Every goddess teaches a way of becoming.

Aphrodite teaches the alchemy of love, not by asking for devotion, but by inviting embodiment.

She is not just the goddess of love and laughter. She also kin to the Goddesses of the underworld: to Inanna, Ishtar and Potnia. The only goddess in the Greek pantheon who is neither married nor a virgin. She embodies alchemy, weaving light and dark, following her pleasure, doing as she pleases.

Aphrodite was one of the first goddesses I ever worked with. First alone, later in my women’s circles, and she has never left me. She often shows up when the theme of self-love becomes active. When I long to be seen, chosen or desired, she doesn’t make things easier; she turns the mirror back toward me, and what it reflects is often the part that feels small, unseen, not enough. That’s where the real work begins.

She invites you to awaken the part of yourself that isn’t afraid to feel pleasure, to move with sensual confidence, to meet others from a place of self-love and belonging rather than longing. Aphrodite isn’t someone you call on for love advice. She’s the mirror that shows you how to become the source of what you seek.

She also appears in my communities, reminding me that love belongs there just as much as in intimacy. Even her birth carries this paradox of alchemy: born from the blood of Uranus and the foam of the Cyprian Sea. Beauty rising from violence, light from shadow. Beauty emerging from violence, light from shadow.

In ancient times she was invoked by many names, each a different face of her power: Aphrodite Areia, warlike and victorious; Aphrodite Ambologera, the forever youthful one; Aphrodite Pandemos, goddess of the people and community; Aphrodite Mechanitis, the inventive one, connected to art, craft, and creation, but also to strategy, subtlety, and cleverness. Each name is a doorway.

This is how I work with myths, goddesses and archetypes in my women’s circles. Not by adorning an altar with flowers, honey and incense or dressing up in flowing fabrics. These things are part of the sacred space, and they have their place. But that’s not where it begins. Real transformation starts from the inside, not the outside. You’re not performing; you’re entering transformation.

To work with Aphrodite is to embody self-love, sacred sensuality and pleasure. She is the archetype that knows her worth, moves through the world with sensual confidence, and understands that beauty and pleasure are sacred. And when you work with her, you activate those same qualities within yourself. That’s the heart of the work. Not a transaction, but transformation.

I bring the old mysteries back into the modern world — not as outer rituals, but as living pathways of embodiment, where the divine feminine is felt, remembered, and reawakened.

Χαῖρε Ἀφροδίτη — Hail Aphrodite.