Happy Halloween

Well, this time of year is always fun, and it’s always really cute to see the kids in costumes. There is a misconception about Halloween, especially among the evangelical types, that it is somehow about demons, in truth, Halloween is about bringing to light and conserving the child inside. You remember that child, don’t you? The one that had fun, that didn’t consider what everyone else thought before acting, the one that loved people without considering what he could get out of it?

Yes, let your inner child soar this Halloween, and see if you can’t keep him around a little while. It’ll keep you young.

Closing my time with Aphrodite.

I am approaching the close to my time with Aphrodite, and as I do so I want to take a few days to think about some of the things I have learned from here in the last few months. These little blog posts are meant to force me to think about my life, to see how I can allow myself to be changed and made better through the influence of the Gods.

But before I get to writing my final few entries on my time with Aphrodite, I would like to take a moment to explain again what it is I am doing.

The star diagram here is how I have seen the image of the Gods during meditation, each standing at a point, with Hestia replicated a second time at the center. I started at 12 O’Clock and then followed the lines of the star to the right wherever they lead. So, starting with Hestia I moved to Apollo, then to Hera, then to Poseidon, and now to Aphrodite. This means, of course, that I now move forward to Hermes, a God I am not sure I am ready for, but that too is part of the process.

I take time, meditating, writing about them, thinking about them, and trying to fix their images, their aspects, their attributes into my mind as a way to formulate new thoughts concepts and ideas about myself and the way I relate to the world around me. I really do reccomend this kind of thing to anyone who feels they need to make changes in their life. It is working for me, and I am hoping by the time I am done, who knows when, I will look back at when I started and be amazed at how much I have changed.

Aphrodite: She who humbles us all.

Sex. It is the great equalizer. When a group of men are nude and the power of Aphrodite is flowing between them (They are all horny) there is a funny thing that happens, and it is not just about men, it is about all of us. They all become equals. Oh, yes, I know, some still have ots more money than others. Some have hot sculpted bodies and others are more plump. Some have big cocks, some do not. But this isn’t about the details, this is about the nude human being, robbed of all the trappings of human social status, such as the silk shirt or the Wal-Mart jeans.

Those men in this hypothetical (Let’s just call it hypothetical, OK?) situation are all the same. They are all human, and that is all they are, because everything else is action. They all start on an even playing field, naked, exposed, and desirous of lustful interaction, and then they all get lost in the acts of sex and there is no me, there is no you, there is us, and the power of a divine being who affects us more than any others, for almost everyone, everything, is affected by the power of Aphrodite.

In these moments of carnal ecstasy, we are all lost to her. We are all lost to the power of her touch, and we are humbled by it. You are no longer the alpha male, you are her plaything. You are no longer in control, she has broken through that easily. You cannot resist her, and that lays you low and brings you eye to eye with the rest of us. We who are human, trapped in a cycle of lust, love, and loss, and who yearn for it, even when we know it can be painful, and that too humbles us. That too reminds us, me, of how helpless I can be to the whims and powers of nature, and the divine spirits that guide it.

The dove as symbol of Aphrodite.

When Christianity grew into a church, and then into a conquering theocratic empire, they did so through the assimilation of the symbols and customs of the people they conquered and forced to take their religion as their own. In many ways, the Christianity that started in the lands of the Levant and grew to power in Greece ended up bearing little resemblance to the religion that emerged as the Orthodox Catholic Church of Rome, as by then centuries had passed and the customs of the Greeks and Romans, including much of their religious and cultic practice and belief, had colored the rituals and practices of the Christians. One of these was the symbol of Venus/Aphrodite, the dove, as a symbol of Divine Love.

During a great deal of history, the goddess of love stood much maligned, if still much loved, as a goddess of the pornographic, the purely sexual, the base, yet underlying all those things there remained an aspect of the goddess that held true, that she was also a goddess of the people, Pandemos the Greeks would say, or Genetrix to the Romans. This view of the Lady of Love as a goddess of the people is also a recognition of her aspects as Ourania, the Heavenly, and part of that was the recognition of Aphrodite as the goddess of divine love, of the subtler, higher functions of love. Those feelings that inspire sacrifice and the power to merge your wants and needs with another are powerful, and when the Christians merged her with their God, making him the source of all love, while conveniently stripping him of all the sexual, sensual, and erotic aspects of the goddess, they also merged the symbol of the dove, symbol of purity, of the purity of love, with his divine attributes.

But that symbol is one we too sometimes forget, that idea that Aphrodite is a goddess that gifts mankind with the capacity to love and love deeply. Aphrodite Ourania is a goddess who loves us, and we easily forget that because her aspect as Porne is so much fun, so divinely playful, and so overtly prevalent in our society.

But the dove is not a symbol of the romanticized love we see in Hollywood movies, that odd little paradigm we still teach our girls to buy into hook, line, and sinker that oh so often leads to disaster and codependency, rather this is a symbol of a much more subtle power that we all possess. The capacity to sense, deep inside ourselves, what is right and what is wrong based on our capacity to love.

You see, this capacity to feel love as it embraces other feelings, like empathy, fear, anger, rage, compassion, is a guiding principle in how we form our moral values, and it is something that has been perverted by the church to force people into a fear filled puritanism that I find disgusting. It is time we, all of us who worship love in her true form, as a distinct power in the cosmos, to take back our symbol. It is time we took back the dove and the purity of love it symbolizes from those who have perverted it into a means to control the masses with fear.