Aphrodite, Greek Goddess of Love · Female Voice

Let your eyes close.

Wherever you are lying tonight, let the bed take your weight. All of it.

Let your breath out. All the way out, further than feels necessary.

And again. Slower.

Tonight I want to tell you about Aphrodite.

Let your shoulders come down away from your ears.

And this is not going to be about romance.

It is about the way you have been talking to yourself since about eleven o'clock.

Because there is a voice that starts up at this hour, and it keeps a list, and it is not kind, and you have been lying here letting it read to you.

I want to show you something the goddess of love actually says, in her own words, in the one place we still have them. It is the opposite of that voice. And it is much older.

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Stay lying down. Nothing here needs doing tonight.

Start with the fact that the Greeks could not agree on where she came from.

Hesiod tells it one way. Kronos turns on his father Ouranos with a blade, and throws what he takes into the sea, and a white foam gathers around it, and out of the foam a girl grows, and she comes ashore. First at Kythera. Then at Cyprus.

No mother. No childhood. And in Hesiod's version she is already there before most of the gods who supposedly outrank her.

Homer tells it completely differently, at about the same time. In the Iliad she is simply the daughter of Zeus and a goddess called Dione. She gets hurt in the fighting at Troy, and she runs home, and she cries in her mother's lap, and her father tells her that war is not her department and she should go back to what she is good at.

That is not a footnote. Those are two different beings with the same name, and the Greeks kept both, and never reconciled them.

Hesiod also says her name comes from that foam. Aphros. The foam born one.

People who study the language now mostly think that is a story built backwards to fit the name, and that the name itself came from somewhere further east, and travelled in by way of Cyprus.

Which means the most famous fact about her is probably a guess somebody made and everybody repeated.

Because there was never only one Aphrodite. Town after town had its own, and each one carried a title.

Two of those titles ended up in an argument that has now run for nearly two and a half thousand years.

Aphrodite Ourania. The heavenly one.

And Aphrodite Pandemos. Usually translated as the common one, and that translation has done a great deal of damage.

In Plato's Symposium, one of the speakers at the party splits love in two along exactly that line. Heavenly love up here, noble and refined. Common love down there, ordinary and cheap. Two goddesses, one of them better than the other.

That speech is philosophy. It is one character's argument at a drinking party, written by a man with a point to make.

It is not what the word meant to the people who actually worshipped her.

Pandemos means of all the people. The whole people. Pausanias, a traveller writing a guidebook to Greece centuries later, reports the tradition that her cult in Athens went back to Theseus, and was set up when he brought all the scattered Athenians together into one city.

She was not the cheap Aphrodite. She was the one who held the town together.

Somebody sorted her into high and low, and the label stuck, and the ranking was never hers.

Now go to Cyprus. To Paphos, where the foam story says she came ashore, and where her most famous sanctuary stood.

Tacitus describes it. He is a Roman historian writing a very long time after everything else in this episode, about a Cypriot temple older than any of it.

And the first thing he says is that there was no statue.

The image of the goddess is not in human form. It is a smooth rounded mass, wide at the bottom, rising to a narrow top. A cone of stone.

No face. Nothing to be beautiful with. The most beautiful being in the Greek imagination, and her oldest image is a stone you could not pick a single feature out of.

And then he says the other thing, and it is the line I want you to keep.

It was forbidden to pour blood on that altar.

Animals were brought, but the altar itself took none of it. Prayers, and a clean flame, and nothing else.

He also passes on a marvel, that the altars stood in the open air and were never once wet with rain, and I would not lean on that one. But the rule about the blood is the kind of thing a historian writes down because it was unusual enough to be worth recording.

Hers was the altar you did not bleed on.

About two thousand six hundred years ago, on the island of Lesbos, a woman called Sappho wrote a hymn to her.

Almost nothing of Sappho survives. Scraps. Half lines. Words torn off at the edge of a page.

One poem came through complete. Exactly one.

And the reason it survived is this. A Greek critic living in Rome, writing about prose style, quoted the whole thing as an example of how to arrange words smoothly. He was showing off a technique. He preserved the only complete poem she has.

It is a summoning. She is calling the goddess down.

The very first word of it is an argument all by itself. It describes Aphrodite as either richly throned or intricate minded, depending on which reading of the manuscript you follow, and scholars have gone back and forth on it for a long time.

The second line settles something else, quietly. Sappho calls her child of Zeus.

So of those two birth stories, Sappho is standing in Homer's. Not the foam. The daughter. And when the goddess sets out, she is leaving her father's house.

She calls her weaver of snares. She asks her not to break her with heartache.

And then she says, come to me the way you came before.

And she tells us what happened before.

Aphrodite comes down from that house in a chariot pulled by sparrows, fast, over the dark earth.

And she arrives, and here is the moment.

She is smiling. The poem says it plainly. She smiled with her immortal face.

And she asks what has happened this time. And why she is calling again. And what she wants most in her wild heart.

Again. The poem leans hard on that word. This is not the first time Sappho has called her about this, and both of them know it, and the goddess names it out loud.

But listen to how she names it.

Not, so you are still on this.

Not, again, really.

She asks, who is it this time that I have to talk round for you. Who wrongs you, Sappho.

She uses her name.

Then she promises it will turn. If she runs, she will follow. If she will not take gifts, she will give them.

And Sappho ends by asking for one thing. Come now, and be my ally.

The word she uses is a military one. Not comforter. Not counsellor. The one who stands next to you in the line and fights on your side.

Here is the part I want you to have.

You have been saying again to yourself all night. Again. Still this. Still not past it.

And you say it with contempt, because that is the only way you have ever heard it said.

The goddess whose entire subject this is says the same word. She says it smiling. She says it as recognition. Of course it is you. Of course it is this again.

Come here.

And she does not ask what is wrong with you.

She asks who wrongs you.

One of those questions assumes you are broken. The other assumes you are worth defending, and goes looking for the thing that hurt you.

The voice you have been using on yourself tonight has no ancient authority behind it. Nobody carved it anywhere. It is not the divine position on you.

We have hymns. We have prayers. We have inscriptions and altars and thousands of years of people addressing this goddess about exactly this.

In none of it does she arrive and tell somebody to be ashamed of how often they have needed her.

She turns up again. That is the entire characterisation.

And at Paphos, at the oldest altar she had, there was one rule, and the rule was no blood.

You have been pouring it there since eleven o'clock.

So here is the practice, and it is two small things.

First. Say the again.

Whatever you have been going over tonight, name it once, plainly, the way you would say it to somebody who was glad you came. Here I am again, about this.

Not to solve it. You are not solving anything at this hour and you know it. Just say it in the other register.

And notice that nothing bad happens when you say it that way.

Second. The altar.

Whatever you were about to do to yourself with that thought. The tallying. The going back over it. The small cruelty you have got very good at.

Not tonight. No blood on this one.

Prayers and a clean flame was all that altar ever took, and it stood for more than a thousand years.

And if you want a question to hold, do not ask what is wrong with you. You have asked that several hundred times and it has never once answered.

Ask for an ally instead. Somebody to stand in the line beside you until morning.

That is a smaller thing to ask for than being fixed. And unlike being fixed, it is available tonight.

Now let me have your body, because you have been holding it like somebody expecting to be told off.

Let your hands open. Let whatever they are gripping go.

Feel the weight of your arms going down into the bed. Heavy.

Your shoulders coming down away from your ears. Further than that. Further than you think they go.

This one lives in the jaw and the throat. Let your jaw come apart. Let it hang.

Your throat soft. Nothing to answer for.

The muscles around your eyes going quiet. They have been holding your face together since this morning.

Let your forehead go smooth.

Your chest rising and falling without you managing a single breath of it.

Your belly soft. Let it be soft.

Your lower back releasing down into the bed.

Your hips going heavy. The long muscles of your legs letting go all the way down.

Your knees. Your calves. Your ankles. And your feet, finally still.

All of it can stop now. Nobody is keeping score in this room.

Here is what is actually true in this room right now.

You are warm. You are lying down. You are safe. The door is locked and the day is over.

The list is on the floor beside the bed, and it is not in your hands.

And a very long way from here there is a smooth cone of stone that people brought their worst hours to for a thousand years, and left them there, and went home.

Nobody was ever turned away from it for coming back too often.

Let the room go soft at the edges.

Let the walls go a long way away. Let the ceiling go.

Let the sounds outside turn into weather. A car is only a sound now. None of it is asking anything of you.

Let the thinking go. Not resolved. Set down beside the bed with the rest of it, where it will all still be in the morning.

Somewhere a very long time ago a woman on an island wrote down that the goddess came, and smiled, and asked her who had hurt her.

And the last thing that poem asks for is not to be rescued. It is company until morning.

That is two thousand six hundred years old, and it is not a verdict on you. It never was.

Let it come up around you the way water comes up around a stone. Slowly. From underneath. With no effort from you at all.

Nothing needs you now.

Not until morning.

Rest is a practice.

You practised tonight.

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