← Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
Origins of Aphrodite: The Sex-Positive Goddess
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- [00:00]
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Cait Lister
Can I make my sight softer?
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Cait Lister
Can we sleep cooler?
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- [01:34]
Kate Lister
Hello my lovely betwixters.
- [01:36]
Cait Lister
It's me, Cait Lister.
- [01:37]
Kate Lister
Thank you for coming back to Betwixt the Sheets. I know you have many, many other podcasts to choose from and I'm genuinely honored that you have returned. But if you're a newbie or if you've forgotten everything we've told you in every single one of the other episodes, then I have to tell you one more time. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way covering range adult subjects. And you should be an adult too. And we call that the fair do's warning. Because if you keep listening and you happen to get offended, well fuck fair dos. We did tell you so that one's on you right on with the show. Oh, don't you just love a relaxing afternoon by the sea? Well, not if it's in ancient Greece, you might not. And not if you're about to witness the creation of Aphrodite. Sound dramatic? Yeah, I think so too. You don't get this at Blackpool Beach. No, but it has to be said it's not the most relaxing of experiences. It involves the God Uranus, who has severed his genitals, as you do, and chucked them into the sea, resulting in a whole load of sea foam. Don't try this at home. I don't know if anyone was thinking of it, but just don't. And out of that foam came none other than Aphrodite herself. That's a hell of an origin story, isn't it? It is. That's never made it into any of the Disney films. Do you want to know more about this goddess? Well, I certainly do. So let's find out more. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Well, we're never going to be able to have an actual face to face conversation with somebody from the ancient world, although potentially Mick Jagger could help us, but until then, it's just not going to happen. But we can use their myths to help us find out what they thought of the world around them. And myths, although they're all kind of, you know, fantastical stories, they can actually help give us an insight into things like gender roles in the ancient world. Joining me today to teach us about the origins of Aphrodite and the myths that surround her is the fabulous historian and author Stephanie Boudin. And if Aphrodite has a number one fangirl, it's Stephanie. So if anyone can help us find out more about where this goddess came from, it's her. Let's crack on. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Stephanie Boudin. How are you doing?
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Cait Lister
Oh, I am delighted to be here. I am so happy to see you again. I'm looking forward to this.
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Kate Lister
Oh, the last time you were on we were talking about ancient Mesopotamia and sex work in ancient Mesopotamia. It was a hugely popular episode, that one. You know, people were all over it, they loved it. So obviously we were gonna have you back on. And today we're talking about Aphrodite.
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Cait Lister
Aphrodite, yes, Aphrodite.
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Kate Lister
Now, I'm super excited to talk to you about this and slightly terrified as well, because I've recently written a thing about Aphrodite and there's a tiny part of me that thinks you're now gonna tell me everything I've said was completely Wrong. An absolute moron. So I'm going to tread gently.
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Cait Lister
If it makes you feel any better, I feel the exact same way.
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Kate Lister
Oh, dear. Oh, my God. If you feel like that. Oh, that does actually make me feel a bit better. I'll start with this one, then. Aphrodite, goddess that we often catch lying across a chaise lawn with a fat cherub feeding her grapes. Very opulent, very drapey, very pouty. That's Aphrodite, right?
- [05:18]
Cait Lister
I'd say that's a little bit more Venus. It's a bit more Roman, ultimately. But it's part of that idea of how do we conceptualize a goddess of sexuality? And it has to be luxurious and honestly, a tad decadent. And it's a way of understanding Aphrodite. I don't think it's a good way of understanding Aphrodite. It's definitely not a complete way of understanding Aphrodite.
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Kate Lister
She is much more than that, isn't she? I mean, all the gods and goddesses are. But she isn't just pouty and, you know, making sexy faces.
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Cait Lister
No, absolutely not. She is an extremely powerful goddess who is so much more than sex. Sex is an awful lot of it. But she does everything from stoking libido to, okay, maybe causing infidelities. You know, Zeus always blamed her for his infidelities. And yet somehow Hera doesn't go after her. So I think she actually knew better. Perhaps. But Aphrodite also protect who are traveling by sea. So in some respects, she's a sea goddess. She promotes civic accord. So when your government gets along or you have a peace treaty, she's there causing that to happen. So as one of the Greek authors, a fellow named Apollodorus of Athens, once said, aphrodite makes friends.
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Kate Lister
Oh, I like that.
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Cait Lister
And sometimes I think that's a great place to start when understanding her. She brings people together harmoniously, happily libid, but she causes people to get along.
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Kate Lister
Oh, now that is a powerful goddess, isn't it? So the bit that I'm slightly worried that you're gonna go, no, idiot, if I just say that she descended from a Mesopotamian goddess called Inanna. Is that right?
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Cait Lister
That is so right. Oh, my God. You know your stuff so well.
- [07:18]
Kate Lister
Like, fuck for that. If you'd gone, no, you idiot, I'd have just. I'd had to end the call and phone an editor. Tell me, tell me about the origin story. Where does she come from? Aphrodite, before she's making Friends with people.
- [07:35]
Cait Lister
Aphrodite is ultimately a Cypriot goddess. So she comes from the island of Cyprus. A couple of her most popular epithets, the nicknames that they gave to deities in ancient Greece, were Kypris, so literally the Cypriot, or Cypria, which is also the Cypriot or Cyprogenes, meaning born on Cyprus. So the Greeks absolutely understood her as coming from and at home on the island of Cyprus. Her happy place, if you want to think of it that way, was her sanctuary at Paphos, what we would now call Palai Paphos, or technically they now call Kuklia, the village of Kuklia in western Cyprus. But that is where her oldest sanctuary that we know of existed on the island. As far as Hesiod is concerned, when she wafted to shore, finally, after being born in the sea, that's where she made landfall, a place called Petro Torromio, literally Roman rock in western Cyprus. And from there she was brought to Paphos, and that remained the place where she would go to have a spa day, to get her nails done, if you will, to have a bath, get perfume, do a fast fashion makeover. It's where she went to get decked out before she seduced Anchises. It's where she ran off to after she was caught in flagrante delictu. Yep, Cyprus. So Cyprus is the place where a whole bunch of different influences came together to mold the goddess we now think of as Aphrodite. So on the one hand, you have what is probably an indigenous goddess to the island. So a female, a character, a goddess, an ancestress. It's really hard to say because we writings from the time periods we would like to be looking at for this, who is probably existing on the island, probably from as early as 2000 BCE.
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Kate Lister
Wow.
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Cait Lister
So we have images, figurines, but we don't have writings, so we can't quite tell what people are thinking. But you also have Cyprus as a crossroads of civilization, especially between the Aegean to the west and even more so the ancient Near East, Syria and Mesopotamia to the east. And it's getting in a lot of this information. And one of the bits of influence it gets in, starting in the 15th century, if not earlier, are these nude female figurines highly eroticized? So these females standing up full forward, full frontal nudity here, boobs out.
- [10:13]
Kate Lister
Okay.
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Cait Lister
Holding their breasts potentially, or just having their hands folded underneath their breasts. It can go either way. Usually it's a little bit more of the latter. They will generally have their hands just under the breast on the upper abdomen, looking at you somewhat politely. Giant pubic triangles. Really huge hips. Giant pubic triangles. And it's a pubic triangle, and it's really wide, and then it's incised with several lines and then highlighted with other lines. And then they're stippling inside of it to make certain it really grabs your attention. And then the line that separates the legs goes all the way up to make certain you see she has a vagina. Thank you very much.
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Kate Lister
Is that like the little. They're called Venus figurines.
- [10:52]
Cait Lister
Yes. We do tend to call them Venus figurines, but they're a little bit different. The Venus figurines tend to be more schematic, and they appear in a range of different poses, and sometimes they don't have heads, and sometimes they don't have arms. Think of something like the Venus of Willendorf, who has a little bit of those. But not really. No. This is a more standardized icon that shows up originally in Mesopotamia and then makes its way throughout the ancient world. And it does show up on Cyprus. And they take their own indigenous figurine tradition, and they keep adapting it more and more to make it more naked, more erotic, more in line with this very eroticized figure. And when we start seeing that around the island, it seems that, okay, they seem to have a female, slightly symbolic. Perhaps it's showing up in domestic context, it's showing up in funerary context. It occasionally shows up in sanctuaries. But the Cypriots seem to have adopted all around the island, this image of a very eroticized female. Right about the time that we start getting evidence from the near east that they have religion, pantheon, they're worshiping different deities.
- [12:06]
Kate Lister
But we don't know. We don't have a name for this very early goddess.
- [12:09]
Cait Lister
We do not have a name for this very early goddess, at least at the time. By the time we can start reading the Cypriot writing, they adopt Greek. So their original writing is something that we call Cypro Minoan, and they got it from the Minoans in Crete. They had a writing system that we call linear A, and we can't read it, so we don't know what language the Minoans were speaking. Yep, it's very frust, and that's the one. You know, they could have taken cuneiform, those Cypriots. They were right there next to the Near East. They could have taken cuneiform, and we'd eventually figure it out and read it. And no, nope, they went for the Minoan stuff. And so we can't read it at all yet. So there's some writing, but we can't read it. So we don't know what names are or anything else by the time we can read the writing. So when we're getting into the Iron Age, they have a number of different deities, including goddesses. And a lot of these goddesses don't actually have a name, they have titles. Yeah. So if we go back to Paphos, for example, they have a goddess whom they call Wanasa, which is actually the Mycenaean Greek word for queen. So she is the queen of Paphos. Maybe she's the queen of Cyprus. All we know is that they call her Wanossa. So she is the queen. In other parts of Greece, they female, we know, was a goddess whom they refer to as the Paphian. They call her Golgia because she's also worshipped in the town of Golgoy. So there are all these localized things. By the time we get down to the 4th century and there's a lot more Greek influence throughout the island, they start saying, oh, yeah, Paphia. Oh, yeah, you mean Aphrodite. Paphia. Right. So she gets that title in a place called Kitroi. And in another town called Amathus down in the south, which is indigenous, very traditional, they call her. Oh, yes, that's Aphrodite, Cypria. So at least by the 4th century BCE, we know that the Cypriots themselves are taking these localized Our lady of Paphos, Our lady of Golgoy, and they're saying, oh, yeah, yeah, that's Aphrodite.
- [14:24]
Kate Lister
Aphrodite. So going back even earlier than that, who were some of the influences on Aphrodite? Because this is fascinating, when you look at gods and you suddenly realize that actually they're an amalgamat of different things have come before them and that people have kind of wedged them together. And I think the thing I like most about ancient religions is it seems it's almost like a choose your own faith because they've got so many gods, and they're like, well, I'm going to worship this one, and you can worship that one, and then we'll all worship this one. Until Christianity comes along. There's only one and spoils all the fun. But what's some of Aphrodite's origin stories?
- [15:02]
Cait Lister
Well, you were saying Inanna, and that is one of the more documentable trajectories, if you will. So you have Sumerian, Inanna, who is understood by the Semitic Akkadian speakers as Ishtar. So you have two very closely related goddesses who eventually just kind of meld into each other. So we call her Inanna or Ishtar, just depending on what language we're dealing with. And this is a very, very powerful goddess. She's understood as a young woman. She is associated with warfare, so she's very martial, very militaristic. She's also understood as a young, libidinous bride. So she's extremely sexual, and she becomes more sexual as time goes on. So with Inanna, when we look at the literature there, we frequently see a warrior goddess who also is saying, I'm getting married. Dumuzi. Oh, it's wonderful. Do I look really pretty for him? Oh, how do my breasts look? Is he gonna like this? And that sort of thing? And then calling on him to, o, please rub my vulva. My wonderful boyfriend, put your mouth on mine. And this is our declaration of love. So Inanna's fantastic, and then Ishtar just takes everything and intensifies it a little bit more. So she becomes a bit more martial and is a great warrior deity, but also becomes more libidinous. So she has quite the insatiable sex drive occasionally. There is this one hymn to Ishtar where basically they're saying they're founding a city and they want Ishtar's blessing. And she says, have all the young men come out and have sex with me as you do. Yep. So 60 and 60 go out, 60 on her breasts, 60 on her hips. They keep over and over ejaculating into her vulva. Eventually, the young men get tired. Ishtar does not get tired.
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Kate Lister
Yay.
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Cait Lister
Celebration is the foundation of the city.
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Cait Lister
Is great. So she's intensely sexual, martial, because she's the person who gives help in warfare. She's also the person who chooses the king, which in practical terms means, all right, I'm not the son of the last king. I'm a usurper. So I have to justify my reign somehow. Oh, I'm king because Ishtar chose me. Oh, that's a really good way to have a regime change is to claim that you were picked by Ishtar because she's functionally the kingmaker.
- [17:39]
Kate Lister
So we get this evolution. And Anna to Ishtar. She's naughty, she's petulant. She's very powerful. You don't want to mess with her because she will take your head off. And then we get like, a fusing with Semitic deities, don't we? It's almost like it's traveling, right? Like, sort of traveling west.
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Cait Lister
Yep. So our first Semites on our journey were those Akkadian speakers in Mesopotamia. Then we're going even farther. Well, this point, if we start in Mesopotamia, we're going farther west, actually. So let's say we're heading into Syria now, and this goddess is being adopted by Syrians, and they already have their own deity. They have this male warrior deity named Ashtar.
- [18:24]
Kate Lister
Oh, that's close, isn't it?
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Cait Lister
Yep, Ashtar. It's very close. And as a matter of fact, the understanding is that Inanna met Ashtar, and that's how we wound up with Ishtar, that they already started kind of joining and overlapping a little bit. So that worked fine in Mesopotamia. But when we got to Syria, there was a little bit of confusion because Ashtar wasn't a big deal in Mesopotamia. He was a far bigger deal in Syria. And you're trying to understand, well, how do these two deities relate? So you have your Inanna, who kind of becomes an. Well, she can't barely be Ashtar. We already have an Ashtar. So we get an Ashtar. And that final T is feminizing. So it's kind of like the A perhaps at the end of a name in English or in the Romance languages, so that Robert becomes Roberta. Well, your T in your Semitic languages feminizes the word. So Ashtar winds up being this Ashtart. And you can actually see some of the confusion in a very powerful city in Syria called Mari, which was right at the crossroads between Mesopotamia and Syria. And we find inscriptions written in cuneiform. And it's an early cuneiform, so it's kind of logographic. So there's only so much you can read about it. But you have this one sign that we understand to be the sign for Inanna. And then you have some of them then are followed by the sign for male, and some of them are followed by the sign for female. So that you have male Inanna and female Inanna. And they looked at that and went, okay, what is going on here? And it's two possible things. On the one hand, you could have Ashtar and Ashtart. Ashtar is the male one, and Ashtart is the female. Or possibly because Ishtar doesn't have that feminizing T, it's technically grammatically masculine. It could be that we have masculine Ishtar. That's Inanna. That's Ishtar, if you will. And then we have the feminine one, the one with the T at the end, and that's Ashtart. So we see a cult of Inanna, Ishtar, side by side with the cult of Ashtart. And then Ashtart becomes very prominent in Syria. She shows up in the Ugaritic corpus, the late Bronze Age, on the very coast of Syria. So this is the place that's gonna have a lot of contact with Cyprus.
- [20:51]
Kate Lister
Cause they're very close, aren't they? If you look at a map, they're actually. They're a lot closer than I had realized that they are.
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Cait Lister
On a very good day, apparently you can see one from the other if you have really good eyes. Not my eyes. Like really good, sharp eyes. So you wind up with this new goddess who is Ashtart. She is worshipped throughout Syria, and she becomes the dominant goddess of the Phoenician pantheons in the Iron Age. So she really becomes popular. And the thing that's somewhat different about her between Ishtar and Ashtart is remember how I was telling you how erotic Ishtar is, that this is a really important aspect of her Persona? You don't see that as much with Ashtart, also known as Astarte. That was her Greek name, by the way. So Ashtart is Astarte, just to be perfectly clear. And Ashtart has all the martial capabilities. She's still this warrior kind of goddess. And while she's understood to be beautiful and desirable, and it seems that her iconography still shows her as a young, beautiful, naked woman very frequently, she doesn't seem to be as erotic as Ishtar.
- [22:01]
Kate Lister
She's not having gang bangs outside the city of Uruk, then?
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Cait Lister
She's not having gang bangs inside, outside, anywhere. She's not a particularly sexual being, but she's definitely martial. She's militaristic.
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Kate Lister
I like that, though. I like that. Like, she's been on holiday, she's had a few thousand years, and she's just gone. Do you know what? I'm bored of men. No, I'm just gonna focus on the war bit. And that's her. Didn't she sort of make it into the Bible somewhere? Like, there's a warning about worshiping of a God. Thought it sounded like Astarte. But now maybe just imagine that you're thinking of Asherah.
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Cait Lister
Yes, that's the one who was basically God's wife. So you have El and his Asherah. She was understood to be a pole, and apparently she was one of the last deities who was kicked out when they went monotheist. So she was particularly irritating. Her and another male deity named baal.
- [22:55]
Kate Lister
I love that just hanging on with the fingernails in the door frames, refusing to to refuse to get. You can't make me. I'll be back with Stephanie and Aphrodite after this short break. This episode is sponsored by Paradise Fold, the silk hair wrap brand that does wonders for your locks. Elizabeth I, Shirley Temple, Charles II and Mary what's one thing we've all got in common? Curls. But if you know anything about having curly hair, it's that it can take a lot of time and product to get these curls exactly how you want them, especially after a good night's sleep. Well betwixt us, Paradise Fold may have the answers to all of our hair problems. And not just for the curls, but for all hair types. They can even help you handle changes in hair texture from menopause and strength stress. Made in London, Paradise Fold hair wraps are beautifully made from 100% silk of the highest grade, are double layered and reversible. This keeps your hair healthier, more hydrated and less frizz without the need for chemical based products all while you sleep soundly. They don't even fall off in bed. And on top of that, Paradise Bold is a carbon positive company and the hair wraps are sustainably made made. So for a confidence boost and some of your much needed time back, grab a Paradise Fold this week. You get access to a free lifetime care and alteration service. If you head to Paradise Fold this week and you'll get a free gift with your first order.
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Cait Lister
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Kate Lister
Then stay in bed and let a.
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Cait Lister
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- [25:23]
Cait Lister
Can I make my sight softer?
- [25:24]
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Cait Lister
Can we sleep cooler?
- [25:28]
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Cait Lister
Now.
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- [26:03]
Kate Lister
So like trying to trace Inanna Ishtar Astarte. And then like as they're going through, but they're sort of changing, are they represented by symbols that remain consistent the whole way through? I know Inanna, she was one for the lions, wasn't she? And there was the morning star and things like that. Is that symbolism? Does that carry on through?
- [26:23]
Cait Lister
A lot of it does, yes. Okay, so we continue seeing a nude female standing on a lion or on a lion's head. And this iconography is closely related to all of these goddesses. Even again, even Ashtart, even though she's not understood as erotic, she's still beautiful and desirable and she's still portrayed the same way. And this probably comes out of her evolution from Inanna Ishtar. So this is the kind of iconography that we see going over to Cyprus and suddenly Cyprus is filled with this iconography of a naked female, highly eroticized. Remember that giant pubic triangle I was telling you about? So that's there for about 150, 200 years. Then they start getting influence from the Aegean, so from Minoan, Crete and Greece. And they keep that naked female figurine, but they modify it a little bit so the hips go in a little bit, but you still got that pubic triangle. And she's still wearing necklaces and bracelets. And these are painted on now. So she's still erotic. She's just a little bit more Western. And one thing that's very important here, and this is an important Cypriot contribution, that nude female in the near east, she's not a mother. She's never shown holding children almost ever. They just don't do that. They don't conceive of this being as being maternal. The Cypriots have this thousand year long history, if you will, of female iconography. And a lot of them hold babies. So whatever this image meant for them, it was a maternal figure. And I wonder myself if she's an ancestress. They're not necessarily thinking in terms of gods or goddesses. Early on, they're thinking of honored ancestors, and that was what was important to them. So when this new iconography shows up in Cyprus, well, you have these nude females, and they're frequently holding their babies. So their conception of whatever this being is is maternal until that Aegean influence shows up. And the folks from Mycenaean Greece, they're not all that into women holding babies. They have a few, but not very many, and definitely not the ones in Crete, which is where we're getting a lot of our influence from. So when that influen influence shows up, this character stops being maternal at all. So you're on the island of Cyprus, you have this really erotic female that's showing up in the iconography all over the island, who starts off maybe as a divine ancestress or something like that. And by the time you get to around, let's say, 1100, she's still erotic. She still got those breasts, she's still got that prominent pubic triangle, but no kids. She's not particularly maternal. So this is an erotic being who's not a maternal being. And that is a great way to define Aphrodite, because she herself is so erotic in all of the literature that we have from Greece and her iconographies, but really especially the literature. But she's not a great mom. She has some kids. She's seldom shown with her kids. And one of the best descriptions we get is at the end of her Homeric hymn, where she's tricked into falling in love with a mortal prince named Anchises. He's the prince of Troy, and she seduces his brains out, and they have a lot of sex. And then she comes to her senses and she just starts whining, more or less, that, man, I'm pregnant now, and this is embarrassing, and it's really annoying. And as soon as this child is born, I am handing him to the deep, bosomed nymphs and they can raise him.
- [30:08]
Kate Lister
So smart.
- [30:09]
Cait Lister
Yeah. So great with the seduction, not so good with the maternity. Terrible mother. Not a great mother. No, it's not her thing.
- [30:20]
Kate Lister
I think it's an important distinction to make, actually, because you often hear Aphrodite or even Inanna or Ishtar being described as fertility goddesses. And it's an interesting description of them. And I've always kind of wondered, is that accurate or is that, like, a bit coy on the behalf of the historians? Because I don't see a lot of mothering and having babies about them.
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Cait Lister
Well, you have to distinguish between fertility and maternity.
- [30:44]
Kate Lister
Oh, that's true, yes. Yeah.
- [30:46]
Cait Lister
Now, keep in mind that in the ancient world, the near east, and in Greece, fertility was gendered masculine because they thought that fertility came from men. Men were the source of new life because we knew about semen long before we knew about the ovum. For certain really obvious reasons.
- [31:02]
Kate Lister
They loved semen, didn't they? I know it sounds weird. That sounds weird. But like, they, like, the earliest writers talk about it as, like, that's where the soul is produced and all of this stuff. They just loved semen.
- [31:13]
Cait Lister
Yes, they were really into semen. Absolutely. There are certain Mesopotamian hymns to the God Enki, where the Tigris and the Euphrates are actually his ejaculate. And it's like washing your clothes in that now. Anyway. But anyway.
- [31:33]
Kate Lister
I'm so sticky. Sorry. Right, Quite all right.
- [31:40]
Cait Lister
But anyway, now, Aphrodite is somewhat associated with fertility simply because she's associated with sex. And they knew that babies came from sex.
- [31:49]
Kate Lister
Yes.
- [31:50]
Cait Lister
So that is a part of it, referring to them as fertility goddesses. And especially with Ishtar in Anat, that's a real bad way to think about it. They are not fertility goddesses. What more or less happened is a. You have some Victorian early scholars into this field who see this hyper erotic goddess, have no idea what to do with her, and they think, well, you know, sex can't really deal with sex. Oh, fertility's okay. And so they kind of push her in the fertility direction. And you see that with some of the early scholars, not necessarily with all of them. What really seems to happen, what really seemed to push Inanna and Ishtar over the fertility edge was actually the counterculture revolution in the United States and in Europe, basically the hippies. Because what happened is they really got into this notion of a female spirituality and this feminine spirituality was grounded in notions of. Of biological essentialism. Fertility women are what bring life to everything. And a lot of that was put onto the ancient pagan religions. Right. So suddenly every single goddess out there became a fertility goddess. No matter, you know, even if she's a virgin, even if she kills people and.
- [33:16]
Kate Lister
Oh, they must have been fuming with that if you were a goddess of virginity and hunting. And some hippies, some stone hippies in the 60s, have decided to tell everyone you're about fertility. Oh, he'd be so angry.
- [33:27]
Cait Lister
Yep. Yeah. And basically what happened with Inanna and Ishtar is a very popular book came out written by Dan Volksstein with translations from the Sumerian by Samuel Noah Kramer about Inanna. And it was literally a popular book. Ask almost any Assyriologist, you know, well, you know, how did you start getting into this topic? And one of the books that will come up is, oh, Inanna. Except that Dianne Wolkstein was a folklorist and she was deeply involved in this counterculture movement and she just kept interpreting anything that was said that, oh, look, she's a fertility goddess. Look, this is fertility, fertility, fertility, fertility. And then everyone gets their introduction to this goddess by reading that book and they think, oh, okay, well, she's a fertility goddess. And it's actually just bad scholarship.
- [34:18]
Kate Lister
Right, okay.
- [34:19]
Cait Lister
And there was one really savvy Assyriologist who was talking a bit about the gender studies in the ancient near east and saying, you know, this thing about Ishtar, I don't get it. Everyone says she's a fertility goddess, and yet you watch her wiping out entire cities and she never has children herself. She seems like the antithesis of fertility to me. How did we come up with this construct? It's like it was the hippies.
- [34:43]
Kate Lister
It was the hippies.
- [34:44]
Cait Lister
Okay, well, at least there's an answer.
- [34:46]
Kate Lister
It's quite nice, actually, to not have to say it was the Victorians for once, because usually they're the ones doing a number on this stuff. So we've got this goddess has kind of moved and mutated and evolved and she's now on Cyprus. When did she get the name Aphrodite, by the way? When does that show up?
- [35:02]
Cait Lister
It shows up in the 8th century BCE, not in Cyprus, but in the Greek world. So she has the name Aphrodite in the works of Homer and he, and dating to around 730 BCE on the island of Pithecusa, which is on the western side of Italy, actually, but where Greeks had colonized excavations brought to light a cup, an inscribed cup. It's called the Nestor cup, and it was in a grave and it has the inscription on it of Nestor in this cup, a pleasant drink. Whoever drinks for me immediately will desire for fair crowned Aphrodite sea. So in other words, once you drink wine, you're gonna get a little drunk and then you're going to get horny.
- [35:45]
Kate Lister
It's as true then as it ever was.
- [35:48]
Cait Lister
It was in a child's grave, which really.
- [35:51]
Kate Lister
Oh, no, you kept that one back.
- [35:54]
Cait Lister
Yeah, but as soon as we're seeing. Yeah, you gotta wonder about the parenting skills.
- [35:59]
Kate Lister
You do have to worry about these people. Yeah.
- [36:01]
Cait Lister
But as soon as we see her name, she's being associated with eroticism, with desire, with sack. So that's the earliest evidence for her name, both in the literature and the epigraphy. We have no idea where her name came from. The Greeks themselves thought it was associated with the word aphros, which is foam, because they thought of her as being foam born. Because according to Hesiod, you have the primordial earth goddess who is gay, and she's having sex with her son Ouranos, who is the sky, except he won't stop having sex with her. And she starts getting really, really grouchy because she wants to give birth because she's preg. And he won't take it out to let her do that. So she creates an adamantine sickle and she gives it to her son Cronos, and she says, get rid of dad. And Kronos castrates Ouranos and tosses the bloody genitalia into the sea. And according to Hesiod, around the members, foam emerged. And from that foam came a beautiful goddess. And this is Aphrodite. So she is born based on. From the blood and semen of her. Castrated. I don't know where you'd put that on a family tree. She's part of his body, so it's not her father.
- [37:14]
Kate Lister
It would be a very awkward family Christmas, that one, wouldn't it? After that little lot, that's just.
- [37:20]
Cait Lister
Okay, a little awkward. But anyway, so that foam she emerged out of, the Greeks thought that Aphrodite was foam born, but it's a folk etymology. And remember how I said we don't know the language of Cyprus, where she originally came from? So I don't think we're gonna really figure out her name until we understand what the Cypriots themselves were speaking?
- [37:43]
Kate Lister
Okay, okay. So we don't know what her name means, but we kind of know when it started to be in currency. And then it gets attached to other goddesses, older goddesses on Cyprus. What other origin stories do we have? Hesiod's got this test thing. Homer's a bit less bonkers, but still pretty mad. What does he say?
- [38:06]
Cait Lister
He's pretty calm about it. As far as Homer's concerned, Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and a sky or sea goddess named Dione. So in book five of the Iliad, when she went into battle to try and help her son Aeneas. And remember, she's not the best mom and she's not really effective, and she's immediately cheating, chased off by Diomedes because he hits her in the hand and she breaks a nail and she goes wailing off to Olympus. Okay, it's not that bad. He actually does stab her.
- [38:36]
Kate Lister
Okay, I thought. I thought you'd be serious. Then the stories are so mad that she broke a nail and decided, no.
- [38:43]
Cait Lister
No, he stabbed her in the hand and she kind of freaked out because she's not a battle goddess. She's not marshal. She flies back to Olympus and her mom's there kind of cuddling her and dad is there saying, now, now, leave the fighting to the actual martial deities. Don't do that. But in that scene, you see she goes to her mother, Dione, while her father Zeus is speaking to her. So as far as Homer is concerned, she is the daughter of Zeus and Dione, it's not as violent and she's not as old. So she is the child of Zeus as opposed to being functionally the grandmother of Zeus, being part of order. But the mere fact that there's such a divergence in tales, both coming from the 8th century, shows that she was actually very late addition to the pantheon. Most of the other gods have been in Greece or on Crete from the Bronze Age. We see them written about in the Linear B texts that come from Pylos and from Knossos in texts relating to sacrifices that are going to be made to the deities. And, okay, there's Zeus and, oh, there's Dion and, oh, there's Athena and there's Hermes and there's no Aphrodite at all. So she comes in very late into the Greek pantheon. And I think part of this is when she got there, they didn't know where to put her. So Hesiod understood her one way based on his closer understanding of some Near Eastern stories, because he's more Eastern. And Homer just puts her in. In a completely different way.
- [40:12]
Kate Lister
Okay, it's interesting there that you said that Homer tells a story where she tries to go and do some fighting but gets hurt and runs away. Because there are some early incarnations of Aphrodite where she is up for a scrap. Am I right in thinking that, like, the Spartans were quite big fans of Aphrodite?
- [40:30]
Cait Lister
The Spartans were big fans of military, and they made everything military.
- [40:35]
Kate Lister
Oh, there we go. So it wasn't particularly that she was a war goddess. It was that the Spartans made her into a war goddess.
- [40:42]
Cait Lister
The Spartans would make Winnie the Pooh into a soldier because they're Spartans. And it's a bit of a debate because people think that, okay, she comes out of these martial Near Eastern goddesses, shouldn't she be martial too? And the fact is, no, she really isn't. But what came up as a complicating factor is the Romans. So remember how I was saying that she seduced this guy named Anchises and had a baby whom she didn't want. She handed over to those depots and nymphs. That was Aeneas. And later on Aeneas, after the fall of Troy, because he was a Trojan prince, he escapes and he takes his dad and his son and a whole bunch of survivors and they go and found basically Attalia, what is eventually going to become the Roman Empire. So as far as the Romans are concerned, this Aphrodite, whom they call Venus, is kind of a national mother. So she's a bit more maternal for the Romans than she is is for the Greeks. Because there's a difference between Aphrodite and Venus. And you get this an awful lot between the Greek Pantheon and the Roman Pantheon. So, for example, in the Greek Pantheon, Helios is the sun and Apollo is a separate deity. You go to Rome and Apollo is a solar deity. So there are differences. And you see that with Aphrodite and Venus too. Now, one of them is that Venus is more maternal for the Romans because she's that national mother. Mother. The son of Aeneas, his name was Ascanius, but his nickname was Iulus because, you know, he's the progenitor of the Julian clan, for example, Julius Caesar. So they really trace this family back to her. She's the. Her mother of the Romans. So that's one difference.
- [42:27]
Kate Lister
Didn't he? He was all about Venus.
- [42:29]
Cait Lister
Yep. But another difference that you see, and this starts in the 1st century BCE when Sulla becomes dictator. He has a special fondness for Venus, Aphrodite. He spends a fair amount of time in what is for the Romans, the East. So in the Greek world, Aphrodite, the Near East. And he starts conceiving of Aphrodite as a more martial goddess.
- [42:52]
Kate Lister
Oh, does he?
- [42:54]
Cait Lister
Yep. He claims that he once had this dream where Aphrodite appears to him him, and he's told, bring an axe to the city of Aphrodisias and dedicate this to her and she will help you in battle. And he has a vision where Venus, wearing the panoply of Aries, so dressed in Aries armor, helps organize his troops and leads him to victory. And so we start having here the rise of a cult of a version of Venus called Venus Victrix, Venus Victorious, if you will, or Venus Victor. So she becomes this Ur mother who's now helping people in battle, originally wearing Ares armor, her Mars armor, if you will. And then this gets adopted down. So Sulla was a bit of a disaster for Rome, but at least eventually he went away. And then you have other folks like Pompey and then Julius Caesar and they're also taking on this idea of, oh, well, our Ur mother Venus is on my side and she's helping me in military matters as well as other things. And you start seeing the proliferation of this Venus Victrix. And she might be shown with some weapons. And then eventually what happens, especially when August Justice Caesar takes over, you start seeing this image in statues, on coins, on jewelry, of a naked Venus. And she's holding a helmet in one hand and she might have a shield in the other one. And cute little Orotes, little cupids are all around her playing with a sword. And so she's martial, but she's actually naked and playing with weapons. Okay, so we see a lot of that. And so it's like, okay, she's Aphrodite armed, she's Venus with weapons, but she's not exactly using them. She's more just playing with them, accessorizing. But apparently a number of different statues started showing up around the Roman world at this time showing Venus Aphrodite, depending on where you are, actually armed with a baldric, with a shield, holding a sword. A couple of those come from Cyprus again and we wind up with titles like Aphrodite and Napoleon. So Aphrodite armed. And we read about that and folks like Pausanias or Strabo have seen these statues and they write about them. So it's like, oh, yeah, I was in Corinth and I saw that great statue of Aphrodite dressed as a warrior. And people think, oh, okay, well, this makes sense. She comes from Ishtar, so it makes sense that she would be a warrior goddess. And don't know what Homer was thinking. And then you have to realize, yeah, but when you look at when all these different things date to, it's always outside of Sparta, it's always Roman period. So you have the Spartans who arm Aphrodite because they arm absolutely everyone. And otherwise you have this cult of Venus Victrix who translates back into a kind of armed Aphrodite in the Greek speaking world. But it's later. So when you do get a somewhat martial Aphrodite, it's because of influence from Venus not because it's something that originally came with her.
- [46:17]
Kate Lister
Am I having a fever dream? Or did I ever see a picture of a statue of Aphrodite with a beard? Or was it Venus with a beard? Or maybe that was just an insane fever dream that I've had.
- [46:29]
Cait Lister
There's one that I can think of. It's very crude. It's from Corinth if I remember correctly. And it looks like a naked female coming out of some kind of egg sac testicles, considering her birth. And she does seem to have some kind of beard.
- [46:45]
Kate Lister
Okay.
- [46:46]
Cait Lister
And the idea that there was an Aphroditos masculine form of Aphrodite goes back to that original kind of gender and sex confusion that we even saw with not so much Inanna, but definitely with Ishtar, slightly less with Ashtart, but that idea of there's the male Inanna and the female Inanna.
- [47:05]
Kate Lister
Okay.
- [47:06]
Cait Lister
And there are a couple of places, some hymns of Ishtar where she claims to have a beard. So there was something vaguely gender bending about it. But it's not very common for Aphrodite really.
- [47:25]
Kate Lister
I'll be back with Stuff Stephanie and Aphrodite after this short break.
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- [48:58]
Kate Lister
The last time you were on we were talking about the idea of sacred sex work in Mesopotamia. Now this is a myth that has been attached to our girl Aphrodite as well.
- [49:08]
Cait Lister
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [49:09]
Kate Lister
That crops up. The idea that her worshippers just went on the game and that that was what they did. Can we talk about that a little bit about where that comes from and if that's true? I think I know what you're gonna say.
- [49:22]
Cait Lister
It's not true. No. Sorry.
- [49:25]
Kate Lister
Dammit. That's not Homer again, is it? Where does this story come from?
- [49:28]
Cait Lister
Herodotus.
- [49:29]
Kate Lister
Herodotus. That's what I was getting my H's muddled up. Honestly, I'm being useless today. It was H someone. Herodotus. What does he have to say about this?
- [49:36]
Cait Lister
What he has to say in book one, passage 199 of his histories, is that the foulest custom amongst the Babylonians is that once in her life, every Babylonian woman must go to the temple of Mulitathe. Babylonians call Aphrodite Mulita. And she must sit there until a foreigner walking amongst the women chooses her. And he must offer her money of any amount. She can't debate it and says, I claim you in the name of goddess. And then they go outside of the sanctuary, they do the nasty. She dedicates the money that she received for having sex with this stranger. And then she goes home. And after that she can never be seduced. And according to Herodotus, there's also a tradition in Cyprus that's a lot like this. Now, this passage is in the midst of a whole bunch of passages that Herodotus, who, for the record, never actually got to Babylon, it would seem.
- [50:32]
Kate Lister
Doesn't he say that, like, people in Cyprus only have sex with incense burning and all kinds of, like, mad stuff like that as really on one? Not quite.
- [50:41]
Cait Lister
But he does claim that the Arabs, after they have sex, do fumigate themselves.
- [50:45]
Kate Lister
That's. That's what I'm thinking of.
- [50:46]
Cait Lister
Yeah, that's part of it. Yep. So never have sex without incense. You know, it's just something you need to have in condoms. Incense. Be prepared.
- [50:54]
Kate Lister
Okay, so he says this, so he.
- [50:56]
Cait Lister
Says this, but he says a bunch of kind of weird things about the Babylonians. Like he says, their medical system is if somebody gets sick, you take them out into the marketplace and you. You lie them down and they say, hey, I have this. Have you ever seen. Do you know a cure for it? And they didn't do that. They had a medical system. Look at this passage, the series of passages. And they say, well, that's all balderdash. Oh, except the sacred prostitution. That one must be right.
- [51:22]
Kate Lister
That must be right.
- [51:23]
Cait Lister
No, it wasn't so that's kind of made up. I personally think that he was speaking poetically there, that he's looking at Babylon that has been conquered by the Persians. And he's saying that they've given up, that they're on their back. They're taking it by the will of the gods. It's kind of like a form of prostitution in some respects. And it's so different from what we do in Greece because here we have scheduled events. There they're waiting around for maybe several years. You don't know. And here when the women get together, the men are excluded, and there the men are let in. And it's just everything is opposite, but it's not real. But people thought it was real.
- [52:07]
Kate Lister
It's a good story. That's the problem. It's like you can see why it suddenly caught on this idea that in this mysterious place, that's how this goddess was worshipped.
- [52:18]
Cait Lister
But it's actually kind of scary because I wrote a book on sacred prostitution. And when you look at the way modern authors conceive of it, they like it because it seems that, wow, look, it's a deep. Who is sex positive, woman positive, body positive. Isn't that great? And when you look at the actual narratives that people have mined to try and get information about the sacred prostitution thing. So Herodotus or Stray Bow, especially Strabo, it's always a rape narrative. I mean, think of those women. They have to go to the sanctuary. They must sit there until someone pays them. They can't debate the price. They can't debate who it is. They can't say, no, it's not positive, is it? No, that's not positive. That's divinely sanctioned rape. And when you realize that's what it is, it's actually kind of horrifying. And then you realize, no, Aphrodite would never condone that she is not a goddess of rape. Early authors. So Herodotus wrote this. And then later authors such as Strabo seem to think that he was correct. So they write about it. And, oh, yeah, somewhere in Babylon there's this temple of Aphrodite where they do this. And it's really funny because when you read Strabo, he's saying, well, there's some temple somewhere where they seem to do something like this really specific stuff. Then he hasn't seen it. No one he knows has seen it. He's taking it from Herodotus, but he can't pin it down anywhere because no one's actually seeing this thing take place. So he Gets very vague and you start seeing a lot of that with the other authors as well. But by the time you do get to your Victorians and then your character counterculture movement with that.
- [53:55]
Kate Lister
I love it. Yeah.
- [53:56]
Cait Lister
Yep. This is just embraced as being, oh, it's sex positive, body positive, woman positive. And it's no longer read as a divine rape narrative.
- [54:06]
Kate Lister
Sex workers were once worshipped as goddesses. And I can see the. I can see the appeal of it.
- [54:11]
Cait Lister
I have some in Herodotus. These aren't sex workers. These are the ones. These are the women. And then what happened is when assyriology gets started and you have all these technical terms for cultic workers, all these different names for priests. Well, that's a deacon, that's a priest, that's a bishop. What's a monsignor? I don't get that. So we have all these names and a number of them are for female cultic workers. And you have a whole bunch of these kind of Victorian Protestant clergy guys who are looking at this and thinking, well, why would you ever have a female serving a deity? That's so weird. Oh, it must be for sex, because women aren't good for anything else.
- [54:48]
Kate Lister
Must be for sex. It might. What else could women possibly be doing there?
- [54:53]
Cait Lister
So. So many of the cultic titles for women got translated as sacred prostitute. The funniest one is the naditu, because naditu means fallow woman. She doesn't have sex. She's celibate. She's a celibate prostitute. Now, does anyone else find that weird?
- [55:10]
Kate Lister
Yes, I. Yeah, that. That's a bit of a conflict in terms. There is. But I have heard some scholars say that sex workers were. I don't know what the word is like, more akin that they found an affinity with Aphrodite, that there's some evidence that perhaps they saw her as their patron. Or is it all just kind of titillating propaganda, in your opinion?
- [55:33]
Cait Lister
I imagine that if you were an actual prostitute in ancient Greece and your life is dependent on this, you're probably going to pray to her. Her, because you need work. But there's also the fact that a lot of the prostitutes in ancient Greece were slaves to begin with. They did not have much agency. A big problem that we wind up with is that there is a confusion between two terms. In ancient Greece, porne means prostitute. We get pornography from it. Then there's something called a hetaira. Now, a hetaira is a companion. That's what the word means. It's the feminine form, companion. People Think that companions are prostitutes, but they're not. Prostitutes sell sex. Yeah, hetairas sell their companionship. So what happens is you're a Greek man, you live in 5th century Athens and you're 35, you're married to a 17 year old, and she's been kept inside and kind of dumb for most of her life so that, that she'll be manageable and chaste and all that stuff you worry about when you're a good patriarchal male who wants to keep control of your women. But she's also boring and you can't really take her out on a night on the town, especially if some of your friends are going to be there. So you need a woman whose company you can enjoy. Enter the hetaira here is a woman who is reasonably well educated. She's kind of beautiful. Her job is flattering you and making you feel good about yourself. You can bring her to a drinking party and have a fun night with the guys. That is what a hetaira sells her companionship. But believing that, oh, no sane man would ever paid to talk to a woman, it must be sex. We have confused these terms and we think that hetairai are prostitutes. Now, hetairai are very closely affiliated with Aphrodite. And there was one particularly famous one, her name was Frewne. She was the top of that industry.
- [57:30]
Kate Lister
Ah, yes, yes.
- [57:32]
Cait Lister
And she would even pose for statues of Aphrodite because she was considered to be that beautiful. So she's a hetaira. She's closely linked with Aphrodite in art. When she was brought up on charges of impiety. There are tales that say that her lawyer, when he realized he was losing the case, took off her top, bared her breasts, and all the jurors looked at that and thought, oh, she's sacred Aphrodite. We can't find her guilty. No. And they acquitted, avoided her, which is a later story. Not entirely true. But the point is she is closely associated with this goddess. And because the companions are associated with Aphrodite, she even has the title Aphrodite Hetaira, that's one of her epithets. People with the misunderstanding think that means that prostitutes are closely associated with her and vice versa. Okay, so it's really more of a confusion between two technical terms.
- [58:23]
Kate Lister
But it's a class thing, really, more than anything. It's about money and companionship and people that are earning their living exclusively by selling sex in a very transactional way. And the courtesans who were being paid to sex was part of it, and it was part of their world. But they're being paid for more than that. Maybe. Yeah.
- [58:42]
Cait Lister
Yeah. We have a total of three citations from the ancient world, all from the same guy, a common playwright name Achon, that says that Hetaire ever charged money for sex. So we know that they charged money to hang out with them, and we know that they had sex because they were allowed to, and so they did it when they wanted to. But we have no evidence that they sold sex ever.
- [59:08]
Kate Lister
Okay, yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. It's very complex, isn't it, this world? So as a sort of a final question. Question, then. Where did Aphrodite go? Like, did she just packed up? They said, right, we're Christian now. And everyone went, all right, then, see you later, Aphrodite.
- [59:25]
Cait Lister
The Christians did not like Aphrodite. No, they really didn't. Because, especially starting with the works of Paul of Tarsus, Also known as St. Paul, I guess he's trying to convert as many people as he can to Christianity. And there are a lot of things that he is willing to allow wiggle room for. You know, you tell guys that you have to be Jewish first before becoming Christian, and, oh, you have to be circumcised. You're getting no one. Okay, that is just not happening. But if you use sex as allure. Oh, well, I got this lovely young lady. She's Christian now, and the only way to marry her and have sex with her is if you convert too. Oh, and you can't do it any other way. And even then, it's a little unnerving because in Greek, the word for sexual intercourse is taerga. Aphrodites. It's the works of Aphrodite. Sexuality itself is aphrodisia. So how do you have sex without having it pertain to Aphrodite? It's really difficult, so that can make it awkward. So they tried to get rid of her. And she also doesn't have any of the positive benefits. Like in early Christianity, when we had to portray Jesus, he was frequently shown the way they would portray Apollo. So as a matter of fact, when it was still illegal to be Christian, someone would come in and see this painting, and they didn't know who it was. It just looks like Apollo. Well, that's not a problem. It's like, ha, ha, joke's on you. And Dionysus, he's kind of cool. He gives a sacramental wine. But Aphrodite, no, we can't get anything Good from her. So what kind of winds up happening is on the one hand, she euhemerizes, which means that they stop thinking of her as a goddess and start thinking of her as this prominent human being who got revered like a goddess but wasn't a goddess. And, oh, yeah, she was basically a whore. So she was this total slut, don't forget that, who convinced women to become prostitutes so that she wouldn't be the only slut out there. And she's really terrible, and we don't like her. And even if she didn't, the understanding of Aphrodite just turned her into literally nothing but a prostitute before we got rid of her as much as possible.
- [61:34]
Kate Lister
Her reputation is just kind of denigrated and denigrated and denigrated. She almost becomes like a cautionary.
- [61:41]
Cait Lister
Almost a cautionary tale. I remember I was at a lecture once and somebody was talking about how did these early Christians deal with polytheism, especially when you're surrounded by it all the time, because you're still living in Rome and it's still filled with statues. And there was one guy who said, oh, yeah, I went to the baths and I took delight in urinating in the face of the statue of Aphrodite. Jerk.
- [62:06]
Kate Lister
Oh, no, I'm. You can't keep a good goddess down, I don't think. And ultimately, they didn't win in the end, did they? Because her legacy is still very much with us today.
- [62:15]
Cait Lister
One of my favorite statements is Aphrodite always wins. Any time you try to suppress human sexuality in any context whatsoever, it comes right out again, stronger, harsher. There was one guy who had, in a wonderful book about Homer, the Bible and ancient religion, that sexuality is the whack, a mole of the human psyche. You try to put it down and it's just going to pop up someplace else, and that is Aphrodite. So she always wins. And in modern society, we do tend to be sex negative, and it always winds up being a problem. And it's like you have so many problems that you could solve so much more easily if you just accept the fact that, yes, people are going to have sex, prepare for it and deal with it, as opposed to trying to suppress it and having it explode on you.
- [63:08]
Kate Lister
Stephanie, you have been fabulous to talk to. I knew that you would be. And if people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you?
- [63:15]
Cait Lister
Any place books are sold.
- [63:17]
Kate Lister
Any place books are sold.
- [63:19]
Cait Lister
Yes.
- [63:20]
Kate Lister
Well, thank you so much for dropping by to tell us all about this incredible goddess. You've been absolutely spectacular.
- [63:27]
Cait Lister
Oh, thank you so much. I love talking about Aphrodite. Absolutely. And I could go on forever, so it's probably good that you stop me at some point.
- [63:37]
Kate Lister
Thank you so much.
- [63:38]
Cait Lister
Yeah, thank you.
- [63:42]
Kate Lister
Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Stephanie for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts Coming up, we have got an episode on the truth about mythical women and one of the sex and scandal in ancient Egypt all coming your way. And if you would like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us@betwixtistoryhit.com this podcast was edited by Tim Arstell and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again betwixt the Sheets the history of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
- [64:22]
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