A goddess
Aphrodite
Desire, including desire in Sappho’s poems. Not a heterosexual department, and not a delivery service.
Aphrodite is a Greek goddess of desire, beauty, and the political power of wanting. Myth gives her a birth from sea-foam in Hesiod and a more ordinary parentage in Homer. She is married, unhappily in the gossip of the Odyssey, to Hephaestus, and she takes Ares as a lover. She also presides, in lyric poetry, over desire that is not a married couple at all.
Sappho
Sappho of Lesbos addresses Aphrodite in the fragment often called the Ode to Aphrodite, asking the goddess to turn a beloved’s heart — a poem of same-sex desire by a woman, as far as the Greek lets us see. It is one of the reasons lesbian history speaks her name. It is also a plea to sway another person, which makes it a complicated prayer to copy. Admire it as poetry. If you pray, aim the ask at your own courage and honesty, not at someone else’s will. Our consent principle still applies when the poem is very old and very beautiful.
A claim to retire
The idea that Aphrodite’s temples ran “sacred prostitution” as a general fact is a modern scholarly casualty. Older handbooks repeated it. More recent scholarship has taken the evidence apart. Do not teach it as the colorful truth. Desire does not need a fabricated brothel of priestesses to be historically interesting.
A modern devotion, clearly labeled
A devotion that leaves people free
- 1Wash your face or your hands. Put on scent only if it will not sicken anyone sharing the air.
- 2Name a desire that is about your life: to tell the truth, to enjoy a meal, to make something beautiful, to grieve a wanting that is not returned.
- 3Say: “Aphrodite, I will not send you to fetch anyone. Sit with the wanting itself. Let me be kind inside it.”
- 4Do one pleasurable thing that does not involve managing another adult: music, clean sheets, a walk, a sentence written well.