I love Aphrodite because she encompasses the Greek relationship with women. She’s often a scourged goddess, seen as too beautiful and meddlesome and promiscuous, but at the same time, when she calls they come.
She’s nothing like Athena and Artemis, who have given up their womanhood to be like men (not men, no, no… more like not-women. Artemis insists on staying chaste, refuting the only thing that women are ‘useful’ for in Ancient Greece, and Athena is the goddess of strategy, of knowledge, of thought, areas, at the time, dominated by men.)
Aphrodite takes her femininity, and weaponises it. She makes shields split and spears shatter with her raw emotion. The Iliad isn’t a battle, it’s a love story. She is the root of all mythology. She is Medea scorned, she is Antigone mourning, she is Apollo holding Phaethon’s body because love doesn’t have to be marriage. She is love between brother and sister, between friends, those secret smiles that only long-married couples can share.
She is vengeful love, she is hateful sex, she is the madness of grieving. She is sleepy kisses, she is a newlywed couple, she is the hands clasped under a table in secret. Aphrodite is forbidden and beautiful.
What is more terrifying than love?
“Magic is a set of techniques and approaches which can be used to extend the limits of Achievable Reality. Our sense of Achievable Reality is the limitations which we believe bind us into a narrow range of actions and successes—what we believe to be possible for us at any one time. In this context, the purpose of magic is to simultaneously explore those boundaries and attempt to push them back—to widen the ‘sphere’ of possible action. Doubt and cynicism are dominant social attitudes in this last decade of the twentieth century. One of the first barriers that you will encounter is the doubt over whether magic can possibly ‘work’ in the first place. Like sex, magic needs to be experienced directly before it can be fully understood. A single act by which you demonstrate that MAGIC WORKS to yourself is worth a thousand books on so-called occult theory.”
– Phil Hine
Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic
http://amzn.to/1ztbUToImage Credit: Cameron Gray & Justin Totemical
So…I have ain’t obsession with crime shows (forensics, detective, etc), and I’ve officially found a troupe that bugs the ever loving piss out of me.
One of the love interests doesn’t want the detective to leave her and go solve the crime.
Okay, so I understand that breaking up a date is a bad…
Oh gods yes.
That’s right up there with my least favorite trope (one that shows up in every series eventually):
We’ve known each other for years, and I trust you implicitly… UNTIL *cues the dramatic music* there’s a rumor or something that you did something and NOW you’re dead to me. And I won’t come and talk to you, oh no. Nothing so simple. And you won’t come talk to me, either.
(General you and I naturally)
Singing For Her 