Cetus the Whale

 Well, here in the southern hemisphere we've just had Australian Beltane (although the non-Pagans thought it was "Halloween"). So what did I do on this night (besides tie up my front gate with string to keep the "trick or treaters" from knocking on the door, because last year they tore the wire screen, so insistent were they on forcing us to acknowledge them), I went to a play The Room of Regret, which is basically a re-telling of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, with my good chum, and then we went to The George. Why am I telling you this? Mainly because I already have an entry on Australian Beltane, the link to which is above. So I didn't want to repeat myself in that regard. Obviously I didn't do anything in like what I've got in that post this Beltane though... Another reason for this post is because now that this blog is being archived (see the post below), I had better start supplying some more copy. Stay tuned for a post on my PhD research topic: Tree Cult in Minoan glyptic. Obscure topic? Wait and see?

Necropolis Now archived by the National Library of Australia

On the 1st August 2013 I received an email from the National Library of Australia explaining how they aim to build a comprehensive collection of Australian publications to ensure that Australians have access to their documentary heritage now and in the future. As the email exaplined, PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive, was set up by the Library in 1996 to enable the archiving and provision of long-term access to online Australian publications. Since then they have been identifying and archiving online publications that meet their collecting scope and priorities.

They then said that they would like to include the on-line publications of Necropolis Now in the PANDORA Archive!!! So that meant that I had to decide whether I wanted to grant the Library licence under the Copyright Act 1968, to copy my publications into the Archive and to provide online public access to them via the Internet. If so, this meant that I would grant the Library permission to retain my publications in the Archive and to provide public access to them in perpetuity. They would re-archive my publication periodically to record significant additions and changes.

The benefits to me in having my publications archived by the Library are that the Library will take the necessary preservation action to keep my publications accessible as hardware and software changes over time. The Library will catalogue my publications and add the records to the National Bibliographic Database (a database of catalogue records shared by over 5,200 Australian libraries), as well as to their own online catalogue. This will increase awareness of my publications among researchers using libraries.

So of course how could I say no to that?

So, Necropolis Now is archived in PANDORA. Now I just need to work out how to add the PANDORA logo to the sidebar of my site, as a fellow blogger has done here. I'm such a Luddite, I just don't know how to do it.

Mighty Aphrodite: A Goddess Tamed by Greek Myth

It is generally accepted that the Greek goddess Aphrodite derives from an ancient Near Eastern predecessor such as the Sumerian/Akkadian goddess of love and war, Inanna/Ishtar. Parallels between Sumerian and Greek literature including similarities between the circumstances of Aphrodite’s birth myth and components of the Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh are evident, particularly in regards to scenes concerning Ishtar where, not only is she thematically similar to Aphrodite, but the activity being performed by her is also very close to later Aphroditean scenes in Greek literature such as the Iliad and Odyssey.

Aphrodite also shares ritual similarities such as incense altars and dove sacrifices with the Near Eastern goddess Astarte (a Greek version of Ishtar) on Cyprus. The themes associated with these goddesses are: descent from a sky god, youthful beauty, conspicuous sexuality, influence over human and animal procreation, vegetative lushness, and warfare. This type of goddess is also a patroness of prostitution and never appears in the role of wife or mother, perhaps because she is closely associated with men and their interests. In myth she appears as a dominant female whose male consort tends to suffer death or disaster in some form.

According to Hesiod’s Theogony, Aphrodite is born from the testicles of heaven - the sky god Ouranos – and the sea. Her birth results when Kronos, son of Ouranos, castrates his father with a sickle and throws the testicles away. The blood from the wound falls on Earth and generates the Erinyes, Giants and Ash-tree Nymphs while...

The genitals, cut off with admant

And thrown from land into the stormy sea,

Were carried for a long time on the waves.

White foam surrounded the immortal flesh,

And in it grew a girl. At first it touched

On holy Cythera, from there it came

To Cyprus, circled by the waves. And there

The goddess came forth, lovely, much revered,

And grass grew up beneath her delicate feet.

Her name is Aphrodite among men

And gods, because she grew up in the foam,

And Cytherea, for she reached that land,

And Cyprogenes from the stormy place

Where she was born, and Philommedes from

The genitals, by which she was conceived.

Eros is her companion; fair Desire

Followed her from the first, both at her birth

And when she joined the company of the gods.

From the beginning, both among gods and men,

She had this honour and received this power:

Fond murmuring of girls, and smiles, and tricks,

And sweet delight, and friendliness and charm.

Here we have a goddess born directly from Heaven’s genitals – there could not a more explicit example of the nature of Aphrodite than so literal a birth myth that creates the Goddess of Sex from actual genitals. Appearing at the beginning of time when heaven and earth separated, Aphrodite was obviously considered to be both ancient and primal, a force of nature. According to Hesiod she is the keystone cementing the bridge between the sexes, the thing that causes them to be united - the sexual drive - because it was she that appeared when the primordial pair first separated. As we know, ever after she will cause the sexes to re-unite as it is her very nature.

Interestingly, Aphrodite is not born from an act of sexual love between embodied deities, but from an act of violence: as a result of the rupture of conjoined heaven and earth. Associating sexuality with aggression and violence has Near Eastern precedents as is depicted on Syrian and Babylonian cylinder seals where erotic encounters between divine females and males are accompanied by scenes of human and animal violence, bringing sexuality and danger together. Ouranos’ severed testicles evoke associations ranging from the beginning of time brought about by the separation of the primordial couple, to the two-sided coin of dual compulsion and trepidation toward sex.

Both Aphrodite and the Sumerian Inanna/Ishtar were daughters of the sky god and goddesses of sexuality, in Aphrodite’s case Hesiod has her born right out of Ouranos’ testicles, whereas while there is a parallel for the castration of Inanna’s father Anu by Kumarbi in the Enuma Elish, it does not result in her birth. The combination of Sumerian literary parallels in the Theogony, the mention of Aphrodite’s Cypriot birth place and her very primal, rather threatening birth myth indicate that Hesiod perceived her as a pre-Olympian independent ‘Eastern’ goddess. As the daughter of Ouranos, the Hesiodic Aphrodite is two generations older than Olympian Zeus and, we can assume, independent from him.

The fifth Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (author unknown), while explicitly mentioning her Cypriot origin and hinting at the goddess’s Near Eastern characteristics such her power over all creatures including wild animals and her association with the Phrygian mountain and hence the goddess Kybele, also involves a subduing of this once-dangerous goddess of sex. While the first five lines of the Hymn tell us how all beings are under the sway of Aphrodite’s power, we then find that three goddesses – Athene, Artemis and Hestia - are not actually able to be swayed by her because they do not involve themselves in sex. The Hymn seems to be a turning point in Aphrodite’s sphere of influence: up until now she has been able to cause whomever she chose to couple, disregarding the bonds of marriage and the vertical hierarchy between immortals and mortals: ‘nothing has escaped Aphrodite, either of the blessed gods, or of mortal men. She even led astray the mind of Zeus…’. Whereas in Hesiod, Aphrodite preceded Zeus and was independent of him, in the Hymn she becomes a ‘daughter of Zeus’ and is thus subject to his power. Somehow, perhaps simply because Zeus is the god ‘who is the greatest and has the greatest honour’, he is able to use Aphrodite’s own power against her to teach her a lesson – to subdue her and reign her in under his control so that he is not under hers. ‘He wanted to bring it about as soon as possible that not even she was set apart from a mortal bed…’

Aphrodite’s demotion in the Hymn is extreme. It is not toward one of her own kind - an immortal - that Zeus causes Aphrodite to yearn, but to a mortal: the Trojan youth, Anchises – she even becomes pregnant to him. While the goddesses thought to be Aphrodite’s Near Eastern counterparts had mortal love interests who died, such as Adonis who later became associated with Aphrodite as well, these were not forced upon them nor did the goddesses become pregnant. In Greek mythology it was a great hardship for immortal goddesses (and gods) to be parents to mortals because the mortals invariably died, so Zeus is teaching Aphrodite the worst kind of love lesson for a god, the one that involves contact with death.

Aphrodite’s power over wild animals on Mount Ida evokes the Phrygian goddess Kybele, ‘Mother of the Mountain’ (although she was not a mother at all), whose young lover Attis castrated himself. Recalling Aphrodite’s Hesiodic birth myth with its explicit castration scene and allusions to the Near Eastern idea of the equivalence of sex and danger, it seems more than coincidence that in the Hymn Anchises fears being ‘unmanned’ after having sex with Aphrodite. Whether we think of this state of ‘unmanning’ as being completely emptied of male virility or as literally castrated as was Attis, the general theme of post-sexual debilitation - hence danger and risk for the male - is present. The inclusion in the Hymn of the stories of Ganymede – a boy who will never mature – and Tithonos – a man who is perpetually incapacitated - further emphasise the theme of the male who is unable to achieve or maintain virility and/or generate children. While this is the kind of result a mortal male may have risked in an encounter with a Near Eastern goddess of sex such as in the case of Gilgamesh and Ishtar: ‘What bridegroom of yours did endure forever?’ or with a Hesiodic Aphrodite, in the Hymn Anchises obtains the very opposite of this. Aphrodite assures him that he will incur ‘no harm from me or the other blessed ones’, in addition he will become the father of ‘a dear son who will rule over the Trojans, as will the children born to his continually’. (This son will be Aeneas, from Virgil’s Aeneid fame). The dangerous, violent, unmanning Near Eastern goddess has done a complete turn about and now bestows fatherhood, progeny and illustrious lineage. Aphrodite has been chastised and controlled by Zeus, in the Hymn she is regretful, knows that her power has been diminished and that she has been brought to the same level as the other gods whom she used to control.

In Homer’s Iliad, while Aphrodite sides with Troy recalling her associations with Phrygia and the Near East, she is fully assimilated into the Olympian pantheon. Aphrodite is now explicitly the ‘daughter of Zeus’ and instead of being born from Ouranos and the sea, at line 330 of the Iliad we discover a mother, ‘Dione’, a female version of Zeus. There is a parallel to Ishtar in Sumerian literature here who, when spurned by Gilgamesh, goes up to heaven and weeps before her father Anu and a female form of her father, ‘Antu’. While Aphrodite played a major role in the circumstances that brought about the Trojan War, unlike the Hesiodic Aphrodite or her Near Eastern predecessors, the Iliad’s Aphrodite is neither dangerous, nor warlike. Although we know Aphrodite was associated with war in both myth from the Odyssey and in iconography, in the Iliad she is hopeless in battle. A mortal, Diomedes, is actually able to insult and physically injure her, Zeus explicitly tells her ‘No, my child, not for you are the works of warfare. Rather concern yourself with the lovely secrets of marriage…’, and Athene, goddess of war, hits her. Aphrodite’s weakness and unsuitability for warfare verges on the comical and she seems destined to be restricted to the role of beautiful Olympian daughter concerned only with attractiveness, sex and deception. While there is still a theme of sex and death in the background, Aphrodite seems inconvenient and pesky rather than directly dangerous.

In the Odyssey as well, the character of Aphrodite appears in a scene that has undertones of the Near Eastern goddess themes of sexuality and violence, but is mixed in with a comical treatment. Ares, the god of war, and Aphrodite who have been having an affair are caught in a net by Aphrodite’s husband, Hephaestus. Having Aphrodite married to Hephaestus in the first place – a very clever but physically deformed god of fire and metalworking – diminishes her somewhat in that the couple are not visually physically compatible – unlike Aphrodite and Ares - although the marriage may refer to her association with copper smelting on Cyprus, or her epithet ‘golden’. Aphrodite becomes the object of laughter because of Hephaestus’ trap and while it is not derisive laughter and one of Aphrodite’s epithets is ‘lover of laughter’, this is an example of the harmless figure she appears as in Homer. Aphrodite is an object of desire for the other male Olympians and the only threat she offers is to the institution of marriage.

As we have seen in the above examples of the depiction of Aphrodite in archaic Greek literature, she has indeed been transformed from an ancient Near Eastern goddess of sex and war into a weak and unthreatening goddess associated with sexual desire and beauty. Although the Hymn to Aphrodite is compositionally later than Hesiod’s Theogony and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, thematically it can be seen to form a bridge between them as author of The Politics of Olympus, Jenny Strauss Clay suggests, though whether this was the intention of the original author cannot be known. The sequence of the transformation from a dangerous, powerful goddess of sexuality to an easily controlled object of men’s desire evident in the progression from Near Eastern myth, to the Theogony, the Hymn, the Iliad and the Odyssey indicates that while Aphrodite as goddess of sexual love was required for inclusion within the Olympian pantheon, her ‘Eastern’ characteristics were felt to be unacceptable. An Olympian Aphrodite needed to be submissive to the authority of Father Zeus, not vice versa, and it is the Hellenisation (making Greek) of Aphrodite and her incorporation into the Olympian pantheon that strips her – as she once stripped men - of her power.

Australian Imbolc: 1 August

In the night sky Aquila the Eagle rises in the east, succeeded by Capricornus and, later, Aquarius. This is early spring when the weather oscilates between the cold of winter and warmer spells that herald true spring. The bush is a riot of flowering wattles, many birds are nesting, tree ferns unfold new fronds and eucalypts display new growth. Sheep in various southerly parts of Australia lactate around this time, fitting in nicely with the traditional symbolism of this sabbat. In northern Australia it is the start of the hot dry season; the weather feels stuffy and the earth begins to dry up. Creeks, waterholes and swamps evaporate, grass shrivels, and the native vegetables of the previous season become more difficult to find. This is the time when the dingoes give birth, turtles and snakes lay their eggs, and freshwater crocodiles start nesting.

Meditation: The first butterflies emerge now. It is said that the flutter of a butterfly's wing in one part of the world can cause a cyclone elsewhere. Small efforts can produce great results. Insignificant actions can manifest in strange futures. All beings and phenomena are connected; touching one strand of the Web of Wyrd can affect the entire structure. This is a time to be alert, refreshed, lucid, to act mindfully and to cultivate forethought.

Image of Aquila from Mr. Eclipse
Text from "The Sabbats" in Practising the Witch's Craft.

Mola Salsa: Sacred Flour from the Hearth of Rome’s Vestal Virgins

The perpetually-burning fire in ancient Rome’s Temple of Vesta was considered to be essential to the safeguarding and continuation of the Roman state. As the public hearth situated in the center of Rome, the Vestal fire was the focus and symbolised the nucleus of the collective home that was Rome. The primary activity performed on this hearth was the transmutation through the use of fire of animal, vegetable and mineral substances into two types of purifying powder. Both these substances are floury and food-like, in addition to having purificatory qualities. One of them, mola salsa, made by the Vestal Virgins three times a year out of salted ground spelt, was used in every public animal sacrifice. The other, suffimen, made once a year from the ash of burned animal components, was used on a single occasion.

It will be argued here that the main characteristic of both mola salsa and suffimen is unification. In order to explore this idea this article will first investigate the procedure involved in the manufacture of mola salsa. This will be followed by an analysis of the times during the year that it was made. Subsequent to this will be an examination of how it is used, succeeded by a consideration of what mola salsa can tell us about the Vestal Virgins who prepared it. The article primarily focuses on the production and application of mola salsa, but will also investigate suffimen. The comparison of mola salsa with suffimen will lead to the conclusion that through contact with the Vestal hearth and treatment by the Vestal Virgins both substances assimilated the qualities of this sacred urban hearth and subsequently acted as extensions of it, causing the rituals in which these materials were used – and hence the people participating in them – to be linked to and revolve around the Vestal fire, the consequence being the unification of separate Roman rituals and their application toward the good of the collective.

Mola salsa consists of two ingredients, flour and salt. The flour is made from prematurely-harvested spelt (far), gathered by the three senior Vestal Virgins on alternate days from the 7th to the 14th of May. The unripe nature of this spelt - in that it was not yet at the point of its reproductive stage in its growth cycle, halted between its ‘virginal’ and ‘maternal’ phases so to speak - echoes the Vestal’s own interstitial physical condition: their unused fertility stored and dedicated to the city of Rome. It also evokes the captio method of Vestal recruitment: the grain being ‘taken as a child from its family’ for a special purpose, as the Vestals were. After the spelt is harvested, it is parched over the Vestal fire, ground and then stored. On a domestic level, parching - a semi-cooking - makes grain more digestible. It can also be seen as a premature result of the cooking process: the spelt is neither raw nor cooked, again suggestive of the Vestals.

The salt part of the mola salsa was also specially prepared and consisted of ‘boiled salt’ and ‘hard salt’. Salt, while an everyday food, was also sacred. Like the spelt, the boiled salt was transformed by the Vestal fire making it both ‘cooked’ on a domestic level, and purified on a religious one. Both the spelt and the salt underwent the normal process connected with the function of a hearth – the transformation by fire of nature (raw materials) into culture (food) - but because it was Vesta’s hearth in particular this transformation compounded literal cooking with sacredness: multiplying the interstitiality of the ingredients and imbuing the resultant product with the Vestal fire’s own traits of purity and, more importantly, mediation. While a domestic hearth made grain into bread suitable for human consumption, in the Vestals’ sacred ‘bakery’ a hybrid substance – flour - was made as ‘food’ for the gods.

The spelt and salt were combined to make batches of mola salsa three times a year: during the festivals of the Vestalia (9 June), the Ides of September (13 September) and the Lupercalia (15 February). The Vestalia was a festival concerned with matronae (adult women), bakers and grain, and purification, again a type of compounding of the qualities of Vesta, the Vestals and the public hearth. The Ides of September was a festival of Jupiter which involved a banquet attended by magistrates and senators so was a high-profile event. The Lupercalia, held in the vicinity of the Palatine Hill, was evocative of Rome’s rustic origins and had Vestal connections (Ovid. Fasti. 2. 270-300, 383) which would have enhanced the antiquity and importance of the Vestal Virgins as mythical and symbolic matronae of Rome. The highlighting of these three festivals as the times of mola salsa production can be understood to emphasise the unity of Roman elites: women (Vestalia), men (Ides of September), and youths (Lupercalia). The making of the mola salsa at these particular times in the year situates the Vestals amongst these categories, linking them and emphasising their importance as core components of Rome.

Ovid tells us that a simple libation of grain and salt was regarded by the Romans as the earliest form of offering to the gods (Fasti 1. 337-53). According to Horace, mola salsa can be used alone as a sacrificial offering in itself (Odes. 3. 23. 20), and a type of mola was also used in domestic contexts as an offering during meals. Mola salsa is evidently seen as both venerably antique and suitable as a medium with which to communicate with the gods. On a state level in the sacra publica (public ritual) the mola salsa made by the Vestals Virgins was utilised in combination with animal sacrifice, a central component of Roman public ritual. Animal sacrifice consisted of six main stages, the third of which, immolatio, involved the pouring of mola salsa over the animal’s head and on the sacrificial knife. Immolatio was the point of actual sacrifice, the critical moment of the ritual when the animal was transferred to the ownership of the gods and it was at this moment that the sacrifice became, or failed to become, litatio (accepted or rejected by the god). It was the application of mola salsa that performed the transformatory action, the sacralising of the ritual offerings, making the bridge between mortals and the gods.

While Cancik and Schneider suggest that immolatio ‘denotes the act of purification before the actual killing’, and Wildfang also sees mola’s function in sacrifice as purificatory, mola salsa really does more than that: it is a mediating substance, creating a channel of communication between the ritual participants and the gods receiving the offering. The purity is just an aspect, not the whole, of its transformatory, unifying power. Mola unifies both vertically, during animal sacrifice from mortals to the gods, and horizontally by linking rituals throughout the year and in various places that different people participated in. Being an indispensible component of every sacrifice, mola salsa is part of the orthopraxy of Roman religion, designating separate rituals performed by different people throughout the year as recognisable elements of the larger category of Roman religion. Mola, like the Vestals who made it, represented the state as a collectivity in harmonious reciprocal relationship to the gods.

Mola salsa performs the same function as the Vestals themselves. As the role of individual aristocratic women was to cement groups and the domus (home) was a microcosm of the state, so the Vestals – the matronae of the greater domus that was the city of Rome – unified all Romans, linking them to each other, to the state and the gods. Through the manufacture and distribution of mola salsa the Vestals influenced, sanctioned and attended (symbolically when not literally) every sacrifice on behalf of the goddess Vesta. Thus the Vestals infused Roman religion spatially and calendrically. The mola, derived from the hearth of Vesta, permeated each individual sacrificial fire with Vestal – collective Roman - qualities, linking them to the public hearth that was the center of Rome. On a conceptual level the use of mola salsa defined sacrificial fires as Roman and on a functional level empowered individual rituals to function for the good of the collective. Vesta’s hearth fire could not be everywhere at once, nor could her priestesses, but the mola salsa could. Mola functions as the limbs of the central hearth, indicating state surveillance, as well as acting as a stand-in for the Vestals/Vestal fire/Rome at each individual ritual where it performs their transformative, unifying activity.

Besides mola salsa, the Vestals also made suffimen, an ashy, flour-like substance, the ingredients of which were collected at two points in the year, the Ides of October (13 October) and the Fordicidia (15 April), and then combined at another, the Parilia (21 April). Unlike mola salsa however, the resultant substance was distributed during a single festival for use in purificatory, rather than sacrificial, bonfires. The ingredients of suffimen consisted of a mixture of the ashes of unborn calves from cows sacrificed to Tellus (Earth) at the Fordicidia and the blood of the October Horse, both of which were subjected to the Vestal fire where they were subsequently reduced to powder. While the Ides of October, the Fordicidia and the Parilia were essentially agriculturally-oriented festivals also celebrated in the city, the Parilia was in addition the anniversary of Rome’s foundation. As the dates on which mola salsa was made highlighted links between people, and its application in animal sacrifice united individual rituals, so the making and distribution of suffimen connected agriculture and pastoralism with the city. The October Horse’s blood linked periphery and center, tracing a path from outside the pomerium (sacred city walls), to the temple of Vesta at the center of Rome, the sacrifices of the Fordicidia linked thirty curiae (districts) with the Capitoline Hill and the bonfires of the Parilia burned in both the city and country (Ovid. Fasti. 4.721-862). Like mola salsa, the suffimen linking these festivals is a mixture of interstitial components transformed by the Vestal fire into a substance with purifying and unifying qualities.

From an investigation of mola salsa’s composition, the method of its production and its comparison with suffimen it is evident that these substances, like the Vestal Virgins themselves, comprise interstitial components that in practice work actively as mediating powers, bridging Roman conceptual and physical space. The uses to which mola salsa and suffimen were put make it apparent that they function on behalf of the Vestal hearth, exerting its unifying function in a vertical religious direction, a horizontal human and topographical direction, and a cyclic calendrical one. Consequently, multiple levels of being within the overall Roman territorial sphere ranging from the mineral, through to the human and to the larger agricultural landscape, are comprehensively linked, via specific Vestal activity, to the heart of Rome.

Bibliography and Notes Here

Interview with me by Ethan Doyle White at Albion Calling

This image of me looking piously heavenward is here just to decorate a notification of an interview I did with British pal and researcher of Traditional Witchcraft, Ethan Doyle White, over at his blog Albion Calling. So, if you are looking for something to read about Paganism in Australia in the late 80s, the 90s, and a bit of the 00s, fly on over there.

Daughter of Aphrodite

According to the ancient Athenian calendar the fourth day after the dark moon each month is dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite, beautiful mistress of love and sexuality. A powerful deity whose domain in antiquity stretched from the Near East to Magna Graecia and beyond, Aphrodite was worshipped by all aspects of society. A goddess considered so potent, so pervasive, that not only did she feature in the celebrated literature of the day — the epics of Homer — she was considered to be directly responsible for starting the Trojan War. Remember, both Helen and Paris were beloved of Aphrodite!

As a student and dedicant of Aphrodite, I believe in love as a physical, carnal, wild force — represented by the Goddess of Love — although I do not claim to understand its mystery nor to competently control its attracting power. Indeed, I aspire to worship Aphrodite in fact, as a sort of placatory gesture directed toward her — I have spent many more years being the victim of her wiles than I have in embodying any sort of role as mistress of her realm. Sometimes I have felt to be almost persecuted by her, the way she makes me weak, smitten and goo-goo over someone, against my will...

Research and practical experimentation have convinced me that the religious forms and methods of the ancient Greeks were valid and that they can be effective and meaningful today. So, when the religious impulse strikes me — as it does every so often — and I feel the need to step into the liminal realm of the gods, I perform a thank-offering to Aphrodite for all the things she has given me — even those things that I haven’t asked for, and that have caused me pain (I suffer to learn!). I also ask for her continuous blessing and that she direct me towards a deeper understanding of her nature.

The way I go about formal worship is to first make a beautiful place for the Goddess’ epiphany: I set up an altar in my garden, place an image of Aphrodite upon it along with scallop shells (she was born from the sea); goat figurines (buck goats are sacred to Her); libation bowls filled with wine, oil and barley; a candle; a censer with frankincense incense; flowers and a bowl of lustral water for pre-ritual washing. I also dress in diaphanous robes and jewelry and wear make-up, because Aphrodite is concerned with indulgent display, not austerity.

At the altar I wash my hands with the water and sprinkle my surrounds. Next I strew barley upon it as an offering symbolising the gifts of the earth. I light a candle representing the hearth goddess, Hestia — who is always honored first in Olympian religion — and pour some wine to her. Then I read the two Homeric Hymns to Aphrodite —I believe the Goddess enjoys hearing them, and they also give me insights into her character. I subsequently pour libations of wine to Aphrodite and to two of her handmaidens, Peitho (persuasion) and Ambologera, (remover of old age).

Sometimes I break out of a strictly Reconstructionist ritual mode and recite something modern, such as the following contemporary invocation/prose-poem to Aphrodite, written by performance artist Joanna Frueh:

Venus Verticordia, changer of hearts, look me straight in the eye, then hug me, then look me in the eye again. Tell me stories about your ancestor, Aphrodite, our mother of Eros, whose child – his name, his works and play – have usurped Aphrodite’s authority.

Aphrodite, full of grace long before the birth of Mary, sometimes I fear I’ve lost you in the slim pickings of the sex-goddess incarnations who slightly reflect your radiance so wayward from the ironic lucidity I see in perfect pictures.

Venus Verticordia grieves: our mother Aphrodite, a wide-ranging aphrodisiac, an erotic pharmacopoeia, is stripped down to one simple, insufficiently effective drug. Aphrodisiac: mistaken for merely a substance to ingest.

Aphrodite, you stimulate me in intricately erotic ways. You arouse the pleasure I feel in my own beauty. Erotic: you mothered the meaning of this word, whose profundity is minimized by the synonym sexy – a useful colloquialism, shorthand for aphrodisiac.

Monster, mother, huge in the ability to praise yourself, I can look at you any time I see myself. Aphrodite, save me from the self-contempt elicited by approximating the ideal beauty. She is a fluffcake and a stalker who has betrayed monster/beauty, the pleasurable corporeality that is your domain.

Aphrodite, help me build the body of love.

(Poem by Joanna Frueh. Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001, pp. 9-10.)

Next, I light the traditional frankincense granules and offer thanks for the past graces I have received, and I pray for future blessings from several different manifestations of Aphrodite, distinguished by her epithets: Aphrodite Epitragidia (buck goat), Cyprian (from Cyprus), Philomeides (laughter-loving) and Eleemon (merciful).

After the formalities, I sit and meditate before the altar, listening for any communications from Deity. Sometimes I murmur my troubles and wishes to her at this time. To conclude, I pour a final libation to Hestia, then end the rite and dismantle my altar.