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Any design concept during the early stage of its generation must take into account a great number of issues and variables, including the qualities of the space(s), the end-use and life-cycle of these proposed spaces, connections, relations, and aspects between spaces, including how they are put together, and the impact of proposals on the immediate and wider locality. The selection of appropriate materials and technology must be considered, tested, and reviewed at an early stage in the design to ensure there are no setbacks (such as higher-than-expected costs) which could occur later in the project. The site and its surrounding environment, as well as the culture and history of the place, will also influence the design. The design must also balance increasing concerns with environmental sustainability. The architect may introduce (intentionally or not), aspects of mathematics and architecture, new or current architectural theory, or references to architectural history. A key part of the design is that the architect often must consult with engineers, surveyors, and other specialists throughout the design, ensuring that aspects such as structural supports and air conditioning elements are coordinated. The control and planning of construction costs are also part of these consultations. Coordination of the different aspects involves a high degree of specialized communication, including advanced computer technology such as building information modeling (BIM), computer-aided design (CAD), and cloud-based technologies. Finally, at all times, the architect must report back to the client, who may have reservations or recommendations which might introduce further variables into the design.
Architects also deal with local and federal jurisdictions regarding regulations and building codes. The architect might need to comply with local planning and zoning laws such as required setbacks, height limitations, parking requirements, transparency requirements (windows), and land use. Some jurisdictions require adherence to design and historic preservation guidelines. Health and safety risks form a vital part of the current design, and in some jurisdictions, design reports and records are required to include ongoing considerations of materials and contaminants, waste management and recycling, traffic control, and fire safety. Means of design. Previously, architects employed drawings to illustrate and generate design proposals. While conceptual sketches are still widely used by architects, computer technology has now become the industry standard. Furthermore, design may include the use of photos, collages, prints, linocuts, 3D scanning technology, and other media in design production. Increasingly, computer software is shaping how architects work. BIM technology allows for the creation of a virtual building that serves as an information database for the sharing of design and building information throughout the life-cycle of the building's design, construction, and maintenance. Virtual reality (VR) presentations are becoming more common for visualizing structural designs and interior spaces from the point-of-view perspective.
Environmental role. Since modern buildings are known to release carbon into the atmosphere, increasing controls are being placed on buildings and associated technology to reduce emissions, increase energy efficiency, and make use of renewable energy sources. Renewable energy sources may be designed into the proposed building by local or national renewable energy providers. As a result, the architect is required to remain abreast of current regulations that are continually being updated. Some new developments exhibit extremely low energy use or passive solar building design. However, the architect is also increasingly being required to provide initiatives in a wider environmental sense. Examples of this include making provisions for low-energy transport, natural daylighting instead of artificial lighting, natural ventilation instead of air conditioning, pollution, and waste management, use of recycled materials, and employment of materials which can be easily recycled. Construction role. As the design becomes more advanced and detailed, specifications and detail designs are made of all the elements and components of the building. Techniques in the production of a building are continually advancing which places a demand on the architect to ensure that he or she remains up to date with these advances.
Depending on the client's needs and the jurisdiction's requirements, the spectrum of the architect's services during each construction stage may be extensive (detailed document preparation and construction review) or less involved (such as allowing a contractor to exercise considerable design-build functions). Architects typically put projects to tender on behalf of their clients, advise them on the award of the project to a general contractor, facilitate and administer a contract of agreement, which is often between the client and the contractor. This contract is legally binding and covers a wide range of aspects, including the insurance and commitments of all stakeholders, the status of the design documents, provisions for the architect's access, and procedures for the control of the works as they proceed. Depending on the type of contract used, provisions for further sub-contract tenders may be required. The architect may require that some elements be covered by a warranty which specifies the expected life and other aspects of the material, product, or work.
In most jurisdictions prior notification to the relevant authority must be given before commencement of the project, giving the local authority notice to carry out independent inspections. The architect will then review and inspect the progress of the work in coordination with the local authority. The architect will typically review contractor shop drawings and other submittals, prepare and issue site instructions, and provide Certificates for Payment to the contractor (see also Design-bid-build) which is based on the work done as well as any materials and other goods purchased or hired in the future. In the United Kingdom and other countries, a quantity surveyor is often part of the team to provide cost consulting. With large, complex projects, an independent construction manager is sometimes hired to assist in the design and management of the construction. In many jurisdictions mandatory certification or assurance of the completed work or part of the work is required. This demand for certification entails a high degree of risk; therefore, regular inspections of the work as it progresses on site is required to ensure that the design is in compliance itself as well as following all relevant statutes and permissions.
Alternate practice and specialisations. Recent decades have seen the rise of specialisations within the profession. Many architects and architectural firms focus on certain project types (e.g. healthcare, retail, public housing, and event management), technological expertise, or project delivery methods. Some architects specialise in building code, building envelope, sustainable design, technical writing, historic preservation(US) or conservation (UK), and accessibility. Many architects elect to move into real-estate (property) development, corporate facilities planning, project management, construction management, chief sustainability officers interior design, city planning, user experience design, and design research. Professional requirements. Although there are variations in each location, most of the world's architects are required to register with the appropriate jurisdiction. Architects are typically required to meet three common requirements: education, experience, and examination. Basic educational requirement generally consist of a university in architecture. The experience requirement for degree candidates is usually satisfied by a practicum or internship (usually two to three years). Finally, a Registration Examination or a series of exams is required prior to licensure.
Professionals who engaged in the design and supervision of construction projects before the late 19th century were not necessarily trained in a separate architecture program in an academic setting. Instead, they often trained under established architects. Prior to modern times, there was no distinction between architects and engineers and the title used varied depending on geographical location. They often carried the title of master builder or surveyor after serving a number of years as an apprentice (such as Sir Christopher Wren). The formal study of architecture in academic institutions played a pivotal role in the development of the profession as a whole, serving as a focal point for advances in architectural technology and theory. The use of "Architect" or abbreviations such as "Ar." as a title attached to a person's name was regulated by law in some countries. Fees. Architects' fee structure was typically based on a percentage of construction value, as a rate per unit area of the proposed construction, hourly rates, or a fixed lump sum fee. Combination of these structures were also common. Fixed fees were usually based on a project's allocated construction cost and could range between 4 and 12% of new construction cost for commercial and institutional projects, depending on the project's size and complexity. Residential projects ranged from 12 to 20%. Renovation projects typically commanded higher percentages such as 15–20%.
Overall billings for architectural firms range widely, depending on their location and economic climate. Billings have traditionally been dependent on local economic conditions, but with rapid globalization, this is becoming less of a factor for large international firms. Salaries could also vary depending on experience, position within the firm (i.e. staff architect, partner, or shareholder, etc.), and the size and location of the firm. Professional organizations. A number of national professional organizations exist to promote career and business development in architecture. Prizes and awards. A wide variety of prizes is awarded by national professional associations and other bodies, recognizing accomplished architects, their buildings, structures, and professional careers. The most lucrative award an architect can receive is the Pritzker Prize, sometimes termed the "Nobel Prize for architecture". The inaugural Pritzker Prize winner was Philip Johnson who was cited as having "50 years of imagination and vitality embodied in a myriad of museums, theatres libraries, houses gardens and corporate structures". The Pritzker Prize has been awarded for forty-two straight editions without interruption, and there are now 22 countries with at least one winning architect. Other prestigious architectural awards are the Royal Gold Medal, the AIA Gold Medal (US), AIA Gold Medal (Australia), and the Praemium Imperiale.
Architects in the UK who have made contributions to the profession through design excellence or architectural education or have in some other way advanced the profession might, until 1971, be elected Fellows of the Royal Institute of British Architects and can write FRIBA after their name if they feel so inclined. Those elected to chartered membership of the RIBA after 1971 may use the initials RIBA but cannot use the old ARIBA and FRIBA. An honorary fellow may use the initials Hon. FRIBA, and an international fellow may use the initials Int. FRIBA. Architects in the US who have made contributions to the profession through design excellence or architectural education or have in some other way advanced the profession are elected Fellows of the American Institute of Architects and can write FAIA after their name. Architects in Canada who have made outstanding contributions to the profession through contributions to research, scholarship, public service, or professional standing to the good of architecture in Canada or elsewhere may be recognized as Fellows of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and can write FRAIC after their name. In Hong Kong, those elected to chartered membership may use the initial HKIA, and those who have made a special contribution after nomination and election by the Hong Kong Institute of Architects (HKIA), may be elected as fellow members of HKIA and may use FHKIA after their name.
Abbreviation An abbreviation () is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method including shortening, contraction, initialism (which includes acronym), or crasis. An abbreviation may be a shortened form of a word, usually ended with a trailing period. For example, the term "etc." is the usual abbreviation for the Latin phrase . Types. A "contraction" is an abbreviation formed by replacing letters with an apostrophe. Examples include "I'm" for "I am" and "li'l" for "little". An "initialism" or "acronym" is an abbreviation consisting of the initial letter of a sequence of words without other punctuation. For example, FBI (), USA (), IBM (), BBC (). When initialism is used as the preferred term, acronym refers more specifically to when the abbreviation is pronounced as a word rather than as separate letters; examples include SWAT and NASA. Initialisms, contractions and crasis share some semantic and phonetic functions, and are connected by the term "abbreviation" in loose parlance. History. In early times, abbreviations may have been common due to the effort involved in writing (many inscriptions were carved in stone) or to provide secrecy via obfuscation.
Reduction of a word to a single letter was common in both Greek and Roman writing. In Roman inscriptions, "Words were commonly abbreviated by using the initial letter or letters of words, and most inscriptions have at least one abbreviation". However, "some could have more than one meaning, depending on their context. (For example, can be an abbreviation for many words, such as ', ', ', ', ', ', ', and '.)" Many frequent abbreviations consisted of more than one letter: for example COS for "consul" and COSS for its nominative etc. plural "consules". Abbreviations were frequently used in early English. Manuscripts of copies of the Old English poem "Beowulf" used many abbreviations, for example the Tironian et () or for "and", and for "since", so that "not much space is wasted". The standardisation of English in the 15th through 17th centuries included a growth in the use of such abbreviations. At first, abbreviations were sometimes represented with various suspension signs, not only periods. For example, sequences like were replaced with , as in for "master" and for "exacerbate". While this may seem trivial, it was symptomatic of an attempt by people manually reproducing academic texts to reduce the copy time.
In the Early Modern English period, between the 15th and 17th centuries, the thorn was used for "th", as in ('the'). In modern times, was often used (in the form ) for promotional reasons, as in . During the growth of philological linguistic theory in academic Britain, abbreviating became very fashionable. Likewise, a century earlier in Boston, a fad of abbreviation started that swept the United States, with the globally popular term OK generally credited as a remnant of its influence. Over the years, however, the lack of convention in some style guides has made it difficult to determine which two-word abbreviations should be abbreviated with periods and which should not. This question is considered below. Widespread use of electronic communication through mobile phones and the Internet during the 1990s led to a marked rise in colloquial abbreviation. This was due largely to increasing popularity of textual communication services such as instant and text messaging. The original SMS supported message lengths of 160 characters at most (using the GSM 03.38 character set), for instance. This brevity gave rise to an informal abbreviation scheme sometimes called Textese, with which 10% or more of the words in a typical SMS message are abbreviated. More recently Twitter, a popular social networking service, began driving abbreviation use with 140 character message limits.
In HTML, abbreviations can be annotated using <abbr title="Meaning of the abbreviation.">abbreviation</abbr> to reveal its meaning by hovering the cursor. Style conventions in English. In modern English, there are multiple conventions for abbreviation, and there is controversy as to which should be used. One generally accepted rule is to be consistent in a body of work. To this end, publishers may express their preferences in a style guide. Some controversies that arise are described below. Capitalization. If the original word was capitalized then the first letter of its abbreviation should retain the capital, for example Lev. for "Leviticus". When a word is abbreviated to more than a single letter and was originally spelled with lower case letters then there is no need for capitalization. However, when abbreviating a phrase where only the first letter of each word is taken, then all letters should be capitalized, as in YTD for "year-to-date", PCB for "printed circuit board" and FYI for "for your information". However, see the following section regarding abbreviations that have become common vocabulary: these are no longer written with capital letters.
Periods. A period (a.k.a. full stop) is sometimes used to signify abbreviation, but opinion is divided as to when and if this convention is best practice. According to Hart's Rules, a word shortened by dropping letters from the end terminates with a period, whereas a word shorted by dropping letters from the middle does not. Fowler's Modern English Usage says a period is used for both of these shortened forms, but recommends against this practice: advising it only for end-shortened words and lower-case initialisms; not for middle-shortened words and upper-case initialisms. Some British style guides, such as for The Guardian and The Economist, disallow periods for all abbreviations. In American English, the period is usually included regardless of whether or not it is a contraction, e.g. "Dr." or "Mrs." In some cases, periods are optional, as in either "US" or "U.S." for "United States", "EU" or "E.U." for "European Union", and "UN" or "U.N." for "United Nations". There are some house styles, however—American ones included—that remove the periods from almost all abbreviations. For example:
Acronyms that were originally capitalized (with or without periods) but have since entered the vocabulary as generic words are no longer written with capital letters nor with any periods. Examples are sonar, radar, lidar, laser, snafu, and scuba. When an abbreviation appears at the end of a sentence, only one period is used: "The capital of the United States is Washington, D.C." In the past, some initialisms were styled with a period after each letter and a space between each pair. For example, "U. S.", but today this is typically "US". Plural. There are multiple ways to pluralize an abbreviation. Sometimes this accomplished by adding an apostrophe and an "s" (), as in "two PC's have broken screens". But, some find this confusing since the notation can indicate possessive case. And, this style is deprecated by many style guides. For instance, Kate Turabian, writing about style in academic writings, allows for an apostrophe to form plural acronyms "only when an abbreviation contains internal periods or both capital and lowercase letters". For example, "DVDs" and "URLs" and "Ph.D.'s", while the Modern Language Association explicitly says, "do not use an apostrophe to form the plural of an abbreviation". Also, the American Psychological Association specifically says, "without an apostrophe".
However, the 1999 style guide for "The New York Times" states that the addition of an apostrophe is necessary when pluralizing all abbreviations, preferring "PC's, TV's and VCR's". Forming a plural of an initialization without an apostrophe can also be used for a number, or a letter. Examples: For units of measure, the same form is used for both singular and plural. Examples: When an abbreviation contains more than one period, "Hart's Rules" recommends putting the "s" after the final one. Examples: However, the same plurals may be rendered less formally as: According to "Hart's Rules", an apostrophe may be used in rare cases where clarity calls for it, for example when letters or symbols are referred to as objects. However, the apostrophe can be dispensed with if the items are set in italics or quotes: In Latin, and continuing to the derivative forms in European languages as well as English, single-letter abbreviations had the plural being a doubling of the letter for note-taking. Most of these deal with writing and publishing. A few longer abbreviations use this as well.
Conventions followed by publications and newspapers. United States. Publications based in the U.S. tend to follow the style guides of "The Chicago Manual of Style" and the Associated Press. The U.S. government follows a style guide published by the U.S. Government Printing Office. The National Institute of Standards and Technology sets the style for abbreviations of units. United Kingdom. Many British publications follow some of these guidelines in abbreviation: Measurements: abbreviations or symbols. Writers often use shorthand to denote units of measure. Such shorthand can be an abbreviation, such as "in" for "inch" or can be a symbol such as "km" for "kilometre". In the International System of Units (SI) manual the word "symbol" is used consistently to define the shorthand used to represent the various SI units of measure. The manual also defines the way in which units should be written, the principal rules being: Syllabic abbreviation. A syllabic abbreviation is usually formed from the initial syllables of several words, such as "Interpol" = "International" + "police". It is a variant of the acronym. Syllabic abbreviations are usually written using lower case, sometimes starting with a capital letter, and are always pronounced as words rather than letter by letter. Syllabic abbreviations should be distinguished from portmanteaus, which combine two words without necessarily taking whole syllables from each.
English. Syllabic abbreviations are not widely used in English. Some UK government agencies such as Ofcom (Office of Communications) and the former Oftel (Office of Telecommunications) use this style. New York City has various neighborhoods named by syllabic abbreviation, such as Tribeca (Triangle below Canal Street) and SoHo (South of Houston Street). This usage has spread into other American cities, giving SoMa, San Francisco (South of Market) and LoDo, Denver (Lower Downtown), amongst others. Chicago-based electric service provider ComEd is a syllabic abbreviation of "Commonwealth" and (Thomas) "Edison". Sections of California are also often colloquially syllabically abbreviated, as in NorCal (Northern California), CenCal (Central California), and SoCal (Southern California). Additionally, in the context of Los Angeles, the syllabic abbreviation SoHo (Southern Hollywood) refers to the southern portion of the Hollywood neighborhood. Partially syllabic abbreviations are preferred by the US Navy, as they increase readability amidst the large number of initialisms that would otherwise have to fit into the same acronyms. Hence "DESRON 6" is used (in the full capital form) to mean "Destroyer Squadron 6", while "COMNAVAIRLANT" would be "Commander, Naval Air Force (in the) Atlantic".
Syllabic abbreviations are a prominent feature of Newspeak, the fictional language of George Orwell's dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four". The political contractions of Newspeak—"Ingsoc" (English Socialism), "Minitrue" (Ministry of Truth), "Miniplenty" (Ministry of Plenty)—are described by Orwell as similar to real examples of German "(see below)" and Russian ("see below)" contractions in the 20th century. The contractions in Newspeak are supposed to have a political function by virtue of their abbreviated structure itself: nice sounding and easily pronounceable, their purpose is to mask all ideological content from the speaker. A more recent syllabic abbreviation has emerged with the disease COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease 2019) caused by the Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (itself frequently abbreviated to SARS-CoV-2, partly an initialism). Albanian. In Albanian, syllabic acronyms are sometimes used for composing a person's name, such as "Migjeni"—an abbreviation from his original name ("Millosh Gjergj Nikolla") a famous Albanian poet and writer—or "ASDRENI" ("Aleksander Stavre Drenova"), another famous Albanian poet.
Other such names which are used commonly in recent decades are GETOAR, composed from "Gegeria" + "Tosks" (representing the two main dialects of the Albanian language, Gegë and Toskë), and "Arbanon"—which is an alternative way used to describe all Albanian lands. German. Syllabic abbreviations were and are common in German; much like acronyms in English, they have a distinctly modern connotation, although contrary to popular belief, many date back to before 1933, if not the end of the Great War. , literally "criminal police" but idiomatically the Criminal Investigation Department of any German police force, begat (variously capitalised), and likewise ("protection police" or "uniform department") begat . Along the same lines, the Swiss Federal Railways' Transit Police—the —are abbreviated as the . With the National Socialist German Workers' Party gaining power came a frenzy of government reorganisation, and with it a series of entirely new syllabic abbreviations. The single national police force amalgamated from the of the various states became the OrPo (, "order police"); the state KriPos together formed the "SiPo" (, "security police"); and there was also the Gestapo (, "secret state police"). The new order of the German Democratic Republic in the east brought about a conscious denazification, but also a repudiation of earlier turns of phrase in favour of neologisms such as for ("state security", the secret police) and for . The phrase , which may be rendered literally as "office of politics" or idiomatically as "political party steering committee", became .
Syllabic abbreviations are not only used in politics, however. Many business names, trademarks, and service marks from across Germany are created on the same pattern: for a few examples, there is Aldi, from "Theo Albrecht", the name of its founder, followed by "discount"; Haribo, from "Hans Riegel", the name of its founder, followed by "Bonn", the town of its head office; and Adidas, from "Adolf "Adi" Dassler", the nickname of its founder followed by his surname. Russian. Syllabic abbreviations are very common in Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian languages. They are often used as names of organizations. Historically, popularization of abbreviations was a way to simplify mass-education in 1920s (see Likbez). The word "kolkhoz" ("kollektívnoye khozyáystvo", collective farm) is another example. Leninist organisations such as the "Comintern" ("Communist International") and "Komsomol" ("Kommunisticheskii Soyuz Molodyozhi", or "Communist youth union") used Russian language syllabic abbreviations. In the modern Russian language, words like "Rosselkhozbank" (from Rossiysky selskokhozyaystvenny bank — Russian Agricultural Bank, RusAg) and "Minobrnauki" (from Ministerstvo obrazovaniya i nauki — Ministry of Education and Science) are still commonly used. In nearby Belarus, there are "Beltelecom" (Belarus Telecommunication) and Belsat (Belarus Satellite).
Spanish. Syllabic abbreviations are common in Spanish; examples abound in organization names such as Pemex for "Petróleos Mexicanos" ("Mexican Petroleums") or Fonafifo for "Fondo Nacional de Financimiento Forestal" (National Forestry Financing Fund). Malay and Indonesian. In Southeast Asian languages, especially in Malay languages, abbreviations are common; examples include Petronas (for "Petroliam Nasional", "National Petroleum"), its Indonesian equivalent Pertamina (from its original name "Perusahaan Pertambangan Minyak dan Gas Bumi Negara", "State Oil and Natural Gas Mining Company"), and Kemenhub (from "Kementerian Perhubungan", "Ministry of Transportation"). Malaysian abbreviation often uses letters from each word, while Indonesia usually uses syllables; although some cases do not follow the style. For example, general elections in Malaysian Malay often shortened into PRU (pilihan raya umum) while Indonesian often shortened into pemilu (pemilihan umum). Another example is Ministry of Health in which Malaysian Malay uses KKM (Kementerian Kesihatan Malaysia), compared to Indonesian Kemenkes (Kementerian Kesehatan).
Chinese and Japanese kanji. East Asian languages whose writing systems use Chinese characters form abbreviations similarly by using key Chinese characters from a term or phrase. For example, in Japanese the term for the United Nations, "kokusai rengō" (国際連合) is often abbreviated to "kokuren" (国連). (Such abbreviations are called (略語) in Japanese; see also Japanese abbreviated and contracted words). The syllabic abbreviation of kanji words is frequently used for universities: for instance, "Tōdai" (東大) for "Tōkyō daigaku" (東京大学, University of Tokyo) and is used similarly in Chinese: "Běidà" (北大) for "Běijīng Dàxué" (北京大学, Peking University). Korean universities often follow the same conventions, such as "Hongdae" (홍대) as short for "Hongik Daehakgyo", or Hongik University. The English phrase "Gung ho" originated as a Chinese abbreviation.
Aphrodite Aphrodite (, ) is an ancient Greek goddess associated with love, lust, beauty, pleasure, passion, procreation, and as her syncretised Roman counterpart , desire, sex, fertility, prosperity, and victory. Aphrodite's major symbols include seashells, myrtles, roses, doves, sparrows, and swans. The cult of Aphrodite was largely derived from that of the Phoenician goddess Astarte, a cognate of the East Semitic goddess Ishtar, whose cult was based on the Sumerian cult of Inanna. Aphrodite's main cult centers were Cythera, Cyprus, Corinth, and Athens. Her main festival was the Aphrodisia, which was celebrated annually in midsummer. In Laconia, Aphrodite was worshipped as a warrior goddess. She was also the patron goddess of prostitutes, an association which led early scholars to propose the concept of sacred prostitution in Greco-Roman culture, an idea which is now generally seen as erroneous. A major goddess in the Greek pantheon, Aphrodite featured prominently in ancient Greek literature. In Hesiod's "Theogony", Aphrodite is born off the coast of Cythera from the foam (, ) produced by Uranus's genitals, which his son Cronus had severed and thrown into the sea. In Homer's "Iliad", however, she is the daughter of Zeus and Dione. In his "Symposium", Plato asserts that these two origins actually belong to separate entities; Aphrodite Urania (a transcendent "Heavenly" Aphrodite) and Aphrodite Pandemos (Aphrodite common to "all the people"). The epithet Aphrodite Areia (the "Warlike") reveals her contrasting nature in ancient Greek religion. Aphrodite had many other epithets, each emphasizing a different aspect of the same goddess or used by a different local cult. Thus she was also known as Cytherea ("Lady of Cythera") and Cypris ("Lady of Cyprus"), because both locations claimed to be the place of her birth. Sappho's "Ode to Aphrodite" is one of the earliest poems dedicated to the goddess and survives from the Archaic period nearly complete.
In Greek mythology, Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus, the god of fire, blacksmiths and metalworking. Aphrodite was frequently unfaithful to him and had many lovers; in the "Odyssey", she is caught in the act of adultery with Ares, the god of war. In the "First Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite", she seduces the mortal shepherd Anchises. Aphrodite was also the surrogate mother and lover of the mortal shepherd Adonis, who was killed by a wild boar. Along with Athena and Hera, Aphrodite was one of the three goddesses whose feud resulted in the beginning of the Trojan War and plays a major role throughout the "Iliad". Aphrodite has been featured in Western art as a symbol of female beauty and has appeared in numerous works of Western literature. She is a major deity in modern Neopagan religions, including the Church of Aphrodite, Wicca, and Hellenism. Etymology. Hesiod derives the name "Aphrodite" from () "sea-foam", interpreting the name as "risen from the foam", but most modern scholars regard this as a spurious folk etymology. Early-modern scholars of classical mythology attempted to argue that Aphrodite's name was of Greek or Indo-European origin, but these efforts have mostly been abandoned. Aphrodite's name is generally accepted to be of non-Greek (probably Semitic) origin, but its exact derivation cannot be determined with confidence.
Scholars in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, accepting Hesiod's "foam" etymology as genuine, analyzed the second part of Aphrodite's name as "-odítē" "wanderer" or as "-dítē" "bright". More recently, Michael Janda, also accepting Hesiod's etymology, has argued in favor of the latter of these interpretations and claims the story of a birth from the foam as an Indo-European mytheme. Similarly, Krzysztof Tomasz Witczak proposes an Indo-European compound "very" and "to shine", also referring to Eos, and Daniel Kölligan has interpreted Aphrodite's name as "shining up from the mist/foam". Other scholars have argued that these hypotheses are unlikely, since Aphrodite's attributes are entirely different from those of both Eos and the Vedic deity Ushas. Modern scholars, due to the believed Near Eastern origins of Aphrodite's worship, have since proposed Semitic origins for the name. Some scholars, such as Fritz Hommel, have suggested that Aphrodite's name is a hellenized pronunciation of the name "Astarte"; other scholars, however, reject this as being linguistically untenable. Martin West reconstructs a Cyprian Canaanite form of the name as either or , and cautiously suggests the latter as being an epithet with the meaning "She of the Villages". Aren Wilson-Wright suggests the Phoenician form as an elative epithet meaning "unique, excellent, sublime".
A number of improbable non-Greek etymologies have also been suggested. One Semitic etymology compares Aphrodite to the Assyrian "barīrītu", the name of a female demon that appears in Middle Babylonian and Late Babylonian texts. Hammarström looks to Etruscan, comparing "(e)prθni" "lord", an Etruscan honorific loaned into Greek as πρύτανις. This would make the theonym in origin an honorific, "the lady". Most scholars reject this etymology as implausible, especially since Aphrodite's name actually appears in Etruscan in the borrowed form "Apru" (from Greek , clipped form of "Aphrodite"). The medieval "Etymologicum Magnum" () offers a highly contrived etymology, deriving "Aphrodite" from the compound "habrodíaitos" (), "she who lives delicately", from "habrós" and "díaita". The alteration from "b" to "ph" is explained as a "familiar" characteristic of Greek "obvious from the Macedonians". In the Cypriot syllabary, a syllabic script used on the island of Cyprus from the eleventh until the fourth centuries BC, Aphrodite's name is attested in the forms (a-po-ro-ta-o-i, read right-to-left), (a-po-ro-ti-ta-i, samewise), and finally (a-po-ro-ti-si-jo, "", "related to Aphrodite", in the context of a month).
Origins. Near Eastern love goddess. The cult of Aphrodite in Greece was imported from, or at least influenced by, the cult of Astarte in Phoenicia, which, in turn, was influenced by the cult of the Mesopotamian goddess known as "Ishtar" to the East Semitic peoples and as "Inanna" to the Sumerians. Pausanias states that the first to establish a cult of Aphrodite were the Assyrians, followed by the Paphians of Cyprus and then the Phoenicians at Ascalon. The Phoenicians, in turn, taught her worship to the people of Cythera. Aphrodite took on Inanna-Ishtar's associations with sexuality and procreation. Furthermore, she was known as Ourania (Οὐρανία), which means "heavenly", a title corresponding to Inanna's role as the Queen of Heaven. Early artistic and literary portrayals of Aphrodite are extremely similar on Inanna-Ishtar. Like Inanna-Ishtar, Aphrodite was also a warrior goddess; the second-century AD Greek geographer Pausanias records that, in Sparta, Aphrodite was worshipped as "Aphrodite Areia", which means "warlike". He also mentions that Aphrodite's most ancient cult statues in Sparta and on Cythera showed her bearing arms. Modern scholars note that Aphrodite's warrior-goddess aspects appear in the oldest strata of her worship and see it as an indication of her Near Eastern origins.
Nineteenth-century classical scholars had a general aversion to the idea that ancient Greek religion was at all influenced by the cultures of the Near East, but, even Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, who argued that Near Eastern influence on Greek culture was largely confined to material culture, admitted that Aphrodite was clearly of Phoenician origin. The significant influence of Near Eastern culture on early Greek religion in general, and on the cult of Aphrodite in particular, is now widely recognized as dating to a period of orientalization during the eighth century BC, when archaic Greece was on the fringes of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Indo-European dawn goddess. Some early comparative mythologists opposed to the idea of a Near Eastern origin argued that Aphrodite originated as an aspect of the Greek dawn goddess Eos and that she was therefore ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess *"Haéusōs" (properly Greek Eos, Latin Aurora, Sanskrit Ushas). Most modern scholars have now rejected the notion of a purely Indo-European Aphrodite, but it is possible that Aphrodite, originally a Semitic deity, may have been influenced by the Indo-European dawn goddess. Both Aphrodite and Eos were known for their erotic beauty and aggressive sexuality and both had relationships with mortal lovers. Both goddesses were associated with the colors red, white, and gold. Michael Janda etymologizes Aphrodite's name as an epithet of Eos meaning "she who rises from the foam [of the ocean]" and points to Hesiod's "Theogony" account of Aphrodite's birth as an archaic reflex of Indo-European myth. Aphrodite rising out of the waters after Cronus defeats Uranus as a mytheme would then be directly cognate to the Rigvedic myth of Indra defeating Vrtra, liberating Ushas. Another key similarity between Aphrodite and the Indo-European dawn goddess is her close kinship to the Greek sky deity, since both of the main claimants to her paternity (Zeus and Uranus) are sky deities.
Forms and epithets. Aphrodite's most common cultic epithet was "Ourania", meaning "heavenly", but this epithet almost never occurs in literary texts, indicating a purely cultic significance. Another common name for Aphrodite was "Pandemos" ("For All the Folk"). In her role as Aphrodite Pandemos, Aphrodite was associated with "Peithō" (), meaning "persuasion", and could be prayed to for aid in seduction. The character of Pausanias in Plato's "Symposium", takes differing cult-practices associated with different epithets of the goddess to claim that Ourania and Pandemos are, in fact, separate goddesses. He asserts that "Aphrodite Ourania" is the celestial Aphrodite, born from the sea foam after Cronus castrated Uranus, and the older of the two goddesses. According to the "Symposium", "Aphrodite Ourania" is the inspiration of male homosexual desire, specifically the ephebic eros, and pederasty. "Aphrodite Pandemos", by contrast, is the younger of the two goddesses: the common Aphrodite, born from the union of Zeus and Dione, and the inspiration of heterosexual desire and sexual promiscuity, the "lesser" of the two loves. "Paphian" (Παφία), was one of her epithets, after the Paphos in Cyprus where she had emerged from the sea at her birth.
Among the Neoplatonists and, later, their Christian interpreters, Ourania is associated with spiritual love, and Pandemos with physical love (desire). A representation of Ourania with her foot resting on a tortoise came to be seen as emblematic of discretion in conjugal love; it was the subject of a chryselephantine sculpture by Phidias for Elis, known only from a parenthetical comment by the geographer Pausanias. One of Aphrodite's most common literary epithets is "Philommeidḗs" (), which means "smile-loving", but is sometimes mistranslated as "laughter-loving". This epithet occurs throughout both of the Homeric epics and the "First Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite". Hesiod references it once in his "Theogony" in the context of Aphrodite's birth, but interprets it as "genital-loving" rather than "smile-loving". Monica Cyrino notes that the epithet may relate to the fact that, in many artistic depictions of Aphrodite, she is shown smiling. Other epithets of her include "Mechanitis" meaning skilled in inventing and "Automata" because, according to Servius, she was the source of spontaneous love.
Common literary epithets of Aphrodite are "Cypris" and "Cythereia", which derive from her associations with the islands of Cyprus and Cythera respectively. On Cyprus, Aphrodite was sometimes called "Eleemon" ("the merciful"). In Athens, she was known as "Aphrodite en kēpois" ("Aphrodite of the Gardens"). At Cape Colias, a town along the Attic coast, she was venerated as "Genetyllis" "Mother". The Spartans worshipped her as "Potnia" "Mistress", "Enoplios" "Armed", "Morpho" "Shapely", "Ambologera" "She who Postpones Old Age". Across the Greek world, she was known under epithets such as "Melainis" in Corinth "Black or Dark One", "Skotia" "Dark One", "Androphonos" "Killer of Men", "Anosia" "Unholy", and "Tymborychos" "Gravedigger", all of which indicate her darker, more violent nature. A male version of Aphrodite known as Aphroditus was worshipped in the city of Amathus on Cyprus. Aphroditus was depicted with the figure and dress of a woman, but had a beard, and was shown lifting his dress to reveal an erect phallus. This gesture was believed to be an apotropaic symbol, and was thought to convey good fortune upon the viewer. Eventually, the popularity of Aphroditus waned as the mainstream, fully feminine version of Aphrodite became more popular, but traces of his cult are preserved in the later legends of Hermaphroditus.
Worship. Classical period. Aphrodite's main festival, the Aphrodisia, was celebrated across Greece, but particularly in Athens and Corinth. In Athens, the Aphrodisia was celebrated on the fourth day of the month of Hekatombaion in honor of Aphrodite's role in the unification of Attica. During this festival, the priests of Aphrodite would purify the temple of Aphrodite Pandemos on the southwestern slope of the Acropolis with the blood of a sacrificed dove. Next, the altars would be anointed and the cult statues of Aphrodite Pandemos and Peitho would be escorted in a majestic procession to a place where they would be ritually bathed. Aphrodite was also honored in Athens as part of the Arrhephoria festival. The fourth day of every month was sacred to Aphrodite. Pausanias records that, in Sparta, Aphrodite was worshipped as "Aphrodite Areia", which means "warlike". This epithet stresses Aphrodite's connections to Ares, with whom she had extramarital relations. Pausanias also records that, in Sparta and on Cythera, a number of extremely ancient cult statues of Aphrodite portrayed her bearing arms. Other cult statues showed her bound in chains.
Aphrodite was the patron goddess of prostitutes of all varieties, ranging from "pornai" (cheap street prostitutes typically owned as slaves by wealthy pimps) to "hetairai" (expensive, well-educated hired companions, who were usually self-employed and sometimes provided sex to their customers). The city of Corinth was renowned throughout the ancient world for its many "hetairai", who had a widespread reputation for being among the most skilled, but also the most expensive, prostitutes in the Greek world. Corinth also had a major temple to Aphrodite located on the Acrocorinth and was one of the main centers of her cult. Records of numerous dedications to Aphrodite made by successful courtesans have survived in poems and in pottery inscriptions. References to Aphrodite in association with prostitution are found in Corinth as well as on the islands of Cyprus, Cythera, and Sicily. Aphrodite's Mesopotamian precursor Inanna-Ishtar was also closely associated with prostitution. Scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries believed that the cult of Aphrodite may have involved ritual prostitution, an assumption based on ambiguous passages in certain ancient texts, particularly a fragment of a "skolion" by the Boeotian poet Pindar, which mentions prostitutes in Corinth in association with Aphrodite. Modern scholars now dismiss the notion of ritual prostitution in Greece as a "historiographic myth" with no factual basis.
Hellenistic and Roman periods. During the Hellenistic period, the Greeks identified Aphrodite with the ancient Egyptian goddesses Hathor and Isis. Aphrodite was the patron goddess of the Lagid queens and Queen Arsinoe II was identified as her mortal incarnation. Aphrodite was worshipped in Alexandria and had numerous temples in and around the city. Arsinoe II introduced the cult of Adonis to Alexandria and many of the women there partook in it. The Tessarakonteres, a gigantic catamaran galley designed by Archimedes for Ptolemy IV Philopator, had a circular temple to Aphrodite on it with a marble statue of the goddess herself. In the second century BC, Ptolemy VIII Physcon and his wives Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III dedicated a temple to Aphrodite Hathor at Philae. Statuettes of Aphrodite for personal devotion became common in Egypt starting in the early Ptolemaic times and extending until long after Egypt became a Roman province. The ancient Romans identified Aphrodite with their goddess Venus, who was originally a goddess of agricultural fertility, vegetation, and springtime. According to the Roman historian Livy, Aphrodite and Venus were officially identified in the third century BC when the cult of "Venus Erycina" was introduced to Rome from the Greek sanctuary of Aphrodite on Mount Eryx in Sicily. After this point, Romans adopted Aphrodite's iconography and myths and applied them to Venus. Because Aphrodite was the mother of the Trojan hero Aeneas in Greek mythology and the Roman tradition claimed Aeneas as the founder of Rome, Venus became venerated as "Venus Genetrix", the mother of the entire Roman nation. Julius Caesar claimed to be directly descended from Aeneas's son Iulus and became a strong proponent of the cult of Venus. This precedent was later followed by his nephew Augustus and the later emperors claiming succession from him.
This syncretism greatly impacted Greek worship of Aphrodite. During the Roman era, the cults of Aphrodite in many Greek cities began to emphasize her relationship with Troy and Aeneas. They also began to adopt distinctively Roman elements, portraying Aphrodite as more maternal, more militaristic, and more concerned with administrative bureaucracy. She was claimed as a divine guardian by many political magistrates. Appearances of Aphrodite in Greek literature also vastly proliferated, usually showing Aphrodite in a characteristically Roman manner. Mythology. Birth. Aphrodite is usually said to have been born near her chief center of worship, Paphos, on the island of Cyprus, which is why she is sometimes called "Cyprian", especially in the poetic works of Sappho. The Sanctuary of Aphrodite Paphia, marking her birthplace, was a place of pilgrimage in the ancient world for centuries. Other versions of her myth have her born near the island of Cythera, hence another of her names, "Cytherea". Cythera was a stopping place for trade and culture between Crete and the Peloponesus, so these stories may preserve traces of the migration of Aphrodite's cult from the Middle East to mainland Greece.
According to the version of her birth recounted by Hesiod in his "Theogony", Cronus severed Uranus' genitals and threw them behind him into the sea. The foam from his genitals gave rise to Aphrodite (hence her name, which Hesiod interprets as "foam-arisen"), while the Giants, the Erinyes (furies), and the Meliae emerged from the drops of his blood. Hesiod states that the genitals "were carried over the sea a long time, and white foam arose from the immortal flesh; with it a girl grew." After Aphrodite was born from the sea-foam, she washed up to shore in the presence of the other gods. Hesiod's account of Aphrodite's birth following Uranus's castration is probably derived from "The Song of Kumarbi", an ancient Hittite epic poem in which the god Kumarbi overthrows his father Anu, the god of the sky, and bites off his genitals, causing him to become pregnant and give birth to Anu's children, which include Ishtar and her brother Teshub, the Hittite storm god. In the "Iliad", Aphrodite is described as the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Dione's name appears to be a feminine cognate to "Dios" and "Dion", which are oblique forms of the name "Zeus". Zeus and Dione shared a cult at Dodona in northwestern Greece. In the "Theogony", Hesiod describes Dione as an Oceanid, but Apollodorus makes her the thirteenth Titan, child of Gaia and Uranus.
Marriage. Aphrodite is consistently portrayed as a nubile, infinitely desirable adult, having had no childhood. She is often depicted nude. In the "Iliad", Aphrodite is the apparently unmarried consort of Ares, the god of war, and the wife of Hephaestus is a different goddess named Charis. Likewise, in Hesiod's "Theogony", Aphrodite is unmarried and the wife of Hephaestus is Aglaea, the youngest of the three Charites. In Book Eight of the "Odyssey", however, the blind singer Demodocus describes Aphrodite as the wife of Hephaestus and tells how she committed adultery with Ares during the Trojan War. The sun-god Helios saw Aphrodite and Ares having sex in Hephaestus's bed and warned Hephaestus, who fashioned a fine, near invisible net. The next time Ares and Aphrodite had sex together, the net trapped them both. Hephaestus brought all the gods into the bedchamber to laugh at the captured adulterers, but Apollo, Hermes, and Poseidon had sympathy for Ares and Poseidon agreed to pay Hephaestus for Ares's release. Aphrodite returned to her temple in Cyprus, where she was attended by the Charites. This narrative probably originated as a Greek folk tale, originally independent of the "Odyssey". In a much later interpolated detail, Ares put the young soldier Alectryon by the door to warn of Helios's arrival but Alectryon fell asleep on guard duty. Helios discovered the two and alerted Hephaestus; Ares in rage turned Alectryon into a rooster, which unfailingly crows to announce the sunrise.
After exposing them, Hephaestus asks Zeus for his wedding gifts and dowry to be returned to him; by the time of the Trojan War, he is married to Charis/Aglaea, one of the Graces, apparently divorced from Aphrodite. Afterwards, it was generally Ares who was regarded as the husband or official consort of the goddess; on the François Vase, the two arrive at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis on the same chariot, as do Zeus with Hera and Poseidon with Amphitrite. The poets Pindar and Aeschylus refer to Ares as Aphrodite's husband. Later stories were invented to explain Aphrodite's marriage to Hephaestus. In the most famous story, Zeus hastily married Aphrodite to Hephaestus in order to prevent the other gods from fighting over her. In another version of the myth, Hephaestus gave his mother Hera a golden throne, but when she sat on it, she became trapped and he refused to let her go until she agreed to give him Aphrodite's hand in marriage. Hephaestus was overjoyed to be married to the goddess of beauty, and forged her beautiful jewelry, including a "strophion" () known as the (), a saltire-shaped undergarment (usually translated as the girdle of Aphrodite), which accentuated her breasts and made her even more irresistible to men. Such "strophia" were commonly used in depictions of the Near Eastern goddesses Ishtar and Atargatis.
Attendants. Aphrodite is almost always accompanied by Eros, the god of lust and sexual desire. In his "Theogony", Hesiod describes Eros as one of the four original primeval forces born at the beginning of time, but, after the birth of Aphrodite from the sea foam, he is joined by Himeros and, together, they become Aphrodite's constant companions. In early Greek art, Eros and Himeros are both shown as idealized handsome youths with wings. The Greek lyric poets regarded the power of Eros and Himeros as dangerous, compulsive, and impossible for anyone to resist. In modern times, Eros is often seen as Aphrodite's son, but this is actually a comparatively late innovation. A "scholion" on Theocritus's "Idylls" remarks that the sixth-century BC poet Sappho had described Eros as the son of Aphrodite and Uranus, but the first surviving reference to Eros as Aphrodite's son comes from Apollonius of Rhodes's "Argonautica", written in the third century BC, which makes him the son of Aphrodite and Ares. Later, the Romans, who saw Venus as a mother goddess, seized on this idea of Eros as Aphrodite's son and popularized it, making it the predominant portrayal in works on mythology until the present day.
Aphrodite's main attendants were the three Charites, whom Hesiod identifies as the daughters of Zeus and Eurynome and names as Aglaea ("Splendor"), Euphrosyne ("Good Cheer"), and Thalia ("Abundance"). The Charites had been worshipped as goddesses in Greece since the beginning of Greek history, long before Aphrodite was introduced to the pantheon. Aphrodite's other set of attendants was the three Horae (the "Hours"), whom Hesiod identifies as the daughters of Zeus and Themis and names as Eunomia ("Good Order"), Dike ("Justice"), and Eirene ("Peace"). Aphrodite was also sometimes accompanied by Harmonia, her daughter by Ares, and Hebe, the daughter of Zeus and Hera. The fertility god Priapus was usually considered to be Aphrodite's son by Dionysus, but he was sometimes also described as her son by Hermes, Adonis, or even Zeus. A "scholion" on Apollonius of Rhodes's "Argonautica" states that, while Aphrodite was pregnant with Priapus, Hera envied her and applied an evil potion to her belly while she was sleeping to ensure that the child would be hideous. In another version, Hera cursed Aphrodite's unborn son because he had been fathered by Zeus. When Aphrodite gave birth, she was horrified to see that the child had a massive, permanently erect penis, a potbelly, and a huge tongue. Aphrodite abandoned the infant to die in the wilderness, but a herdsman found him and raised him, later discovering that Priapus could use his massive penis to aid in the growth of plants.
Anchises. The "First Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite" (Hymn 5), which was probably composed sometime in the mid-seventh century BC, describes how Zeus once became annoyed with Aphrodite for causing deities to fall in love with mortals, so he caused her to fall in love with Anchises, a handsome mortal shepherd who lived in the foothills beneath Mount Ida near the city of Troy. Aphrodite appears to Anchises in the form of a tall, beautiful, mortal virgin while he is alone in his home. Anchises sees her dressed in bright clothing and gleaming jewelry, with her breasts shining with divine radiance. He asks her if she is Aphrodite and promises to build her an altar on top of the mountain if she will bless him and his family. Aphrodite lies and tells him that she is not a goddess, but the daughter of one of the noble families of Phrygia. She claims to be able to understand the Trojan language because she had a Trojan nurse as a child and says that she found herself on the mountainside after she was snatched up by Hermes while dancing in a celebration in honor of Artemis, the goddess of virginity. Aphrodite tells Anchises that she is still a virgin and begs him to take her to his parents. Anchises immediately becomes overcome with mad lust for Aphrodite and swears that he will have sex with her. Anchises takes Aphrodite, with her eyes cast downwards, to his bed, which is covered in the furs of lions and bears. He then strips her naked and makes love to her.
After the lovemaking is complete, Aphrodite reveals her true divine form. Anchises is terrified, but Aphrodite consoles him and promises that she will bear him a son. She prophesies that their son will be the demigod Aeneas, who will be raised by the nymphs of the wilderness for five years before going to Troy to become a nobleman like his father. The story of Aeneas's conception is also mentioned in Hesiod's "Theogony" and in Book II of Homer's "Iliad". Adonis. The myth of Aphrodite and Adonis is probably derived from the ancient Sumerian legend of Inanna and Dumuzid. The Greek name ("Adōnis", ) is derived from the Canaanite word "ʼadōn", meaning "lord". The earliest known Greek reference to Adonis comes from a fragment of a poem by the Lesbian poet Sappho ( – ), in which a chorus of young girls asks Aphrodite what they can do to mourn Adonis's death. Aphrodite replies that they must beat their breasts and tear their tunics. Later references flesh out the story with more details. According to the retelling of the story found in the poem "Metamorphoses" by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC – 17/18 AD), Adonis was the son of Myrrha, who was cursed by Aphrodite with insatiable lust for her own father, King Cinyras of Cyprus, after Myrrha's mother bragged that her daughter was more beautiful than the goddess. Driven out after becoming pregnant, Myrrha was changed into a myrrh tree, but still gave birth to Adonis.
Aphrodite found the baby and took him to the underworld to be fostered by Persephone. She returned for him once he was grown and discovered him to be strikingly handsome. Persephone wanted to keep Adonis, resulting in a custody battle between the two goddesses over whom should rightly possess Adonis. Zeus settled the dispute by decreeing that Adonis would spend one third of the year with Aphrodite, one third with Persephone, and one third with whomever he chose. Adonis chose to spend that time with Aphrodite. Then, one day, while Adonis was hunting, he was wounded by a wild boar and bled to death in Aphrodite's arms. In a semi-mocking work, the "Dialogues of the Gods", the satirical author Lucian comedically relates how a frustrated Aphrodite complains to the moon goddess Selene about her son Eros making Persephone fall in love with Adonis and now she has to share him with her. In different versions of the story, the boar was either sent by Ares, who was jealous that Aphrodite was spending so much time with Adonis, or by Artemis, who wanted revenge against Aphrodite for having killed her devoted follower Hippolytus. In another version, Apollo in fury changed himself into a boar and killed Adonis because Aphrodite had blinded his son Erymanthus when he stumbled upon Aphrodite naked as she was bathing after intercourse with Adonis. The story also provides an etiology for Aphrodite's associations with certain flowers. Reportedly, as she mourned Adonis's death, she caused anemones to grow wherever his blood fell and declared a festival on the anniversary of his death. In one version of the story, Aphrodite injured herself on a thorn from a rose bush and the rose, which had previously been white, was stained red by her blood. According to Lucian's "On the Syrian Goddess", each year during the festival of Adonis, the Adonis River in Lebanon (now known as the Abraham River) ran red with blood.
The myth of Adonis is associated with the festival of the Adonia, which was celebrated by Greek women every year in midsummer. The festival, which was evidently already celebrated in Lesbos by Sappho's time, seems to have first become popular in Athens in the mid-fifth century BC. At the start of the festival, the women would plant a "garden of Adonis", a small garden planted inside a small basket or a shallow piece of broken pottery containing a variety of quick-growing plants, such as lettuce and fennel, or even quick-sprouting grains such as wheat and barley. The women would then climb ladders to the roofs of their houses, where they would place the gardens out under the heat of the summer sun. The plants would sprout in the sunlight but wither quickly in the heat. Then the women would mourn and lament loudly over the death of Adonis, tearing their clothes and beating their breasts in a public display of grief. Divine favoritism. In Hesiod's "Works and Days", Zeus orders Aphrodite to make Pandora, the first woman, physically beautiful and sexually attractive, so that she may become "an evil men will love to embrace". Aphrodite "spills grace" over Pandora's head and equips her with "painful desire and knee-weakening anguish", thus making her the perfect vessel for evil to enter the world. Aphrodite's attendants, Peitho, the Charites, and the Horae, adorn Pandora with gold and jewelry.
According to one myth, Aphrodite aided Hippomenes, a noble youth who wished to marry Atalanta, a maiden who was renowned throughout the land for her beauty, but who refused to marry any man unless he could outrun her in a footrace. Atalanta was an exceedingly swift runner and she beheaded all of the men who lost to her. Aphrodite gave Hippomenes three golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides and instructed him to toss them in front of Atalanta as he raced her. Hippomenes obeyed Aphrodite's order and Atalanta, seeing the beautiful, golden fruits, bent down to pick up each one, allowing Hippomenes to outrun her. In the version of the story from Ovid's "Metamorphoses", Hippomenes forgets to repay Aphrodite for her aid, so she causes the couple to become inflamed with lust while they are staying at the temple of Cybele. The couple desecrate the temple by having sex in it, leading Cybele to turn them into lions as punishment. The myth of Pygmalion is first mentioned by the third-century BC Greek writer Philostephanus of Cyrene, but is first recounted in detail in Ovid's "Metamorphoses". According to Ovid, Pygmalion was an exceedingly handsome sculptor from the island of Cyprus, who was so sickened by the immorality of women that he refused to marry. He fell madly and passionately in love with the ivory cult statue he was carving of Aphrodite and longed to marry it. Because Pygmalion was extremely pious and devoted to Aphrodite, the goddess brought the statue to life. Pygmalion married the girl the statue became and they had a son named Paphos, after whom the capital of Cyprus received its name. Pseudo-Apollodorus later mentions "Metharme, daughter of Pygmalion, king of Cyprus".
Anger myths. Aphrodite generously rewarded those who honored her, but also punished those who disrespected her, often quite brutally. A myth described in Apollonius of Rhodes's "Argonautica" and later summarized in the "Bibliotheca" of Pseudo-Apollodorus tells how, when the women of the island of Lemnos refused to sacrifice to Aphrodite, the goddess cursed them to stink horribly so that their husbands would never have sex with them. Instead, their husbands started having sex with their Thracian slave-girls. In anger, the women of Lemnos murdered the entire male population of the island, as well as all the Thracian slaves. When Jason and his crew of Argonauts arrived on Lemnos, they mated with the sex-starved women under Aphrodite's approval and repopulated the island. From then on, the women of Lemnos never disrespected Aphrodite again. In Euripides's tragedy "Hippolytus", which was first performed at the City Dionysia in 428 BC, Theseus's son Hippolytus worships only Artemis, the goddess of virginity, and refuses to engage in any form of sexual contact. Aphrodite is infuriated by his prideful behavior and, in the prologue to the play, she declares that, by honoring only Artemis and refusing to venerate her, Hippolytus has directly challenged her authority. Aphrodite therefore causes Hippolytus's stepmother, Phaedra, to fall in love with him, knowing Hippolytus will reject her. After being rejected, Phaedra commits suicide and leaves a suicide note to Theseus telling him that she killed herself because Hippolytus attempted to rape her. Theseus prays to Poseidon to kill Hippolytus for his transgression. Poseidon sends a wild bull to scare Hippolytus's horses as he is riding by the sea in his chariot, causing the horses to bolt and smash the chariot against the cliffs, dragging Hippolytus to a bloody death across the rocky shoreline. The play concludes with Artemis vowing to kill Aphrodite's own mortal beloved (presumably Adonis) in revenge.
Glaucus of Corinth angered Aphrodite by refusing to let his horses for chariot racing mate, since doing so would hinder their speed. During the chariot race at the funeral games of King Pelias, Aphrodite drove his horses mad and they tore him apart. Polyphonte was a young woman who chose a virginal life with Artemis instead of marriage and children, as favoured by Aphrodite. Aphrodite cursed her, causing her to have children by a bear. The resulting bear-like offspring Agrius and Oreius were wild cannibals who incurred the hatred of Zeus for attacking traveling strangers. Ultimately, Ares (who was Polyphonte's grandfather) and Hermes (who was originally dispatched by Zeus to kill them) transformed all Polyphonte, Agrius, and Oreius into birds of ill omen while the servant who begged for mercy was transformed into a woodpecker. According to Apollodorus, a jealous Aphrodite cursed Eos, the goddess of dawn, to be perpetually in love and have insatiable sexual desire because Eos once had lain with Aphrodite's sweetheart Ares.
According to Ovid in his "Metamorphoses" (book 10.238 ff.), Propoetides who are the daughters of Propoetus from the city of Amathus on the island of Cyprus denied Aphrodite's divinity and failed to worship her properly. Therefore, Aphrodite turned them into the world's first prostitutes. According to Diodorus Siculus, when the Rhodian sea nymphe Halia's six sons by Poseidon arrogantly refused to let Aphrodite land upon their shore, the goddess cursed them with insanity. In their madness, they raped Halia. As punishment, Poseidon buried them in the island's sea-caverns. Xanthius, a descendant of Bellerophon, had two children: Leucippus and an unnamed daughter. Through the wrath of Aphrodite (reasons unknown), Leucippus fell in love with his own sister. They started a secret relationship but the girl was already betrothed to another man and he went on to inform her father Xanthius, without telling him the name of the seducer. Xanthius went straight to his daughter's chamber where she was together with Leucippus right at the moment. On hearing him enter, she tried to escape, but Xanthius hit her with a dagger, thinking that he was slaying the seducer, and killed her. Leucippus, failing to recognize his father at first, slew him. When the truth was revealed, he had to leave the country and took part in colonization of Crete and the lands in Asia Minor.
Queen Cenchreis of Cyprus, wife of King Cinyras, bragged that her daughter Myrrha was more beautiful than Aphrodite. Therefore, Myrrha was cursed by Aphrodite with insatiable lust for her own father, King Cinyras of Cyprus and he slept with her unknowingly in the dark. She eventually transformed into the myrrh tree and gave birth to Adonis in this form. In another version of the same story, King of Assyria Theias was the father of Myrrha and Adonis, and again Aphrodite urged Myrrha, or Smyrna, to commit incest with her father, Theias. Myrrha's nurse helped with the scheme. When Theias discovered this, he flew into a rage, chasing his daughter with a knife. The gods turned her into a myrrh tree and Adonis eventually sprung from this tree. It was also said that Myrrha fled from her father, and Aphrodite transformed her into a tree. Adonis was then born when Theias shot an arrow into the tree or when a boar used its tusks to tear the tree's bark off. Cinyras also had three other daughters: Braesia, Laogora, and Orsedice. These girls by the wrath of Aphrodite (reasons unknown) cohabited with foreigners and ended their life in Egypt.
The Muse Clio derided the goddess' own love for Adonis. Therefore, Clio fell in love with Pierus, son of Magnes and bore Hyacinth. Aegiale was a daughter of Adrastus and Amphithea and was married to Diomedes. Because of anger of Aphrodite, whom Diomedes had wounded in the war against Troy, she had multiple lovers, including a certain Hippolytus. when Aegiale went so far as to threaten his life, he fled to Italy. According to Stesichorus and Hesiod while Tyndareus sacrificing to the gods he forgot Aphrodite, therefore the goddess made his daughters twice and thrice wed and deserters of their husbands. Timandra deserted Echemus and went and came to Phyleus and Clytaemnestra deserted Agamemnon and lay with Aegisthus who was a worse mate for her and eventually killed her husband with her lover and finally, Helen of Troy deserted Menelaus under the influence of Aphrodite for Paris and her unfaitfulness eventually causes the War of Troy. As a result of her actions, Aphrodite caused the War of Troy in order to take Priam's kingdom and pass it down to her descendants.
In one of the versions of the legend, Pasiphae did not make offerings to the goddess Venus [Aphrodite]. Because of this, Venus [Aphrodite] inspired in her an unnatural love for a bull resulting in the birth of the Minotaur or she cursed her because she was Helios's daughter who revealed her adultery to Hephaestus. For Helios' own tale-telling, she cursed him with uncontrollable lust over the mortal princess Leucothoe, which led to him abandoning his then-lover Clytie, leaving her heartbroken. Lysippe was the mother of Tanais by Berossos. Her son only venerated Ares and was fully devoted to war, neglecting love and marriage. Aphrodite cursed him with falling in love with his own mother. Preferring to die rather than give up his chastity, he threw himself into the river Amazonius, which was subsequently renamed Tanais. According to Hyginus, Orpheus's mother Calliope of the Muses at the behest of Zeus, judged the dispute between the goddesses Aphrodite and Persephone over Adonis and decided that both shall possess him half of the year. This enraged Venus [Aphrodite], because she had not been granted what she thought was her right. Therefore, Venus [Aphrodite] inspired love for Orpheus in the women of Thrace, causing them to tear him apart as each of them sought Orpheus for herself.
Aphrodite personally witnessed the young huntress Rhodopis swear eternal devotion and chastity to Artemis when she joined her group. Aphrodite then summoned her son Eros, and convinced him that such lifestyle was an insult to them both. So under her command, Eros made Rhodopis and Euthynicus, another young hunter who had shunned love and romance just like her, to fall in love with each other. Despite their chaste life, Rhodopis and Euthynicus withdrew to some cavern where they violated their vows. Artemis was not slow to take notice after seeing Aphrodite laugh, so she changed Rhodopis into a fountain as a punishment instead. Judgment of Paris and Trojan War. The myth of the Judgement of Paris is mentioned briefly in the "Iliad", but is described in depth in an epitome of the "Cypria", a lost poem of the Epic Cycle, which records that all the gods and goddesses as well as various mortals were invited to the marriage of Peleus and Thetis (the eventual parents of Achilles). Only Eris, goddess of discord, was not invited. She was annoyed at this, so she arrived with a golden apple inscribed with the word καλλίστῃ (kallistēi, "for the fairest"), which she threw among the goddesses. Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena all claimed to be the fairest, and thus the rightful owner of the apple.
The goddesses chose to place the matter before Zeus, who, not wanting to favor one of the goddesses, put the choice into the hands of Paris, a Trojan prince. After bathing in the spring of Mount Ida where Troy was situated, the goddesses appeared before Paris for his decision. In the extant ancient depictions of the Judgement of Paris, Aphrodite is only occasionally represented nude, and Athena and Hera are always fully clothed. Since the Renaissance, however, Western paintings have typically portrayed all three goddesses as completely naked. All three goddesses were ideally beautiful and Paris could not decide between them, so they resorted to bribes. Hera tried to bribe Paris with power over all Asia and Europe, and Athena offered wisdom, fame and glory in battle, but Aphrodite promised Paris that, if he were to choose her as the fairest, she would let him marry the most beautiful woman on earth. This woman was Helen, who was already married to King Menelaus of Sparta. Paris selected Aphrodite and awarded her the apple. The other two goddesses were enraged and, as a direct result, sided with the Greeks in the Trojan War.
Aphrodite plays an important and active role throughout the entirety of Homer's "Iliad". In Book III, she rescues Paris from Menelaus after he foolishly challenges him to a one-on-one duel. She then appears to Helen in the form of an old woman and attempts to persuade her to have sex with Paris, reminding her of his physical beauty and athletic prowess. Helen immediately recognizes Aphrodite by her beautiful neck, perfect breasts, and flashing eyes and chides the goddess, addressing her as her equal. Aphrodite sharply rebukes Helen, reminding her that, if she vexes her, she will punish her just as much as she has favored her already. Helen demurely obeys Aphrodite's command. In Book V, Aphrodite charges into battle to rescue her son Aeneas from the Greek hero Diomedes. Diomedes recognizes Aphrodite as a "weakling" goddess and, thrusting his spear, nicks her wrist through her "ambrosial robe". Aphrodite borrows Ares's chariot to ride back to Mount Olympus. Zeus chides her for putting herself in danger, reminding her that "her specialty is love, not war." According to Walter Burkert, this scene directly parallels a scene from Tablet VI of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" in which Ishtar, Aphrodite's Akkadian precursor, cries to her mother Antu after the hero Gilgamesh rejects her sexual advances, but is mildly rebuked by her father Anu. In Book XIV of the "Iliad", during the "Dios Apate" episode, Aphrodite lends her "kestos himas" to Hera for the purpose of seducing Zeus and distracting him from the combat while Poseidon aids the Greek forces on the beach. In the "Theomachia" in Book XXI, Aphrodite again enters the battlefield to carry Ares away after he is wounded.
Offspring. Sometimes poets and dramatists recounted ancient traditions, which varied, and sometimes they invented new details; later scholiasts might draw on either or simply guess. Thus while Aeneas and Phobos were regularly described as offspring of Aphrodite, others listed here such as Priapus and Eros were sometimes said to be children of Aphrodite but with varying fathers and sometimes given other mothers or none at all. Iconography. Symbols. Aphrodite's most prominent avian symbol was the dove, which was originally an important symbol of her Near Eastern precursor Inanna-Ishtar. (In fact, the ancient Greek word for "dove", "peristerá", may be derived from a Semitic phrase "peraḥ Ištar", meaning "bird of Ishtar".) Aphrodite frequently appears with doves in ancient Greek pottery and the temple of Aphrodite Pandemos on the southwest slope of the Athenian Acropolis was decorated with relief sculptures of doves with knotted fillets in their beaks. Votive offerings of small, white, marble doves were also discovered in the temple of Aphrodite at Daphni. In addition to her associations with doves, Aphrodite was also closely linked with sparrows and she is described riding in a chariot pulled by sparrows in Sappho's "Ode to Aphrodite". According to myth, the dove was originally a nymph named Peristera who helped Aphrodite win in a flower-picking contest over her son Eros; for this Eros turned her into a dove, but Aphrodite took the dove under her wing and made it her sacred bird.
Because of her connections to the sea, Aphrodite was associated with a number of different types of water fowl, including swans, geese, and ducks. Aphrodite's other symbols included the sea, conch shells, and roses. The rose and myrtle flowers were both sacred to Aphrodite. A myth explaining the origin of Aphrodite's connection to myrtle goes that originally the myrtle was a maiden, Myrina, a dedicated priestess of Aphrodite. When her previous betrothed carried her away from the temple to marry her, Myrina killed him, and Aphrodite turned her into a myrtle, forever under her protection. Her most important fruit emblem was the apple, and in myth, she turned Melos, childhood friend and kin-in-law to Adonis, into an apple after he killed himself, mourning over Adonis' death. Likewise, Melos's wife Pelia was turned into a dove. She was also associated with pomegranates, possibly because the red seeds suggested sexuality or because Greek women sometimes used pomegranates as a method of birth control. In Greek art, Aphrodite is often also accompanied by dolphins and Nereids.
In classical art. A scene of Aphrodite rising from the sea appears on the back of the Ludovisi Throne ( 460 BC), which was probably originally part of a massive altar that was constructed as part of the Ionic temple to Aphrodite in the Greek polis of Locri Epizephyrii in Magna Graecia in southern Italy. The throne shows Aphrodite rising from the sea, clad in a diaphanous garment, which is drenched with seawater and clinging to her body, revealing her upturned breasts and the outline of her navel. Her hair hangs dripping as she reaches to two attendants standing barefoot on the rocky shore on either side of her, lifting her out of the water. Scenes with Aphrodite appear in works of classical Greek pottery, including a famous white-ground "kylix" by the Pistoxenos Painter dating the between 470 and 460 BC, showing her riding on a swan or goose. Aphrodite was often described as golden-haired and portrayed with this color hair in art. In BC, the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles carved the marble statue "Aphrodite of Knidos", which Pliny the Elder later praised as the greatest sculpture ever made. The statue showed a nude Aphrodite modestly covering her pubic region while resting against a water pot with her robe draped over it for support. The "Aphrodite of Knidos" was the first full-sized statue to depict Aphrodite completely naked and one of the first sculptures that was intended to be viewed from all sides. The statue was purchased by the people of Knidos in around 350 BC and proved to be tremendously influential on later depictions of Aphrodite. The original sculpture has been lost, but written descriptions of it as well several depictions of it on coins are still extant and over sixty copies, small-scale models, and fragments of it have been identified.
The Greek painter Apelles of Kos, a contemporary of Praxiteles, produced the panel painting "Aphrodite Anadyomene" ("Aphrodite Rising from the Sea"). According to Athenaeus, Apelles was inspired to paint the painting after watching the courtesan Phryne take off her clothes, untie her hair, and bathe naked in the sea at Eleusis. The painting was displayed in the Asclepeion on the island of Kos. The "Aphrodite Anadyomene" went unnoticed for centuries, but Pliny the Elder records that, in his own time, it was regarded as Apelles's most famous work. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, statues depicting Aphrodite proliferated; many of these statues were modeled at least to some extent on Praxiteles's "Aphrodite of Knidos". Some statues show Aphrodite crouching naked; others show her wringing water out of her hair as she rises from the sea. Another common type of statue is known as "Aphrodite Kallipygos", the name of which is Greek for "Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks"; this type of sculpture shows Aphrodite lifting her "peplos" to display her buttocks to the viewer while looking back at them from over her shoulder. The ancient Romans produced massive numbers of copies of Greek sculptures of Aphrodite and more sculptures of Aphrodite have survived from antiquity than of any other deity.
Post-classical culture. Middle Ages. Early Christians frequently adapted pagan iconography to suit Christian purposes. In the Early Middle Ages, Christians adapted elements of Aphrodite/Venus's iconography and applied them to Eve and prostitutes, but also female saints and even the Virgin Mary. Christians in the east reinterpreted the story of Aphrodite's birth as a metaphor for baptism; in a Coptic stele from the sixth century AD, a female orant is shown wearing Aphrodite's conch shell as a sign that she is newly baptized. Throughout the Middle Ages, villages and communities across Europe still maintained folk tales and traditions about Aphrodite/Venus and travelers reported a wide variety of stories. Numerous Roman mosaics of Venus survived in Britain, preserving memory of the pagan past. In North Africa in the late fifth century AD, Fulgentius of Ruspe encountered mosaics of Aphrodite and reinterpreted her as a symbol of the sin of Lust, arguing that she was shown naked because "the sin of lust is never cloaked" and that she was often shown "swimming" because "all lust suffers shipwreck of its affairs." He also argued that she was associated with doves and conches because these are symbols of copulation, and that she was associated with roses because "as the rose gives pleasure, but is swept away by the swift movement of the seasons, so lust is pleasant for a moment, but is swept away forever."
While Fulgentius had appropriated Aphrodite as a symbol of Lust, Isidore of Seville ( 560–636) interpreted her as a symbol of marital procreative sex and declared that the moral of the story of Aphrodite's birth is that sex can only be holy in the presence of semen, blood, and heat, which he regarded as all being necessary for procreation. Meanwhile, Isidore denigrated Aphrodite/Venus's son Eros/Cupid as a "demon of fornication" ("daemon fornicationis"). Aphrodite/Venus was best known to Western European scholars through her appearances in Virgil's "Aeneid" and Ovid's "Metamorphoses". Venus is mentioned in the Latin poem "Pervigilium Veneris" ("The Eve of Saint Venus"), written in the third or fourth century AD, and in Giovanni Boccaccio's "Genealogia Deorum Gentilium". Since the Late Middle Ages. the myth of the "Venusberg" (German; French "Mont de Vénus", "Mountain of Venus") – a subterranean realm ruled by Venus, hidden underneath Christian Europe – became a motif of European folklore rendered in various legends and epics. In German folklore of the 16th century, the narrative becomes associated with the minnesinger Tannhäuser, and in that form the myth was taken up in later literature and opera.
Art. Aphrodite is the central figure in Sandro Botticelli's painting "Primavera", which has been described as "one of the most written about, and most controversial paintings in the world", and "one of the most popular paintings in Western art". The story of Aphrodite's birth from the foam was a popular subject matter for painters during the Italian Renaissance, who were attempting to consciously reconstruct Apelles of Kos's lost masterpiece "Aphrodite Anadyomene" based on the literary "ekphrasis" of it preserved by Cicero and Pliny the Elder. Artists also drew inspiration from Ovid's description of the birth of Venus in his "Metamorphoses". Sandro Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" ( 1485) was also partially inspired by a description by Poliziano of a relief on the subject. Later Italian renditions of the same scene include Titian's "Venus Anadyomene" () and Raphael's painting in the "Stufetta del cardinal Bibbiena" (1516). Titian's biographer Giorgio Vasari identified all of Titian's paintings of naked women as paintings of "Venus", including an erotic painting from , which he called the "Venus of Urbino", even though the painting does not contain any of Aphrodite/Venus's traditional iconography and the woman in it is clearly shown in a contemporary setting, not a classical one.
"The Birth of Venus" (1863) by Alexandre Cabanel Jacques-Louis David's final work was his 1824 "magnum opus", "Mars Being Disarmed by Venus", which combines elements of classical, Renaissance, traditional French art, and contemporary artistic styles. While he was working on the painting, David described it, saying, "This is the last picture I want to paint, but I want to surpass myself in it. I will put the date of my seventy-five years on it and afterwards I will never again pick up my brush." The painting was exhibited first in Brussels and then in Paris, where over 10,000 people came to see it. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's painting "Venus Anadyomene" was one of his major works. Louis Geofroy described it as a "dream of youth realized with the power of maturity, a happiness that few obtain, artists or others." Théophile Gautier declared: "Nothing remains of the marvelous painting of the Greeks, but surely if anything could give the idea of antique painting as it was conceived following the statues of Phidias and the poems of Homer, it is M. Ingres's painting: the "Venus Anadyomene" of Apelles has been found." Other critics dismissed it as a piece of unimaginative, sentimental kitsch, but Ingres himself considered it to be among his greatest works and used the same figure as the model for his later 1856 painting "La Source".
Paintings of Venus were favorites of the late nineteenth-century Academic artists in France. In 1863, Alexandre Cabanel won widespread critical acclaim at the Paris Salon for his painting "The Birth of Venus", which the French emperor Napoleon III immediately purchased for his own personal art collection. Édouard Manet's 1865 painting "Olympia" parodied the nude Venuses of the Academic painters, particularly Cabanel's "Birth of Venus". In 1867, the English Academic painter Frederic Leighton displayed his "Venus Disrobing for the Bath" at the academy. The art critic J. B. Atkinson praised it, declaring that "Mr Leighton, instead of adopting corrupt Roman notions regarding Venus such as Rubens embodied, has wisely reverted to the Greek idea of Aphrodite, a goddess worshipped, and by artists painted, as the perfection of female grace and beauty." A year later, the English painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, painted "Venus Verticordia" (Latin for "Aphrodite, the Changer of Hearts"), showing Aphrodite as a nude red-headed woman in a garden of roses. Though he was reproached for his "outré" subject matter, Rossetti refused to alter the painting and it was soon purchased by J. Mitchell of Bradford. In 1879, William Adolphe Bouguereau exhibited at the Paris Salon his own "Birth of Venus", which imitated the classical tradition of "contrapposto" and was met with widespread critical acclaim, rivalling the popularity of Cabanel's version from nearly two decades prior.
Literature. William Shakespeare's erotic narrative poem "Venus and Adonis" (1593), a retelling of the courtship of Aphrodite and Adonis from Ovid's "Metamorphoses", was the most popular of all his works published within his own lifetime. Six editions of it were published before Shakespeare's death (more than any of his other works) and it enjoyed particularly strong popularity among young adults. In 1605, Richard Barnfield lauded it, declaring that the poem had placed Shakespeare's name "in fames immortall Booke". Despite this, the poem has received mixed reception from modern critics; Samuel Taylor Coleridge defended it, but Samuel Butler complained that it bored him and C. S. Lewis described an attempted reading of it as "suffocating". Aphrodite appears in Richard Garnett's short story collection "The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales" (1888), in which the gods' temples have been destroyed by Christians. Stories revolving around sculptures of Aphrodite were common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examples of such works of literature include the novel "The Tinted Venus: A Farcical Romance" (1885) by Thomas Anstey Guthrie and the short story "The Venus of Ille" (1887) by Prosper Mérimée, both of which are about statues of Aphrodite that come to life. Another noteworthy example is "Aphrodite in Aulis" by the Anglo-Irish writer George Moore, which revolves around an ancient Greek family who moves to Aulis. The French writer Pierre Louÿs titled his erotic historical novel "" (1896) after the Greek goddess. The novel enjoyed widespread commercial success, but scandalized French audiences due to its sensuality and its decadent portrayal of Greek society.
In the early twentieth century, stories of Aphrodite were used by feminist poets, such as Amy Lowell and Alicia Ostriker. Many of these poems dealt with Aphrodite's legendary birth from the foam of the sea. Other feminist writers, including Claude Cahun, Thit Jensen, and Anaïs Nin also made use of the myth of Aphrodite in their writings. Ever since the publication of Isabel Allende's book "Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses" in 1998, the name "Aphrodite" has been used as a title for dozens of books dealing with all topics even superficially connected to her domain. Frequently these books do not even mention Aphrodite, or mention her only briefly, but make use of her name as a selling point. Modern worship. In 1938, Gleb Botkin, a Russian immigrant to the United States, founded the Church of Aphrodite, a neopagan religion centered around the worship of a mother goddess, whom its practitioners identified as Aphrodite. The Church of Aphrodite's theology was laid out in the book "In Search of Reality", published in 1969, two years before Botkin's death. The book portrayed Aphrodite in a drastically different light than the one in which the Greeks envisioned her, instead casting her as "the sole Goddess of a somewhat Neoplatonic Pagan monotheism". It claimed that the worship of Aphrodite had been brought to Greece by the mystic teacher Orpheus, but that the Greeks had misunderstood Orpheus's teachings and had not realized the importance of worshipping Aphrodite alone.
Aphrodite is a major deity in Wicca, a contemporary nature-based syncretic Neopagan religion. Wiccans regard Aphrodite as one aspect of the Goddess and she is frequently invoked by name during enchantments dealing with love and romance. Wiccans regard Aphrodite as the ruler of human emotions, erotic spirituality, creativity, and art. As one of the twelve Olympians, Aphrodite is a major deity within Hellenismos (Hellenic Polytheistic Reconstructionism), a Neopagan religion which seeks to authentically revive and recreate the religion of ancient Greece in the modern world. Unlike Wiccans, Hellenists are usually strictly polytheistic or pantheistic. Hellenists venerate Aphrodite primarily as the goddess of romantic love, but also as a goddess of sexuality, the sea, and war. Her many epithets include "Sea Born", "Killer of Men", "She upon the Graves", "Fair Sailing", and "Ally in War".
Antisymmetric relation In mathematics, a binary relation formula_1 on a set formula_2 is antisymmetric if there is no pair of "distinct" elements of formula_2 each of which is related by formula_1 to the other. More formally, formula_1 is antisymmetric precisely if for all formula_6 formula_7 or equivalently, formula_8 The definition of antisymmetry says nothing about whether formula_9 actually holds or not for any formula_10. An antisymmetric relation formula_1 on a set formula_2 may be reflexive (that is, formula_9 for all formula_14), irreflexive (that is, formula_9 for no formula_14), or neither reflexive nor irreflexive. A relation is asymmetric if and only if it is both antisymmetric and irreflexive. Examples. The divisibility relation on the natural numbers is an important example of an antisymmetric relation. In this context, antisymmetry means that the only way each of two numbers can be divisible by the other is if the two are, in fact, the same number; equivalently, if formula_17 and formula_18 are distinct and formula_17 is a factor of formula_20 then formula_18 cannot be a factor of formula_22 For example, 12 is divisible by 4, but 4 is not divisible by 12.
The usual order relation formula_23 on the real numbers is antisymmetric: if for two real numbers formula_24 and formula_25 both inequalities formula_26 and formula_27 hold, then formula_24 and formula_25 must be equal. Similarly, the subset order formula_30 on the subsets of any given set is antisymmetric: given two sets formula_31 and formula_32 if every element in formula_31 also is in formula_34 and every element in formula_34 is also in formula_36 then formula_31 and formula_34 must contain all the same elements and therefore be equal: formula_39 A real-life example of a relation that is typically antisymmetric is "paid the restaurant bill of" (understood as restricted to a given occasion). Typically, some people pay their own bills, while others pay for their spouses or friends. As long as no two people pay each other's bills, the relation is antisymmetric. Properties. Partial and total orders are antisymmetric by definition. A relation can be both symmetric and antisymmetric (in this case, it must be coreflexive), and there are relations which are neither symmetric nor antisymmetric (for example, the "preys on" relation on biological species). Antisymmetry is different from asymmetry: a relation is asymmetric if and only if it is antisymmetric and irreflexive.
Aleister Crowley Aleister Crowley ( ; born Edward Alexander Crowley; 12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947) was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, novelist, mountaineer, and painter. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life. Born to a wealthy family in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, Crowley rejected his parents' fundamentalist Christian Plymouth Brethren faith to pursue an interest in Western esotericism. He was educated at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he focused his attention upon mountaineering and poetry, resulting in several publications. Some biographers allege that here he was recruited into a British intelligence agency, further suggesting that he remained a spy throughout his life. In 1898, he joined the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where he was trained in ceremonial magic by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennett. He went mountaineering in Mexico with Oscar Eckenstein, before studying Hindu and Buddhist practices in India. In 1904, he married Rose Edith Kelly, and they honeymooned in Cairo, Egypt, where Crowley wrote down "The Book of the Law"—a sacred text that serves as the basis for Thelema, which he said had been dictated to him by a supernatural entity named Aiwass. "The Book" announced the start of the Æon of Horus, and declared that its followers should "Do what thou wilt", and seek to align themselves with their True Will via the practice of ceremonial magic.
After the unsuccessful 1905 Kanchenjunga expedition, and a visit to India and China, Crowley returned to Britain, where he attracted attention as a prolific author of poetry, novels, and occult literature. In 1907, he and George Cecil Jones co-founded an esoteric order—the A∴A∴, through which they propagated Thelema. After spending time in Algeria, in 1912 he was initiated into another esoteric order—the German-based Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), in which he rose to become the leader of its British branch, which he reformulated in accordance with his Thelemite beliefs. Through O.T.O., Thelemite groups were established in Britain, Australia, and North America. Crowley spent the First World War in the United States, where he took up painting, and campaigned for the German war effort against Britain. His biographers later revealed that he had infiltrated the pro-German movement to assist the British intelligence services. In 1920, he established the Abbey of Thelema—a religious commune in Cefalù, Sicily, where he lived with various followers. His libertine lifestyle led to denunciations in the British press, and the Italian government evicted him in 1923. He divided the following two decades between France, Germany, and England, and continued to promote Thelema until his death.
Crowley gained widespread notoriety during his lifetime, being a drug user, a bisexual, and an individualist social critic. Crowley has remained a highly influential figure over western esotericism and the counterculture of the 1960s, and he continues to be considered a prophet in Thelema. He is the subject of various biographies and academic studies. Early life. Youth. Crowley was born Edward Alexander Crowley at 30 Clarendon Square in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, on 12 October 1875. His father, Edward Crowley (1829–1887), was trained as an engineer, but his share in a lucrative family brewing business, Crowley's Alton Ales, allowed him to retire before his son was born. His mother, Emily Bertha Bishop (1848–1917), came from a Devonshire-Somerset family and had a strained relationship with her son; she described him as "the Beast", a name that he revelled in. The couple had been married at London's Kensington Registry Office in November 1874, and were evangelical Christians. Crowley's father was born a Quaker, but converted to the Exclusive Brethren, a faction of a Christian fundamentalist group known as the Plymouth Brethren; Emily likewise converted upon marriage. Crowley's father was particularly devout, spending his time as a travelling preacher for the sect and reading a chapter from the Bible to his wife and son after breakfast every day. Following the death of their baby daughter in 1880, in 1881 the Crowleys moved to Redhill, Surrey. At the age of 8, Crowley was sent to H. T. Habershon's evangelical Christian boarding school in Hastings, and then to Ebor preparatory school in Cambridge, run by the Reverend Henry d'Arcy Champney, whom Crowley considered a sadist.
In March 1887, when Crowley was eleven years old, his father died of tongue cancer. Crowley described this as a turning point in his life, and he always maintained an admiration of his father, describing him as "my hero and my friend". Inheriting a third of his father's wealth, he began misbehaving at school and was harshly punished by Champney; Crowley's family removed him from the school when he developed albuminuria. He then attended Malvern College and Tonbridge School, both of which he despised and left after a few terms. He became increasingly sceptical of Christianity, pointing out Biblical inconsistencies to his religious teachers, and went against the Christian morality of his upbringing by smoking, masturbating, and having sex with prostitutes from whom he contracted gonorrhea. Sent to live with a Brethren tutor in Eastbourne, he undertook chemistry courses at Eastbourne College. Crowley developed interests in chess, poetry, and mountain climbing, and in 1894 climbed Beachy Head before visiting the Alps and joining the Scottish Mountaineering Club. The following year he returned to the Bernese Alps, climbing the Eiger, Trift, Jungfrau, Mönch, and Wetterhorn.
Cambridge University: 1895–1898. Having adopted the name of Aleister over Edward, in October 1895 Crowley began a three-year course at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was entered for the Moral Science Tripos studying philosophy. With approval from his personal tutor, he changed to English literature, which was not then part of the curriculum offered. Crowley spent much of his time at university engaged in his pastimes, becoming president of the chess club and practising the game for two hours a day; he briefly considered a professional career as a chess player. Crowley also embraced his love of literature and poetry, particularly the works of Richard Francis Burton and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Many of his own poems appeared in student publications such as "The Granta", "Cambridge Magazine", and "Cantab". He continued his mountaineering, going on holiday to the Alps to climb every year from 1894 to 1898, often with his friend Oscar Eckenstein, and in 1897 he made the first ascent of the Mönch without a guide. These feats led to his recognition in the Alpine mountaineering community.
Crowley had his first significant mystical experience while on holiday in Stockholm in December 1896. Several biographers, including Lawrence Sutin, Richard Kaczynski, and Tobias Churton, believed that this was the result of Crowley's first same-sex sexual experience, which enabled him to recognize his bisexuality. At Cambridge, Crowley maintained a vigorous sex life with women—largely with female prostitutes, from one of whom he caught syphilis—but eventually he took part in same-sex activities, despite their illegality. In October 1897, Crowley met Herbert Charles Pollitt, president of the Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club, and the two entered into a relationship. They broke apart because Pollitt did not share Crowley's increasing interest in Western esotericism, a break-up that Crowley regretted for many years. In 1897, Crowley travelled to Saint Petersburg in Russia, later saying that he was trying to learn Russian as he was considering a future diplomatic career there. In October 1897, a brief illness triggered considerations of mortality and "the futility of all human endeavour", and Crowley abandoned all thoughts of a diplomatic career in favour of pursuing an interest in the occult.
In March 1898, he obtained A. E. Waite's "The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts", and then Karl von Eckartshausen's "The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary", furthering his occult interests. That same year, Leonard Smithers, a publisher who Crowley met through Pollitt, published 100 copies of Crowley's poem "Aceldama: A Place to Bury Strangers In", but it was not a particular success. That same year, Crowley published a string of other poems, including "White Stains", a Decadent collection of erotic poetry that was printed abroad lest its publication be prohibited by the British authorities. In July 1898, he left Cambridge, not having taken any degree at all despite a "first class" showing in his 1897 exams and consistent "second class honours" results before that. The Golden Dawn: 1898–1899. In August 1898, Crowley was in Zermatt, Switzerland, where he met the chemist Julian L. Baker, and the two began discussing their common interest in alchemy. Back in London, Baker introduced Crowley to George Cecil Jones, Baker's brother-in-law and a fellow member of the occult society known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which was founded in 1888. Crowley was initiated into the Outer Order of the Golden Dawn on 18 November 1898 by the group's leader, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. The ceremony took place in the Golden Dawn's Isis-Urania Temple held at London's Mark Masons Hall, where Crowley took the magical motto and name "Frater Perdurabo", which he interpreted as "Brother I shall endure to the end".
Crowley moved into his own luxury flat at 67–69 Chancery Lane and soon invited a senior Golden Dawn member, Allan Bennett, to live with him as his personal magical tutor. Bennett taught Crowley more about ceremonial magic and the ritual use of drugs, and together they performed the rituals of the "Goetia", until Bennett left for South Asia to study Buddhism. In November 1899, Crowley purchased Boleskine House in Foyers on the shore of Loch Ness in Scotland. He developed a love of Scottish culture, describing himself as the "Laird of Boleskine", and took to wearing traditional highland dress, even during visits to London. He continued writing poetry, publishing "Jezebel and Other Tragic Poems", "Tales of Archais", "Songs of the Spirit", "Appeal to the American Republic", and "Jephthah" in 1898–99; most gained mixed reviews from literary critics, although "Jephthah" was considered a particular critical success. Crowley soon progressed through the lower grades of the Golden Dawn, and was ready to enter the group's inner Second Order. He was unpopular in the group; his bisexuality and libertine lifestyle gained him a bad reputation, and he developed feuds with some of the members, including W. B. Yeats. When the Golden Dawn's London lodge refused to initiate Crowley into the Second Order, he visited Mathers in Paris, who personally admitted him into the Adeptus Minor Grade. A schism had developed between Mathers and the London members of the Golden Dawn, who were unhappy with his autocratic rule. Acting under Mathers' orders, Crowley—with the help of his mistress and fellow initiate Elaine Simpson—attempted to seize the Vault of the Adepts, a temple space at 36 Blythe Road in West Kensington, from the London lodge members. When the case was taken to court, the judge ruled in favour of the London lodge, as they had paid for the space's rent, leaving both Crowley and Mathers isolated from the group.
Mexico, India, Paris, and marriage: 1900–1903. In 1900, Crowley travelled to Mexico via the United States, settling in Mexico City and starting a relationship with a local woman. Developing a love of the country, he continued experimenting with ceremonial magic, working with John Dee's Enochian invocations. He later said he had been initiated into Freemasonry while there, and he wrote a play based on Richard Wagner's "Tannhäuser" as well as a series of poems, published as "Oracles" (1905). Eckenstein joined him later in 1900, and together they climbed several mountains, including Iztaccihuatl, Popocatepetl, and Colima, the latter of which they had to abandon owing to a volcanic eruption. Leaving Mexico, Crowley headed to San Francisco before sailing for Hawaii aboard the "Nippon Maru". On the ship, he had a brief affair with a married woman named Mary Alice Rogers; saying he fell in love with her, he wrote a series of poems about the romance, published as "Alice: An Adultery" (1903).
Having arrived in Paris in November 1902, he socialized with his friend the painter Gerald Kelly, and through him became a fixture of the Parisian arts scene. Whilst there, Crowley wrote a series of poems on the work of an acquaintance, the sculptor Auguste Rodin. These poems were later published as "Rodin in Rime" (1907). One of those frequenting this milieu was W. Somerset Maugham, who after briefly meeting Crowley later used him as a model for the character of Oliver Haddo in his novel "The Magician" (1908). He returned to Boleskine in April 1903. In August, Crowley wed Gerald Kelly's sister Rose Edith Kelly in a "marriage of convenience" to prevent her from entering an arranged marriage; the marriage appalled the Kelly family and damaged his friendship with Gerald. Heading on a honeymoon to Paris, Cairo, and then Ceylon, Crowley fell in love with Rose and worked to prove his affections. While on his honeymoon, he wrote her a series of love poems, published as "Rosa Mundi and other Love Songs" (1906), as well as authoring the religious satire "Why Jesus Wept" (1904).
Developing Thelema. Egypt and "The Book of the Law": 1904. In February 1904, Crowley and Rose arrived in Cairo. Pretending to be a prince and princess, they rented an apartment in which Crowley set up a temple room and began invoking ancient Egyptian deities, while studying Islamic mysticism and Arabic. According to Crowley's later account, Rose regularly became delirious and informed him "they are waiting for you." On 18 March, she explained that "they" were the god Horus, and on 20 March proclaimed that "the Equinox of the Gods has come". She led him to a nearby museum, where she showed him a seventh-century BCE mortuary stele known as the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu; Crowley thought it important that the exhibit's number was 666, the Number of the Beast in Christian belief, and in later years termed the artefact the "Stele of Revealing". According to Crowley's later statements, on 8 April he heard a disembodied voice identifying itself as that of Aiwass, the messenger of Horus, or Hoor-Paar-Kraat. Crowley said that he wrote down everything the voice told him over the course of the next three days, and titled it "Liber AL vel Legis" or "The Book of the Law". The book proclaimed that humanity was entering a new Aeon, and that Crowley would serve as its prophet. It stated that a supreme moral law was to be introduced in this Aeon, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," and that people should learn to live in tune with their Will. This book, and the philosophy that it espoused, became the cornerstone of Crowley's religion, Thelema. Crowley said that at the time he was unsure what to do with "The Book of the Law". Often resenting it, he said that he ignored the instructions which the text commanded him to perform, which included taking the Stele of Revealing from the museum, fortifying his own island, and translating the book into all the world's languages. According to his account, he instead sent typescripts of the work to several occultists he knew, putting the manuscript away and ignoring it.
Kanchenjunga and China: 1905–1906. Returning to Boleskine, Crowley came to believe that Mathers was using magic against him, and the relationship between the two broke down. On 28 July 1905, Rose gave birth to Crowley's first child, a daughter named Lilith, and Crowley wrote the pornographic "Snowdrops from a Curate's Garden" to entertain his recuperating wife. He also founded a publishing company through which to publish his poetry, naming it the Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth in parody of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Among its first publications were Crowley's "Collected Works", edited by Ivor Back, an old friend of Crowley's who was both a practicing surgeon and an enthusiast of literature. His poetry often received strong reviews (either positive or negative), but never sold well. In an attempt to gain more publicity, he issued a reward of £100 for the best essay on his work. The winner of this was J. F. C. Fuller, a British Army officer and military historian, whose essay, "The Star in the West" (1907), heralded Crowley's poetry as some of the greatest ever written.
Crowley decided to climb Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas of Nepal, widely recognised as the world's most treacherous mountain. The collaboration between Jacot-Guillarmod, Charles Adolphe Reymond, Alexis Pache, and Alcesti C. Rigo de Righi, the expedition was marred by much argument between Crowley and the others, who thought that he was reckless. They eventually mutinied against Crowley's control, with the other climbers heading back down the mountain as nightfall approached despite Crowley's warnings that it was too dangerous. Subsequently, Pache and several porters were killed in an accident, something for which Crowley was widely blamed by the mountaineering community. Spending time in Moharbhanj, where he took part in big-game hunting and wrote the homoerotic work "The Scented Garden", Crowley met up with Rose and Lilith in Calcutta before being forced to leave India after non-lethally shooting two men who tried to mug him. Briefly visiting Bennett in Burma, Crowley and his family decided to tour Southern China, hiring porters and a nanny for the purpose. Crowley smoked opium throughout the journey, which took the family from Tengyueh through to Yungchang, Tali, Yunnanfu, and then Hanoi. On the way, he spent much time on spiritual and magical work, reciting the "Bornless Ritual", an invocation to his Holy Guardian Angel, on a daily basis.
While Rose and Lilith returned to Europe, Crowley headed to Shanghai to meet old friend Elaine Simpson, who was fascinated by "The Book of the Law"; together they performed rituals in an attempt to contact Aiwass. Crowley then sailed to Japan and Canada, before continuing to New York City, where he unsuccessfully solicited support for a second expedition up Kanchenjunga. Upon arrival in Britain, Crowley learned that his daughter Lilith had died of typhoid in Rangoon, something he later blamed on Rose's increasing alcoholism. Under emotional distress, his health began to suffer, and he underwent a series of surgical operations. He began short-lived romances with actress Vera "Lola" Neville (née Snepp) and author Ada Leverson, while Rose gave birth to Crowley's second daughter, Lola Zaza, in February 1907. The A∴A∴ and The Holy Books of Thelema: 1907–1909. With his old mentor George Cecil Jones, Crowley continued performing the Abramelin rituals at the Ashdown Park Hotel in Coulsdon, Surrey. Crowley believed that in doing so he attained "samadhi", or union with Godhead, thereby marking a turning point in his life. Making heavy use of hashish during these rituals, he wrote an essay on "The Psychology of Hashish" (1909) in which he championed the drug as an aid to mysticism. He also said he had been contacted once again by Aiwass in late October and November 1907, adding that Aiwass dictated two further texts to him, "Liber VII" and "Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente", both of which were later classified in the corpus of The Holy Books of Thelema. Crowley wrote down more Thelemic Holy Books during the last two months of the year, including "Liber LXVI", "Liber Arcanorum", "Liber Porta Lucis, Sub Figura X", "Liber Tau", "Liber Trigrammaton" and "Liber DCCCXIII vel Ararita", which he again said he had received from a preternatural source. Crowley stated that in June 1909, when the manuscript of "The Book of the Law" was rediscovered at Boleskine, he developed the opinion that Thelema represented objective truth.
Crowley's inheritance was running out. Trying to earn money, he was hired by George Montagu Bennett, the Earl of Tankerville, to help protect him from witchcraft; recognising Bennett's paranoia as being based in his cocaine addiction, Crowley took him on holiday to France and Morocco to recuperate. In 1907, he also began taking in paying students, whom he instructed in occult and magical practice. Victor Neuburg, whom Crowley met in February 1907, became his sexual partner and closest disciple; in 1908 the pair toured northern Spain before heading to Tangier, Morocco. The following year Neuburg stayed at Boleskine, where he and Crowley engaged in sadomasochism. Crowley continued to write prolifically, producing such works of poetry as "Ambergris", "Clouds Without Water", and "Konx Om Pax", as well as his first attempt at an autobiography, "The World's Tragedy". Recognizing the popularity of short horror stories, Crowley wrote his own, some of which were published, and he also published several articles in "Vanity Fair", a magazine edited by his friend Frank Harris. He also wrote "Liber 777", a book of magical and Qabalistic correspondences that borrowed from Mathers and Bennett.
In November 1907, Crowley and Jones decided to found an occult order to act as a successor to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, being aided in doing so by Fuller. The result was the A∴A∴. The group's headquarters and temple were situated at 124 Victoria Street in central London, and their rites borrowed much from those of the Golden Dawn, but with an added Thelemic basis. Its earliest members included solicitor Richard Noel Warren, artist Austin Osman Spare, Horace Sheridan-Bickers, author George Raffalovich, Francis Henry Everard Joseph Feilding, engineer Herbert Edward Inman, Kenneth Ward, and Charles Stansfeld Jones. In March 1909, Crowley began production of a biannual periodical titled "The Equinox". He billed this periodical, which was to become the "Official Organ" of the A∴A∴, as "The Review of Scientific Illuminism". Crowley became increasingly frustrated with Rose's alcoholism, and in November 1909 he divorced her on the grounds of his own adultery. Lola was entrusted to Rose's care; the couple remained friends and Rose continued to live at Boleskine. Her alcoholism worsened, and as a result she was institutionalized in September 1911.
Algeria and the Rites of Eleusis: 1909–1911. In November 1909, Crowley and Neuburg travelled to Algeria, touring the desert from El Arba to Aumale, Bou Saâda, and then Dā'leh Addin, with Crowley reciting the Quran to fortify himself against growing feelings of awe and dread. During the trip he invoked the thirty aethyrs of Enochian magic, with Neuburg recording the results, later published in "The Equinox" as "The Vision and the Voice". Following a mountaintop sex magic ritual, Crowley also performed an evocation to the demon Choronzon involving blood sacrifice, and considered the results to be a watershed in his magical career. Returning to London in January 1910, Crowley found that Mathers was suing him for publishing Golden Dawn secrets in "The Equinox"; the court found in favour of Crowley. The case was widely reported in the press, with Crowley gaining wider fame. Crowley enjoyed this, and played up to the sensationalist stereotype of being a Satanist and advocate of human sacrifice, despite being neither.
The publicity attracted new members to the A∴A∴, among them Frank Bennett, James Bayley, Herbert Close, and James Windram. The Australian violinist Leila Waddell soon became Crowley's lover. Deciding to expand his teachings to a wider audience, Crowley developed the Rites of Artemis, a public performance of magic and symbolism featuring A∴A∴ members personifying various deities. It was first performed at the A∴A∴ headquarters, with attendees given a fruit punch containing peyote to enhance their experience. Various members of the press attended, and reported largely positively on it. In October and November 1910, Crowley decided to stage something similar, the Rites of Eleusis, at Caxton Hall, Westminster; this time press reviews were mixed. Crowley came under particular criticism from West de Wend Fenton, editor of "The Looking Glass" newspaper, who called him "one of the most blasphemous and cold-blooded villains of modern times". Fenton's articles suggested that Crowley and Jones were involved in homosexual activity; Crowley did not mind, but Jones unsuccessfully sued for libel. Fuller broke off his friendship and involvement with Crowley over the scandal, and Crowley and Neuburg returned to Algeria for further magical workings.
"The Equinox" continued publishing, and various books of literature and poetry were also published under its imprint, like Crowley's "Ambergris", "The Winged Beetle", and "The Scented Garden", as well as Neuburg's "The Triumph of Pan" and Ethel Archer's "The Whirlpool". In 1911, Crowley and Waddell holidayed in Montigny-sur-Loing, where he wrote prolifically, producing poems, short stories, plays, and 19 works on magic and mysticism, including the two final Holy Books of Thelema. In Paris, he met Mary Desti, who became his next "Scarlet Woman", with the two undertaking magical workings in St. Moritz; Crowley believed that one of the Secret Chiefs, Ab-ul-Diz, was speaking through her. Based on Desti's statements when in trance, Crowley wrote the two-volume "Book 4" (1912–13) and at the time developed the spelling "magick" in reference to the paranormal phenomenon as a means of distinguishing it from the stage magic of illusionists. Ordo Templi Orientis and the Paris Working: 1912–1914.
In March 1913, Crowley acted as producer for "The Ragged Ragtime Girls", a group of female violinists led by Waddell, as they performed at London's Old Tivoli theatre. They subsequently performed in Moscow for six weeks, where Crowley had a sadomasochistic relationship with the Hungarian Anny Ringler. In Moscow, Crowley continued to write plays and poetry, including "Hymn to Pan", and the Gnostic Mass, a Thelemic ritual that became a key part of O.T.O. liturgy. Churton suggested that Crowley had travelled to Moscow on the orders of British intelligence to spy on revolutionary elements in the city. In January 1914, Crowley and Neuburg settled into an apartment in Paris, where the former was involved in the controversy surrounding Jacob Epstein's new monument to Oscar Wilde. Together Crowley and Neuburg performed the six-week "Paris Working", a period of intense ritual involving strong drug use in which they invoked the gods Mercury and Jupiter. As part of the ritual, the couple performed acts of sex magic together, at times being joined by journalist Walter Duranty. Inspired by the results of the Working, Crowley wrote "Liber Agapé", a treatise on sex magic. Following the Paris Working, Neuburg began to distance himself from Crowley, resulting in an argument in which Crowley cursed him.
United States: 1914–1919. By 1914, Crowley was living a hand-to-mouth existence, relying largely on donations from A∴A∴ members and dues payments made to O.T.O. In May, he transferred ownership of Boleskine House to the MMM for financial reasons, and in July he went mountaineering in the Swiss Alps. During this time the First World War broke out. After recuperating from a bout of phlebitis, Crowley set sail for the United States aboard the RMS "Lusitania" in October 1914. Arriving in New York City, he moved into a hotel and began earning money writing for the American edition of "Vanity Fair" and undertaking freelance work for the famed astrologer Evangeline Adams. In the city, he continued experimenting with sex magic, through the use of masturbation, female prostitutes, and male clients of a Turkish bathhouse; all of these encounters were documented in his diaries. Professing to be of Irish ancestry and a supporter of Irish independence from Great Britain, Crowley began to espouse support for Germany in their war against Britain. He became involved in New York's pro-German movement, and in January 1915 pro-German propagandist George Sylvester Viereck employed him as a writer for his propagandist paper, "The Fatherland", which was dedicated to keeping the US neutral in the conflict. In later years, detractors denounced Crowley as a traitor to Britain for this action.
Crowley entered into a relationship with Jeanne Robert Foster, with whom he toured the West Coast. In Vancouver, headquarters of the North American O.T.O., he met with Charles Stansfeld Jones and Wilfred Talbot Smith to discuss the propagation of Thelema on the continent. In Detroit he experimented with Peyote at Parke-Davis, then visited Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, and the Grand Canyon, before returning to New York. There he befriended Ananda Coomaraswamy and his wife Alice Richardson; Crowley and Richardson performed sex magic in April 1916, following which she became pregnant and then miscarried. Later that year he took a "magical retirement" to a cabin by Lake Pasquaney owned by Evangeline Adams. There, he made heavy use of drugs and undertook a ritual after which he proclaimed himself "Master Therion". He also wrote several short stories based on James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough" and a work of literary criticism, "The Gospel According to Bernard Shaw". In December, he moved to New Orleans, his favourite US city, before spending February 1917 with evangelical Christian relatives in Titusville, Florida. Returning to New York City, he moved in with artist and A∴A∴ member Leon Engers Kennedy in May, learning of his mother's death. After the collapse of "The Fatherland", Crowley continued his association with Viereck, who appointed him contributing editor of arts journal "The International". Crowley used it to promote Thelema, but it soon ceased publication. He then moved to the studio apartment of Roddie Minor, who became his partner and Scarlet Woman. Through their rituals, which Crowley called "The Amalantrah Workings", he believed that they were contacted by a preternatural entity named Lam. The relationship soon ended.
In 1918, Crowley went on a magical retreat in the wilderness of Esopus Island on the Hudson River. Here, he began an adaptation of the "Tao Te Ching", painted Thelemic slogans on the riverside cliffs, and—he later wrote—experienced past life memories of being Ge Xuan, Pope Alexander VI, Alessandro Cagliostro, and Éliphas Lévi. Back in New York City, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he took Leah Hirsig as his lover and next Scarlet Woman. He took up painting as a hobby, exhibiting his work at the Greenwich Village Liberal Club and attracting the attention of "The Evening World". With the financial assistance of sympathetic Freemasons, Crowley revived "The Equinox" with the first issue of volume III, known as "The Blue Equinox". He spent mid-1919 on a climbing holiday in Montauk before returning to London in December. Abbey of Thelema: 1920–1923. Now destitute and back in London, Crowley came under attack from the tabloid "John Bull", which labelled him traitorous "scum" for his work with the German war effort; several friends aware of his intelligence work urged him to sue, but he decided not to. When he was suffering from asthma, a doctor prescribed him heroin, to which he soon became addicted. In January 1920, he moved to Paris, renting a house in Fontainebleau with Leah Hirsig; they were soon joined in a "ménage à trois" by Ninette Shumway, and also (in living arrangement) by Leah's newborn daughter Anne "Poupée" Leah. Crowley had ideas of forming a community of Thelemites, which he called the Abbey of Thelema after the Abbaye de Thélème in François Rabelais' satire "Gargantua and Pantagruel". After consulting the "I Ching", he chose Cefalù in Sicily as a location, and after arriving there, began renting the old Villa Santa Barbara as his Abbey on 2 April.
Moving to the commune with Hirsig, Shumway, and their children Hansi, Howard, and Poupée, Crowley described the scenario as "perfectly happy ... my idea of heaven." They wore robes, and performed rituals to the sun god Ra at set times during the day, also occasionally performing the Gnostic Mass; the rest of the day they were left to follow their own interests. Undertaking widespread correspondences, Crowley continued to paint, wrote a commentary on "The Book of the Law", and revised the third part of "Book 4". He offered a libertine education for the children, allowing them to play all day and witness acts of sex magic. He occasionally travelled to Palermo to visit rent boys and buy supplies, including drugs; his heroin addiction came to dominate his life, and cocaine began to erode his nasal cavity. There was no cleaning rota, and wild dogs and cats wandered throughout the building, which soon became unsanitary. Poupée died in October 1920, and Ninette gave birth to a daughter, Astarte Lulu Panthea, soon afterwards.
New followers continued to arrive at the Abbey to be taught by Crowley. Among them was film star Jane Wolfe, who arrived in July 1920, where she was initiated into the A∴A∴ and became Crowley's secretary. Another was Cecil Frederick Russell, who often argued with Crowley, disliking the same-sex sexual magic that he was required to perform, and left after a year. More conducive was the Australian Thelemite Frank Bennett, who also spent several months at the Abbey. In February 1922, Crowley returned to Paris for a retreat in an unsuccessful attempt to kick his heroin addiction. He then went to London in search of money, where he published articles in "The English Review" criticising the Dangerous Drugs Act 1920 and wrote a novel, "The Diary of a Drug Fiend", completed in July. On publication, it received mixed reviews; he was lambasted by the "Sunday Express", which called for its burning and used its influence to prevent further reprints. Subsequently, a young Thelemite named Raoul Loveday moved to the Abbey with his wife Betty May; while Loveday was devoted to Crowley, May detested him and life at the commune. She later said that Loveday was made to drink the blood of a sacrificed cat, and that they were required to cut themselves with razors every time they used the pronoun "I". Loveday drank from a local polluted stream, soon developing a liver infection resulting in his death in February 1923. Returning to London, May told her story to the press. "John Bull" proclaimed Crowley "the wickedest man in the world" and "a man we'd like to hang", and although Crowley deemed many of their accusations against him to be slanderous, he was unable to afford the legal fees to sue them. As a result, "John Bull" continued its attack, with its stories being repeated in newspapers throughout Europe and in North America. The Fascist government of Benito Mussolini learned of Crowley's activities, and in April 1923 he was given a deportation notice forcing him to leave Italy; without him, the Abbey closed.
Later life. Tunisia, Paris, and London: 1923–1929. Crowley and Hirsig went to Tunis, where, dogged by continuing poor health, he unsuccessfully tried again to give up heroin, and began writing what he termed his "autohagiography", "The Confessions of Aleister Crowley". They were joined in Tunis by the Thelemite Norman Mudd, who became Crowley's public relations consultant. Employing a local boy, Mohammad ben Brahim, as his servant, Crowley went with him on a retreat to Nefta, where they performed sex magic together. In January 1924, Crowley travelled to Nice, France, where he met with Frank Harris, underwent a series of nasal operations, and visited the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man and had a positive opinion of its founder, George Gurdjieff. Destitute, he took on a wealthy student, Alexander Zu Zolar, before taking on another American follower, Dorothy Olsen. Crowley took Olsen back to Tunisia for a magical retreat in Nefta, where he also wrote "To Man" (1924), a declaration of his own status as a prophet entrusted with bringing Thelema to humanity. After spending the winter in Paris, in early 1925 Crowley and Olsen returned to Tunis, where he wrote "The Heart of the Master" (1938) as an account of a vision he experienced in a trance. In March Olsen became pregnant, and Hirsig was called to take care of her; she miscarried, following which Crowley took Olsen back to France. Hirsig later distanced herself from Crowley, who then denounced her.
According to Crowley, Reuss named him head of O.T.O. upon his death, but this was challenged by a leader of the German O.T.O., . Tränker called the Hohenleuben Conference in Thuringia, Germany, which Crowley attended. There, prominent members like Karl Germer and Martha Küntzel championed Crowley's leadership, but other key figures like Albin Grau, Oskar Hopfer, and Henri Birven backed Tränker by opposing it, resulting in a split in O.T.O. Moving to Paris, where he broke with Olsen in 1926, Crowley went through a large number of lovers over the following years, with whom he experimented in sex magic. Throughout, he was dogged by poor health, largely caused by his heroin and cocaine addictions. In 1928, Crowley was introduced to Israel Regardie, a young Englishman, who embraced Thelema and became Crowley's secretary for the next three years. That year, Crowley also met Gerald Yorke, who began organising Crowley's finances but never became a Thelemite. He also befriended the journalist Tom Driberg; Driberg did not accept Thelema either. It was here that Crowley also published one of his most significant works, "Magick in Theory and Practice", which received little attention at the time.
In December 1928 Crowley met the Nicaraguan Maria Teresa Sanchez (Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar). Crowley was deported from France by the authorities, who disliked his reputation and feared that he was a German agent. So that she could join him in Britain, Crowley married Sanchez in August 1929. Now based in London, Mandrake Press agreed to publish his autobiography in a limited edition six-volume set, also publishing his novel "Moonchild" and book of short stories "The Stratagem". Mandrake went into liquidation in November 1930, before the entirety of Crowley's "Confessions" could be published. Mandrake's owner P. R. Stephensen meanwhile wrote "The Legend of Aleister Crowley", an analysis of the media coverage surrounding him. Berlin and London: 1930–1938. In April 1930, Crowley moved to Berlin, where he took Hanni Jaegar as his magical partner; the relationship was troubled. In September he went to Lisbon in Portugal to meet the poet Fernando Pessoa. There, he decided to fake his own death, doing so with Pessoa's help at the Boca do Inferno rock formation. He then returned to Berlin, where he reappeared three weeks later at the opening of his art exhibition at the Gallery Neumann-Nierendorf. Crowley's paintings fitted with the fashion for German Expressionism; few of them sold, but the press reports were largely favourable. In August 1931, he took Bertha Busch as his new lover; they had a violent relationship, and often physically assaulted one another. He continued to have affairs with both men and women while in the city, and met with famous people like Aldous Huxley and Alfred Adler. After befriending him, in January 1932 he took the communist Gerald Hamilton as a lodger, through whom he was introduced to many figures within the Berlin far left; it is possible that he was operating as a spy for British intelligence at this time, monitoring the communist movement.
Crowley left Busch and returned to London, where he took Pearl Brooksmith as his new Scarlet Woman. Undergoing further nasal surgery, it was here in 1932 that he was invited to be guest of honour at Foyles' Literary Luncheon, also being invited by Harry Price to speak at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research. In need of money, he launched a series of court cases against people whom he believed to have libelled him, some of which proved successful. He gained much publicity for his lawsuit against Constable and Co for publishing Nina Hamnett's "Laughing Torso" (1932)—a book he alleged libelled him by referring to his occult practice as black magic—but lost the case. The court case added to Crowley's financial problems, and in February 1935 he was declared bankrupt. During the hearing, it was revealed that Crowley was spending three times his income for several years. Crowley developed a friendship with Deidre Patricia Doherty; she offered to bear his child, who was born in May 1937. Named Randall Gair, Crowley nicknamed him Aleister Atatürk. He died in a car accident in 2002 at the age of 65. Crowley continued to socialize with friends, holding curry parties in which he cooked particularly spicy food for them. In 1936, he published his first book in six years, "The Equinox of the Gods", which contained a facsimile of "The Book of the Law" and was considered to be volume III, number 3, of "The Equinox" periodical. The work sold well, resulting in a second print run. In 1937, he gave a series of public lectures on yoga in Soho. Crowley was now living largely off contributions supplied by O.T.O.'s Agape Lodge in California, led by rocket scientist Jack Parsons. Crowley was intrigued by the rise of Nazism in Germany, and influenced by his friend Martha Küntzel believed that Adolf Hitler might convert to Thelema; when the Nazis abolished the German O.T.O. and imprisoned Germer, who fled to the US, Crowley then lambasted Hitler as a black magician.
Second World War and death: 1939–1947. When the Second World War broke out, Crowley wrote to the Naval Intelligence Division offering his services, but they declined. He associated with a variety of figures in Britain's intelligence community at the time, including Dennis Wheatley, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and Maxwell Knight, and wrote that he originated the "V for Victory" sign first used by the BBC; this has never been proven. In 1940, his asthma worsened, and with his German-produced medication unavailable, he returned to using heroin, once again becoming addicted. As the Blitz hit London, Crowley relocated to Torquay, where he was briefly admitted to hospital with asthma, and entertained himself with visits to the local chess club. Tiring of Torquay, he returned to London, where he was visited by American Thelemite Grady McMurtry, to whom Crowley awarded the title of "Hymenaeus Alpha". He stipulated that though Germer would be his immediate successor, McMurty should succeed Germer as head of O.T.O. after the latter's death. With O.T.O. initiate Lady Frieda Harris, Crowley developed plans to produce a tarot card set, designed by him and painted by Harris. Accompanying this was a book, published in a limited edition as "The Book of Thoth" by Chiswick Press in 1944. To aid the war effort, he wrote a proclamation on the rights of humanity, "Liber OZ", and a poem for the liberation of France, "Le Gauloise". Crowley's final publication during his lifetime was a book of poetry, "Olla: An Anthology of Sixty Years of Song". Another of his projects, "Aleister Explains Everything", was posthumously published as "Magick Without Tears".
In April 1944 Crowley briefly moved to Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire, where he was visited by the poet Nancy Cunard, before relocating to Hastings in Sussex, where he took up residence at the Netherwood boarding house. He took a young man named Kenneth Grant as his secretary, paying him in magical teaching rather than wages. He was also introduced to John Symonds, whom he appointed to be his literary executor; Symonds thought little of Crowley, later publishing unfavorable biographies of him. Corresponding with the illusionist Arnold Crowther, it was through him that Crowley was introduced to Gerald Gardner, the future founder of Gardnerian Wicca. They became friends, with Crowley authorising Gardner to revive Britain's ailing O.T.O. Another visitor was Eliza Marian Butler, who interviewed Crowley for her book "The Myth of the Magus". Other friends and family also spent time with him, among them Doherty and Crowley's son Aleister Atatürk. On 1 December 1947, Crowley died at Netherwood of chronic bronchitis aggravated by pleurisy and myocardial degeneration, aged 72. His funeral was held at a Brighton crematorium on 5 December; about a dozen people attended, and Louis Wilkinson read excerpts from the Gnostic Mass, "The Book of the Law", and "Hymn to Pan". The funeral generated press controversy, and was labelled a Black Mass by the tabloids. Crowley's body was cremated; his ashes were sent to Karl Germer in the US, who buried them in his garden in Hampton, New Jersey.

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