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What is known about the rituals of the Aphrodisia festival is consistent with Aphrodite's representation in iconography and text. For example, the first ritual of the festival would be to purify the temple with the blood from a dove, the sacred bird of Aphrodite.
There was also an annual festival in Cyprus that included performing sexual activities for Aphrodite Herself. Part of the activity was for the worshippers to give gifts to Aphrodite, and in return receive phalluses if they showed favor in Her eyes. [4] This ritual represented the affirmation at the time for the need of sexual power and activity.
Aphrodite (/ ˌ æ f r ə ˈ d aɪ t iː / ⓘ, AF-rə-DY-tee) [a] is an ancient Greek goddess associated with love, lust, beauty, pleasure, passion, procreation, and as her syncretized Roman counterpart Venus, desire, sex, fertility, prosperity, and victory. Aphrodite's major symbols include seashells, myrtles, roses, doves
The temple of Aphrodite [in Korinthos in the days of the tyrant Kypselos] was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple slaves, courtesans, whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was also on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich; for instance, the ship captains freely ...
Inanna/Ishtar, Mesopotamian goddess of sex and fertility, depicted on a ceremonial vase. Sacred prostitution, temple prostitution, cult prostitution, [1] and religious prostitution are purported rites consisting of paid intercourse performed in the context of religious worship, possibly as a form of fertility rite or divine marriage (hieros gamos).
Juno Borrowing the Girdle of Venus by Guy Head (c. 1771). The earliest mention of the girdle is in Book 14 of the Iliad, when its magical power is sought by Hera, who wants to seduce her husband Zeus, and has arrayed herself in all her finery, when she asks Aphrodite for "love and desire" (φιλότητα καί ἵμερον, philótēta kaí hímeron). [2]
She [Aphrodite] went to Kypros, to Paphos, where her precinct is and fragrant altar, and passed into her sweet-smelling temple. [9] Strabo described it: Palaipaphos [in Kypros], which last is situated at about ten stadia above the sea, has a mooring-place, and an ancient temple of Aphrodite Paphia. Then [beyond that] to the promontory Zephyria ...
Venus Urania (Christian Griepenkerl, 1878) Statue of the so-called 'Aphrodite on a tortoise', 430–420 BCE, Athens [a]Aphrodite Urania (Ancient Greek: Ἀφροδίτη Οὐρανία, romanized: Aphrodítē Ouranía, Latinized as Venus Urania) was an epithet of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, signifying a "heavenly" or "spiritual" aspect descended from the sky-god Ouranos to distinguish her ...