Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Origins of Aphrodite: The Sex-Positive Goddess

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

Who was Aphrodite? She's often thought of as a goddess of sexuality, but there's so much more to this woman.Which ancient civilisation was she created by? How did the early Christians react to her overt sexuality? Was she ever thought of a sex worker?Joining Kate today is the fantastic author and historian Dr. Stephanie Budin, to introduce us to this fascinating goddess.*TW: This episode includes references to sexual assault*This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely Bertwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. Thank you for coming back to Bertwix the Sheeds. I know you have many, many other podcasts to choose from, and I'm genuinely honoured 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 around 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, fair do's, 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 fan girl, 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 Boodin. How are you doing? Oh, I am delighted to be here. I am so happy to see you again.

forward to this. Oh, the last time you were on, we were talking about ancient Mesopotamia and sex working ancient Mesopotamia. It's a hugely popular episode, that one, you know, people were all over it. They loved it. So obviously, we were going to have you back on. And today we're talking about Aphrodite. Aphrodite. Yes. Aphrodite. 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 going to tell me everything I've said was completely wrong and I'm an absolute moron. So I'm going to tread gently.

If it makes you feel any better, I feel the exact same way all the time. Oh, dear my God. Oh, my God. If you feel like that, 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 a grapes, very opulent, very drapey, very pouty. That's Aphrodite, right?

I'd say that's a little bit more venous. 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. 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. 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 protects people who are traveling by sea. So in some respect, 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 of fellow named Apelodorus of Athens once said, Aphrodite makes friends. Oh, I like that. And sometimes I think that's a great place to start when understanding her. She brings people together harmoniously, happily, libidnously. But she causes people to get along. Oh, now that is a powerful goddess, isn't it? So the bit that I'm slightly worried that you're going to go, no, idiot.

If I just say that she descended from a Mesopotamian goddess called Anana, is that? right? That is so right. Oh my God. You know your stuff so well. Like, fuck for that. If you'd gone, no, you idiot, I'd have to end the call and phone an editor very quickly. Tell me about the origin story. Where does she come from Aphrodite before she's making friends with people? Aphrodite is ultimately a Cypriot goddess. So she comes from the island of Cyprus. A couple of her, popular epithets, the nicknames that they gave to deities in ancient Greece, were Kipris, so literally the Cypriot, or Kipriya, which is also the Cypriot, or Kiprogenes, 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 Pallipathos, or technically they now call Cuclia, the village of Cuclia, 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 Lawn Fall, a place called Petzroto Romeo, 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 fashion makeover. It's where she went to get decked out before she seduced Ankises. It's where she ran off to after she was caught in Flagrante delictu.

She's all about Cyprus. Yep, Cyprus. So Cyprus is the place where a whole bunch of different influences came together to much. mold of 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 don't have 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. Wow. So we have images, figurines, but we don't have writings. So we can't quite. We don'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 influence, 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. Boobes out, okay. 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, and giant pubic triangles. Really? U-chips, 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. Is that like the little, they're called Venus figurines, right? 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 all. Villendorf, 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 figuring 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 worshipping different deities. But we don't know. We don't have a name.

for this very early goddess? 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 frustrating. And that's the one, you know, they could have taken Keneiform, those Cypriots. They were right there next to the Near East they could have taken keneiform 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 their 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. Oh, hello. Yeah. So if we go back to Paphos, for example, they have a goddess whom they call Wanasa, which is actually the Mycenaeanian 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 Wanasa. So she is the queen. In other parts of Greece, they have a female. We know is a goddess whom they refer to as

the Paffian, they call her Golgia, because he's also worshipped in the town of Golgoy. So there are all these localized things. By the time we get down to the fourth century, and there's a lot more Greek influence throughout the island, they start saying, oh, yeah, Pafia, oh yeah, you mean Aphrodite Pafia, right? So she gets that title in a place called Kitroy. And in another town called Amathis, down in the south, which is very indigenous, very traditional. They call her, oh, yes, that's Aphrodite, Kipria. So at least by the 4th century BCE, we know that the Cypriots themselves are taking these localized, Our Lady of Pathos, Our Lady of Golgoy.

And they're saying, oh, yeah, yeah, that's Aphrodite. 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 amalgamation of different things that 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 longer, there's only one and spoils all the fun. But what's some of Aphrodite's origin stories? Well, you were saying Inana, and that is one of the more documentable trajectories, if you will. So you have Sumerian Inana, 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 Inana 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 Inana, when we look at the literature there, we frequently see a warrior goddess who also is saying, I'm getting married, Demozy. Oh, it's wonderful. Do I look really pretty for him? Oh, how do my breasts look? Is he going to like this? and that sort of thing, and then calling on him to, oh, please rub my vulva, my wonderful boyfriend, put your mouth on mine, and this is our declaration of love.

Plow my furrow. So Inan is 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's this one hymn to the god, 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. So you do. Yep. So 60 and 60 go out. 60 on her breast, 60 on her hips.

They keep over and over ejaculating into her revolve. Eventually the young men get tired. Ishtar does not get tired. Yay. Celebration is the foundation of the city. It 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 helpful. So a really good way to have a regime change is to claim that you were picked by Ishtar because she's functionally the kingmaker. So we get this evolution, Anna, Anana 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 like it's traveling, right? Like sort of traveling west. Yep. So our first Sammites on our journey were those Akkadian speakers in Mesopotamia. Then we're going even farther. Well, at this point, if we started 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. Oh, that's close, isn't it? Yep, Ashtar. It's very close. And as a matter of fact, the understanding is that Inana 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 Enonautism.

who kind of becomes a, well, she can't barely be Ashtar. We already have an Ashtar. So we get an ash tart. 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 ash tart. 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 kaneiform, and it's an early kenea form, 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 Inana. 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 anana and female anana. 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 Ashtar. Ashtar is the male one, and Ashtar is the female, or possibly, because Ishtar doesn't have that feminizing tea, it's technically grammatically masculine. It could be that we have masculine, Ishtar, that's Inana, that's Ishtar, if you will. And then we have the feminine one, the one with the tea at the end, and that's Ashthart. So we see a cult of Inana Ishtar side by side with a cult of Ash Tart. And then Ashtar becomes very prominent in Syria. She shows up in the Ugaritic Corpus, a late Bronze Age, on the very coast

of Syria. So this is the place that's going to have a lot of contact with Cyprus. Because they're very close, aren't they? If you look at a map, they're actually, they're a lot close than I had realized that they are. On a very good day, apparently, you can see one from the other, if you have really good eyes, not my eyes. Really good sharp eyes. So you wind up with this new goddess who is Ashtar. 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 Ashtar is, remember 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 Ashtar.

Also known as Astarte, that was her Greek name, by the way. So Ashtar is Astarte, just to be perfectly clear. And Ashtar 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. She's not having gangbangs outside the city of O'Rook, then. She's not having gangbangs inside, outside, anywhere. She's not a particularly sexual being, but she's definitely marshal. She's militaristic. I like that, though.

I like that, like, that, like, she's been on holiday. She's had a few thousand years and she's just got, do you know what? I'm bored of men. No, I'm just going to 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 worshipping of a goddess. I thought it sounded like a started, but now I've maybe just imagined that.

You're thinking of Asherah. Yes, that's the one. Who was basically God's wife. So you have Elle in his Ashera. She was understood to be a pole. and apparently she was one of the last Ditties who was kicked out when they went monotheist so she was particularly irritating

her and another male deity named Ball I'd love that just hanging on with the fingernails in the door frames refusing to go I'll go you can't make me I'll be back with Stephanie and Aphrodite after the short break so like trying to trace Inana Ishtar Estate and then

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 Anana, 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? A lot of it does, yes. 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. Again, even Ashchart, 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 Inane 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 Greek. 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 in terms of honored ancestors. And that was what was a 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 Myceny and Grace, 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 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, 1,100, she's still erotic. She still's 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 homericum where she's tricked into falling in love with a mortal prince named Eichies, 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. Smart. Yeah.

So, great with the seduction, not so good with the maternity. Terrible mother. Not a great mother, no. It's not her thing. I think it's an important distinction to make, actually, because you often hear Aphrodite or even anana 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. Well, you have to distinguish between fertility and maternity. Oh, that's true. Yes, yeah. 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, certain really obvious reasons. They loved semen, didn't they? Like, I know it sounds weird.

That sounds weird, but like they, like, the earliest writers talk about it is like, that's where the soul is produced and all of this stuff. They just loved semen. Yes, they were really into semen. Absolutely. There are certain Mesopotamian hymns to the God Anki where the Tigris and the Euphrates are actually his ejaculate. And it's like, I'm washing your clothes in that now. Anyway. My head is all sticky. Sorry. Right.

It's quite all right. But anyway, now, Aphrodite is somewhat associated with fertility simply because she's associated with sex and they knew that babies came from sex. Yes. So that is a part of it. Referring to them as fertility goddesses and especially with Ishtar in and on it, that's a really 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 is 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 in on. 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 biological essentialism and 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 what, you know, even if she's a virgin, even if she kills people. And, 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. Yep. Yeah. And basically what happened with Inana and Ishtar is a very popular book came out written by Dan Volkstein, with translations from the Sumer by Samuel Noah Kramer about Inana. And it was literally a popular book. Ask almost any a seriologist you know, well, you know, how did you start getting into this topic? And one of the books that will come up is, oh, Inana, except that Dan Wilkstein 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. Right. Okay. And there was one really savvy Assyriologist who was talking a bit about this gender studies in ancient Near East, was 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. Okay, well, at least there's an answer. 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 goddesses 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? It shows up in the 8th century, B.C.E. Not in Cyprus, but in the Greek world.

So she has the name Aphrodite in the works of Homer and Hesiod. 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 Nester Cup, and it was in a grave, and it has the inscription on it of Nester in this cup, a pleasant drink. Whoever drinks for me immediately will desire for Faircrowned Aphrodite sees him. So in other words, once you drink you're going to get a little drunk and then you're going to get horny.

It's as true then as it ever was. It was in a child's grave, which really needs me in my turn. Oh no. You kept that one back. Yeah. But as soon as we're seeing, yeah, you've got to wonder about the parenting skills. You do have to worry about these people, yeah. But as soon as we see her name, she's being associated with eroticism, with desire, with sex. 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 Afros, which is foam,

because they thought of her as being foam-borne. Because according to Hesiod, you have the primordial earth goddess who is gay, and she's having sex with her son Oronos, 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 pregnant 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, Kronos, and she says, get rid of dad, and Kronos castrates Oronos 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 basically from the blood and semen of her castrated. I don't know where you put that on a family tree. She's part of his body, so it's not her father.

It would be a very awkward family Christmas, that one, wouldn't it, after that little lot? That's just, okay. A little awkward. But anyway, so that foam, she emerged out of the, The Greeks thought that Aphrodite was phone-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 going to really figure out her name until we understand what the Cypriots themselves were speaking. 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 of her? Hesio's got this testicle thing. Homer's a bit less bonkers, but still pretty mad. What does he say? 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 Deane. 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 chased off by Diomides because he hits her in the hand and she breaks a nail and she goes whaling off to Olympus. Okay, it's not that bad. He actually does stab her. Okay. I thought you'd be serious then. The stories are so mad that she broke an nail and decided no, no, no. He stabbed her in the hand and she kind of freaked out because she's not a battle goddess. She's not Marshall. 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, D.N.E. while her father, Zeus, is speaking to her. So as far as Homer is concerned, she is the daughter of Zeus and DNA. 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 Oronos. 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 text that come from Pilos and from Knosos in texts relating to sacrifices that are going to be made to the deities and okay,

there's Zeus and there's DNA and 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 Husea had 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. 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 the Spartans were quite big fans of Aphrodite? The Spartans were big fans of military. And they made everything military. 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. 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 Ancise's and had a baby whom she didn't want, she handed over to those deepos 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 Atalia 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 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. The son of Aeneas, his name was Ascanius, but his nickname was Ulysses, because, you know, he's the progenitor of the Eulian 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. And Julius Caesar loved her, didn't he?

He was all about Venus. Yep. But another difference that you see, and this starts in the first century BCE when Sulla becomes dictator, he has a special fondness for Venus slash Aphrodite. He spends a fair amount of time in what is for the Romans of the East. So in the Greek world, Aphrodite the Near East, and he starts conceiving of Aphrodite as a more martial goddess. Oh, does he? Yep.

He claims that he once had this dream where Aphrodite appears to him. And he's told, bring an axe to the city of Aphrodisius and dedicate this to her. And she will help you in battle. And he has a vision where Venus, wearing the panoply of Avrodisius, 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 of Venus Victrix, Venus victorious, if you will, or Venus Victor. So she becomes this urmother who's now helping people in battle, originally wearing

Aries armor, or Mars's armor, if you will. And then this gets adopted down. So Sola was a bit of a disaster for Rome, but at least eventually he went away. And then you have other folks like Pompeii and then Julius Caesar. And they're also taking on this idea of,

oh, well, our Urmother 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 Augustus 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 erotase, little cupids are all around. her playing with the sword. And so she's marshal, 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 fun. Accessorizing. But apparently a number of different statues started showing up around the Roman world at this time, showing Venus slash 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 ennopelion, so Aphrodite armed. And we read about that. And folks like Palsanias 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. And as a warrior. And people think, oh, okay, well, this makes sense. She comes from Ishtar, right? 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. 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? 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. Okay. And the idea that there was an aproditos, masculine form of Aphrodite, goes back to that original kind of gender and sex confusion that we even saw with not so much Inana, but definitely with Ishtar, slightly less with Ashtar, but that idea of the There's the male inana and the female inana. Okay. 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. I'll be back with Stephanie and Aphrodite after this short break. 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. Absolutely. 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 going to say. It's not true. No, sorry. That's not Homer again, is it? Where does this story come from? Herodotus. 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? What he has to say in book one, passage 199 of his histories, is that the foulest custom amongst the Babylonians is this, that once in her life, every Babylonian woman must go to the temple of mulita, the 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 the 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. 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 well? Like he's really on one. Not quite, but he does claim that the Arabs after they have sex do fumigate themselves. That's what I'm thinking of. That's part of it. Yeah. So never have sex without incense.

You know, it's just something you need to have in. Condoms, incense, be prepared. Okay. So he says this. So he 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 lie them down and they say, hey, I have this. Have you ever seen this? Do you know a cure for it? And they didn't do that. They had a medical system. So a serialologist 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. That must be right. 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. It's a good story. That's the problem. It's like you can see why it's suddenly caught on this idea that in this mysterious place, that's how this goddess was worshipped. 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 deity 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 Strabo, 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 he realizes, 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, seemed 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.

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 seen 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 counterculture movement with that. I love it. Yeah. 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. Sex workers were once worshipped as goddesses, and I can see the, I can see the appeal of it. I have heard some... In Herodas, these aren't sex workers. These are the wives. These are the women. And then what happened is when a seriology gets started and you have

all these technical terms for cultic workers, all these different names for priests, 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. It must be for sex. What else could women possibly be doing there? 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? Yes. Yeah, that's a bit of a conflict in terms there, isn't it? But I have heard some scholars say that sex workers were, I don't know what the word is, like more akin, they found an affinity with that. Aphrodite, that there's some evidence that perhaps they saw her as their patient, or is it all just kind of titillating propaganda in your opinion? 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 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. Pornay means prostitute. We get pornography from it. Then there's something called a hittira. Now, a hittira 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. Hittiras sell their companionship. So what happens is, you're a Greek man, you live fifth 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 she'll be manageable and chased 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 Hittaira. Here is a woman who's a woman who, 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, whatever paid to talk to a woman, it must be sex. We have confused these terms and we think that hetairi are prostitutes. Now, Hittirai are very closely affiliated with Aphrodite. And there was one particularly famous one. Her name was Frune. She was the top of that industry. Ah, yes, yes.

And she would even pose for statues of Aphrodite because she was considered to be that beautiful. So she's a Hittirah. 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, buried her breasts, and all the jurors looked at that and thought,

oh, she's sacred to Aphrodite. We can't find her guilty, no, and they acquitted 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 Hittaira, that's one of her epithets. Okay. 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. But it's a class thing really more than anything. It's about money and companionship and people that are earning them 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 were being paid for more than that. Maybe. Yeah. We have a total of three citations from the ancient world, all from the same guy, a comic. playwright named Akhan that says that Hittire 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. 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, then, where did Aphrodite go? Like did she just packed up But they said right we're Christian now

And everyone went all right then See you later. Aphrodite. 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 a lure, 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 to. 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 ta erga aprodite. It's the works of Aphrodite. Sexuality. itself is Afrodisiya. So how do you have sex without having it pertained 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, jokes 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 eucharizes, which means that they stop thinking of hers 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 horror. So she was this total slut who convinced women to become prostitute 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. Her reputation is just kind of denigrated and denigrate and denigrate. She almost becomes like a cautionary tale. 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. Like, a jerk. No. Oh, no, I'm, I, 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. 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. 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? place books are sold. Any place books are sold. Yes. Well, thank you so much for dropping by to tell us

all about this incredible goddess. You have been absolutely spectacular. 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. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. 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 with you and follow along whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got an episode on The Truth about mythical women and one on 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 at betwixtat history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith, the senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.