, her love for Adonis, the beautiful youth born from the riven bark of the myrrh tree, has inspired some of the most moving and sensual poetry in Western literature and lovers of ancient lore and profound wisdom are urged to rush to the library and get a copy of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, one of my favourite poems, as beautifully written as any of Keats' or Shelley's masterpieces.

Loss and death, unrequited love and abandonment, are all part of Aphrodite's realm. Indeed, only by these dark shadows does her golden brilliance become a complete creation, smiling its beguiling smile as well as looking on death with immortal eyes. It is Hera who personifies permanence not Venus. She is fully aware that passioante love does not last forever but also that men are condemned by their very nature to involve themselves in physical love and suffer its dire consequences.

Torches are made to light, jewels to wear

Dainties to taste, fresh beauty for the use.

Herbs for their smell, and sappy plants to bear;

Things growing to themselves are growth's abuse:

Seeds spring from seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty;

Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty.

Another poet, Ovid, wrote about the various metamorphoses mortals go through in their lives due to the very essence of Aphrodite's power to change them. Even Pygmalion, the legendary king of Cyprus, could only bring his ivory statue of the ideal woman by falling in love with it. Ovid writes, "Pygmalion gazed in wonder, and in his heart rose a passionate love for this image of human form." He attends the festival of Venus where he makes his offerings to the goddess of love and prays to her:

When Pygmalion returned home, he went directly to the statue of

The girl he loved, leaned over the couch, and kissed her. She seemed

Warm: he laid his lips on hers again, and touched her breast with his

Hands -- at his touch the ivory lost its hardness, and grew soft: his

Fingers made an imprint on the yielding surface, just as wax of Hymettus

Melts in the sun and, worked by men's fingers, is fashioned into many

Different shapes. The lover stood, amazed, afraid of being mistaken, his

Joy tempered with doubt, and again and again stroked the object of his

Prayers. It was indeed a human body! The veins throbbed as he pressed

Them with his thumb. Then Pygmalion was eloquent in his thanks to

Venus. At long last, he pressed lips upon living lips, and the girl felt the

Kisses he gave her, and blushed. Timidly raising her eyes, she saw her

Lover and the light of day together.

The power of love can transform all of us in the twinling of an eye and lift our spirits to new heights but at the same time it can bring about death and destruction in its wake. We can either drown in love or be released by and through it into a more intense life. Socrates refers to it in Phaedrus as 'divine madness', of which he describes four types which he ascribes to four gods: the inspiration of the prophet to Apollo, that of the mystic to Dionysos, that of the poet to the Muses, and the madness of the lover, to Aphrodite and Eros, the latter being the highest form of divine madness.

It is the divine madness that removes the vagueness and dullness of routine perceptions, that brings the sublime within reach of earthly mortals. All men have experienced moments in their lives when they have felt the exaltation of love and beauty, the power and magnificence of Aphrodite. The myths remind us that her irresistible power can either lead us to spiritual edification or abject dissipation. All of us should strive for the former and avoid the latter but do our utmost never to offend the goddess of love and beauty. We would do well to heed Homer's advice when in The Iliad he makes Achilles say, "Who soever obeyeth the gods,to him they gladly hearken."

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