Aphrodite's birth is older than that of most Olympian gods, and it begins with a surprisingly violent event. According to Hesiod's Theogony, when Kronos rose against his father Uranos, he severed him from the sky with the stroke of a sickle. The severed seed fell into the sea.

Around that seed, white foam rose from the waves. The Greek word aphros means foam, and by tradition the goddess's name comes from it. Within the foam a girl grew, and the waters carried her first near the island of Kythera, then to the shore of Cyprus. This is why she is called both Kytherea and the Cyprian.

The moment she set foot on land, grass sprang up and flowers bloomed where she stepped. The Homeric Hymn describes the Horai, the Seasons, welcoming her: they place golden crowns on the goddess, dress her in fine garments, and lead her to Olympus among the gods. All who see her beauty are filled with wonder.

Something important is hidden here: Aphrodite was born from the first great wound of the cosmos. Attraction, in the language of myth, is what comes after a rupture.

Aphrodite's myths travel through every face of desire. On Olympus she was married to Hephaestus, yet her heart was bound to Ares, the god of war. In Homer's Odyssey, the bard Demodokos tells the story: when Hephaestus learns of the pair's meetings, he weaves an invisible, fine net, traps them in bed, and calls all the gods to laugh at the sight.

The myth does not shy away from saying that even the strongest attraction carries a vulnerability.

Perhaps her most moving story is that of Adonis. As told in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Aphrodite falls for this young hunter of extraordinary beauty and warns him to stay away from dangerous prey. Adonis does not listen, and he is killed by a wild boar. The goddess grows a red flower, the anemone, from his blood. Love, in the myth, is also a name for loss.

In another story Ovid tells of the mortal Psyche, a girl whose beauty was compared to Aphrodite's own. The impossible tasks the goddess gives her show that love is a trial of ripening, and in the end Psyche rises to immortality. Aphrodite governs not only desire but the side of desire that transforms a person.

Aphrodite's symbols whisper her nature. The rose, with its beauty and its thorn, carries beside its pleasure the possibility of being wounded. The dove is the bird of gentleness and devotion. The myrtle leaf was sacred to her, and sea foam always recalls the moment of her birth.

The center of her worship was Cyprus. Her temple at Paphos was among the most famous of the ancient world, and Pausanias describes how deeply these shores were tied to the goddess. Temples rose to her in many cities, across Kythera, Corinth, and the coasts of Anatolia.

In Rome she was known as Venus and considered the ancestress of the line of Emperor Augustus, since legend held that the hero Aeneas was her son.

What is striking is that Aphrodite had no single face. Ancient Greece sometimes called her Aphrodite Ourania, the goddess of celestial, lofty, spiritual love, and sometimes Aphrodite Pandemos, the goddess of everyday, bodily attraction shared by all. In his dialogue the Symposium, Plato discusses these two faces at length.

The goddess carries both the most refined and the most concrete form of love at once.

What does Aphrodite say to us today? The planet Venus that bears her name is, in astrology, the symbol of value, aesthetics, and the capacity for relationship. But the myth points to something deeper.

Aphrodite is the force of attraction within us. The capacity to value oneself and another, to notice beauty, to recognize pleasure without shame. She does not reject the body, does not belittle form, does not count desire as sin. Her presence is a permission: permission to feel, to be drawn, to attach.

But she has a shadow too. When Aphrodite energy loses its balance, it can seek its worth only in outside approval, use a relationship as a mirror, turn beauty into a mask. The lesson of the myth is subtle: the goddess was born from the sea's first wound, which means true attraction passes through the acceptance of a vulnerability.

To love yourself, and to love another, both ask you to risk staying open.