Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 10: Aphrodite

Aphrodite.
 
Sources and Influences
 
BAM: Aphrodite

Thealogy

Aphrodite is perhaps the Goddess named in the Charge whose origins are most complex and whose mythology is most marked by the syncretism of different local Goddesses. Robbins Dexter comments in the context of discussing Greek Goddesses:

‘...keep in mind the process of syncretism, which played an important role in the development of Greek deities. ...local goddesses with varying functions were often given the names of goddesses whose worship was more widespread. Thus, a Near-Eastern mother-goddess might be assimilated with the Greek virgin goddess, Artemis, or a local Laconian warrior-goddess might be syncretised to the pan-Hellenic Aphrodite.’  (Miriam Robbins Dexter: Whence the Goddesses: A Sourcebook. Pergamon Press, New York, 1990, p. 112. The summary of the origins of Aphrodite is also taken from Robbins Dexter.)

However it is important also to bear in mind that that this process of assimilation of divinities, which in some magical circles today would equate to the process of creating egregores, does not provide support to the theory of an original single Great Mother, but means that different Goddesses were called by different names and took on the attributes and functions of other Goddesses.
There are two different accounts in mythology for the origin of Aphrodite: the Homeric account states that she is a daughter of Zeus, but the more common account of her origins was that in Hesiod, where Kronos, Zeus’s father, castrated Ouranos, his own father, and threw the severed genitalia into the sea. A maiden grew out of the white foam of the sea, and went to Cythera and then Cyprus, emerging as a beautiful Goddess called Aphrodite. Pausanias ascribes the origins of the cult of Aphrodite Ourania to the Assyrians, from whom the people of Cyprus took it, and it spread to the Phoenicians. Herodotus thought that the temple of Aphrodite in Ascalon in Syria was her oldest temple.
Dexter Robbins concludes that the Greeks, while agreeing that Aphrodite was not of Greek origin, did not agree on the geographical origin of her cult. She believes that the cult of a Near Eastern Goddess such as Ashtoreth could have spread to the Greeks, who gave her a new name, included her in their pantheon (hence the attribution of fatherhood to Zeus), and she was then given characteristics found in Indo-European mythology, in addition to her original Near Eastern characteristics.
Some of the Near Eastern Goddess characteristics are found in her iconography, in symbols of a goose, a swan, and a snake. Another Near Eastern characteristic is found in the practice of sacred prostitution in her temple at Babylon (caution should be exercised in how we understand the modern phrase ‘sacred prostitution’: in the ancient world, while it did degenerate into prostitution as we would understand it, what we call by this phrase almost never meant what we mean by it (Simon Price and Emily Kearns (editors): The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, article ‘prostitution, sacred’, pp. 454-455.) ). Herodotus reports this custom, which he describes as ‘wholly shameful’, in shocked tones, but this custom related to a Goddess named in the Charge surely provides an impetus towards the freer sexual mores that Gardner and associates aimed for in the early days of their fertility cult. Every native woman of Babylonia was required once in her lifetime to sit in the temple of Aphrodite and wait to have intercourse with a stranger. She had to do this with the first man to toss a coin into her lap, she could not refuse, and she had to wait in the temple until a man did toss her a coin. Herodotus comments wryly that ugly women could be waiting in the temple for a long time (Herodotus (Translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, revised by John Marincola): The Histories. Penguin Books, London, 2003. Book 1.199.).
Aphrodite was primarily, therefore, associated with love, and came to take on the characteristics of a Mother Goddess, coming to transcend her original fertility function in being worshipped as a warrior-Goddess by the Spartans, which Robbins Dexter connects to her function as Mother:

‘...she was invoked in this capacity by the martial Spartans. Her “warrior” powers were most likely derived from her nurturing function. The function of a political, protective city-goddess became that of defending the city in time of war and that of guarding it in peacetime.’  (Robbins Dexter, op. cit., p. 114.)

A far cry from the gentle images of love which the name ‘Aphrodite’ often evokes, and much closer to a modern Pagan understanding of powerful womanhood.
In mythology she is as much seen as a Goddess of sexual love; although married to the blacksmith Hephaestos, in the Odyssey she falls in love with the warrior-God Ares, and begins an affair with him. Hephaestos makes a net of bronze, attaches it to their bed, and when, thinking he is away, Aphrodite goes to bed with Ares, they are caught in the net. Hephaestos calls on all of the Gods to witness this, but they laugh, and many agree they would like to be in Ares’s shoes.
Once again this indicates a Goddess of love which definitely includes sexual love: the Goddess of love is not bound by the norms of monogamy in Greek society, and nor is she chaste. Dexter Robbins comments on the autonomy that this indicates.
So an obvious reason for Aphrodite’s inclusion among the named Goddesses in the Charge would be her associations with sexual love and fertility. However a fascinating connection, albeit one which does not appear in the usual authorities, with the mythology of witchcraft itself is also made by J. Rendel Harris  (J. Rendel Harris: The Origin of the Cult of Aphrodite. The University Press, Manchester, 1916. The evidence is lacking to assert that this connection was known to Gardner, but this article could have provided a connection in this context), who connects the cult of Aphrodite to the mandrake as the love-apple of the ancients. Mandrake appears in the mythology of witchcraft and the old herbals as the plant whose root is suggestive of a person’s body, and which was rumoured to scream when it was pulled out of the earth. Harris comments that Aphrodite in ancient Cyprus was seen as both black and white, male and female, and equates a reference in Macrobius to a bearded Venus in Cyprus, to Aphrodite. Similarly mandrake roots were seen as both male and female: ‘We need not, then, hesitate to draw conclusion from the black mandrake to the black goddess. They are the same.’ (Ibid, p. 17.)  In language redolent of the predominant use of colours of the time in which he lives, he states that the ‘white’ Aphrodite predominated, but that the ‘darker’ aspects of the ‘black’ Aphrodite were responsible for her role as a Psychopomp, or guide of souls to the other world. He also draws on the image of the witch with her garden, and actually thinks that Aphrodite started out as a witch (in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods Athene charges Aphrodite with witchcraft):

‘As soon as we have satisfied ourselves that Aphrodite was originally a witch, and not a courtesan, we are almost obliged to infer that, like the other witch-goddesses, she had a garden of her own, in which grew her mandrake and other rarities and specialities.’  (Ibid, p. 18.)

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Aphrodite gathers apples from her garden in Cyprus, and Harris believes this to refer to the mandrake-apple, which he believes is not a medicinal remedy but used only in magic, particularly love magic. He thinks that Aphrodite’s cult came to Greece from Cyprus with the mandrake, and points out that both she and Apollo are pictured holding apples, hers the love apple, to his oracular apple.
In his published writings Gardner draws on this image of Aphrodite as witch, in her teaching her son Jason to draw down the moon and invoke Hecate ( Gerald Gardner: The Meaning of Witchcraft. Weiser Books, York Beach, 2004.), indicating that he saw Aphrodite in this way, but not where he got the image from.