Aphrodite is a Goddess Born of The Sea

Aphrodite is a Goddess born of The Sea : She is Primeval, Oceanic in her feminine power. She is from The Beginning of Time and holds court at The Bottom of The Sea. In psychological terms, she reigns in the unconscious, symbolised by the waters of the sea. She is scarcely approachable on ordinary conscious terms; one might as well confront a tidal wave. One can admire, worship, or be crushed by such archetypal femininity but it is extremely difficult to relate to it. It is Psyche’s task, from her human vantage point, to do just that—to relate and soften the great oceanic, archetypal feminine. This is our myth.

Every woman has an Aphrodite in her. She is recognized by her overwhelming femininity and vast, impersonal, unrelatable majesty.

There are marvellous stories about Aphrodite and her court. She has a servant who carries a mirror before her so that she may constantly see herself. Someone continually makes perfume for her. She is jealous and will stand no competition whatsoever. She is constantly arranging marriages and is never satisfied until everyone is busily serving her fertility.

Aphrodite is the principle of mirroring every experience back into our own consciousness. As man is occupied with expansion and exploration and finding that which is new, Aphrodite is reflecting and mirroring and assimilating. Aphrodite’s mirror is symbolic of a most profound quality of the goddess of love. She frequently offers one a mirror by which one can see one’s self, a self hopelessly stuck in projection without the help of the mirror. Asking what is being mirrored back can begin the process of understanding, which may prevent getting stuck in an insoluble emotional tangle. This is not to say there are not outer events. But it is important to realize and understand that many things of our own interior nature masquerade as outer events when they should be mirrored back into our subjective world from which they sprang. Aphrodite provides this mirror more often than we would like to admit. Whenever one falls in love, sees the god or goddess-like qualities in another, it is Aphrodite mirroring our immortality and divine-like qualities. 

We are as reluctant to see our virtues as our faults and a long period of suffering generally lies between the mirroring and the accomplishment. Psyche takes just such a long journey between her falling in love with Eros and the discovery of her own immortality.