Listening for Aphrodite

Joanna Gardner, PhD
4 minutes ago
5 min read

"Aphrodite" Briton Rivière, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, we still sing to the goddess of love. The hit song “Venus” (1969) by Shocking Blue—delightfully covered by Bananarama in 1986—opens with: “Goddess on the mountain top / burning like a silver flame / the summit of beauty and love / and Venus was her name.” Natalie Merchant’s “Come On, Aphrodite” (2023) echoes this call: “Come on, Aphrodite, you goddess of love / Come on, Aphrodite from that mountain above, / Come on, Aphrodite, I’m begging you, begging you, / I’m begging you please.” These songs summon Aphrodite, supplicate her, and tell her of her own charms, all in the hopes that she might deign to call the singer to the heroic adventure of love.

Aphrodite’s call to adventure

We could say that Aphrodite, or Venus in the Roman tradition, serves as the patron deity of On Love, the newest title in the Joseph Campbell Essentials series. On Love collects Campbell’s most poignant quotes about Aphrodite’s domain into a single, pocket-sized volume. Her metaphorical music sings from every page, channeled through Campbell’s unique wisdom. One theme recurs in the book: the beginning of love, or what Campbell describes as the separation stage of the heroic journey to which Aphrodite calls brave souls. He describes this moment as “the mighty jolt” (29) when “someone walks in the room and that’s it! ... You think: This is it, this is my life” (71). Truly, every love is its own journey. Whether short-lived or long, whether in the genre of comedy or tragedy, relationships follow the same three-part structure that Joseph Campbell charts in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: separation, or departure; initiation, or transformation; and return with a boon (23).

Aphroditic journeys don’t happen every day, but when they do, when she issues her sacred invitation, then “the laws that govern all prudent life will dissolve” (On Love, 44). Aphrodite scorns prudence. Instead, she embodies passion, abandon, and surrender, demanding humility, courage, hope, and daring, as well as a complete willingness to appear foolish. She requires sacrifice on behalf of her values: love, laughter, pleasure, and beauty. As a metaphor, Aphrodite is love, laughter, pleasure, and beauty. She asks much on behalf of those archetypal forces, but then when you least expect it, she turns around and shares them with you and maybe with someone you love.

Journeying with Aphrodite

Aphrodite stands, in her sultry way, for the ultimate mystery of the infinitely renewable resource called love. No matter how far we follow the path of love, more always awaits. Complete love is impossible to reach or even imagine, but Aphrodite has only to glance, to whisper, to breathe the smallest sigh or hum a single note for her presence to burst forth. “As though struck by lightning, so is one by love, which is a divine seizure, transmuting the life, erasing every interfering thought” (On Love, 7). Aphrodite changes everything. No one returns unchanged after journeying with her.

Aphrodite scorns prudence. Instead, she embodies passion, abandon, and surrender, demanding humility, courage, hope, and daring, as well as a complete willingness to appear foolish.

A song, too, is a journey. Words alone brush the surfaces of feeling, but words combined with music open the floodgates of soul so emotion can course through. The opening of a song is a separation or departure from the world outside the song into the special world within it. In that world, lyrics and music can effect an initiatory experience, and the end of the song delivers the listener or musician back to their ordinary world changed somehow, perhaps with a boon to share with their metaphorical village.

When Aphrodite sings

Aphrodite issues an invitation to practice relationship skills with her, the better to practice with others. I can ask myself: how well do I listen when Aphrodite speaks? How do I show her my gratitude? How can I express my needs and desires to her? What kind of gifts do I offer her? These questions map to the human realm of love as well.

So we sing to Aphrodite, and sometimes she sings back. Campbell describes this as the moment lovers realize “that beneath the illusion of two-ness dwells identity: ‘each is both.’ This realization can expand into a discovery that beneath the multitudinous individualities of the whole surrounding universe—human, animal, vegetable, even mineral—dwells identity; whereupon the love experience becomes cosmic, and the beloved who first opened the vision is magnified as the mirror of creation” (On Love, 74). Aphrodite uses surface appearances to push past them all the way to the spiritual realization of our connection with all beings. That means the name for what connects us is love. She offers this mighty boon for the small price of humble courage and hopeful daring, or what Campbell calls a “noble heart” (9).

Because Aphrodite is sacred, so is love. So is laughter. So are beauty, pleasure, and relationships, whether they last for the span of a fleeting fancy, entire lives, or any amount of time in between. Although mythic music might imagine her on a mountain top, Aphrodite reveals love as the fundamental force that supports creation, which means she is the force that supports creation. That’s one boon her journey offers, and the way to finding it begins with a single step on her sacred path.

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MythBlast authored by:

Joanna Gardner, PhD, is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist whose work focuses on creativity, goddesses, and wonder tales. She is the author of The Practice of Enchantment: MythBlast Essays, 2020-2024 and the lead author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide. Joanna serves as director of marketing and communications for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and as adjunct professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program. She also co-founded and co-leads the Fates and Graces, hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. For Joanna's updates and additional publications, you are most cordially invited to visit her website at joannagardner.com.

This MythBlast was inspired by the Separation stage of the hero's journey.

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