Woman was conceived as attaining her sanguinary or lustful purposes by means of feminine stratagems or conspiratorial schemes, by personal ruthlessness that swept aside all frustrations, all moralities, and stopped neither at poisoning nor at murder. The roster of such women, in the stream of universal history, is long and challenging. It includes, among many others equally notorious, equally branded, Lilith and Cleopatra, Claudia and Messalina, Antonina and Theodora, Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth Bathory, Madame de Montespan and Lady Kyteler, the Borgias and Isobel Gowdie, Jeannette Biscar: and, in goetic contexts, Sagana, Canidia, and Oenothea.
Aphrodite had many forms, multiple aspects of her functions and her patronage, numberless descriptive designations, both in Greece itself and in the cults of Asia Minor where her attributes were equated with the properties of analogous and indigenous divinities. But basically she was one, the universal, the cosmic force that dominates all amatory contacts, that drives men, intent votaries of the goddess and bent on adherent dedication to her offices, to the realization of her injunctions at all costs, resorting to charms and mystic recipes, to fantastic interpretations of precious stones and flowers, to talismans and amatory manuals, grimoires, exotic herbs and insidious preparations.
For centuries man and woman have displayed mutual hostilities and resentments in a number of directions: personally and socially, politically and spiritually. Yet there appears a strange dichotomy in this human pair of male and female. They have despised each other and have sought each other, as Plato suggests in one of his more fanciful moments. The mutual act of racial procreation merged and was subsequently largely lost in the erotic consummations itself. So that, as the complexities of life grew, and as its manifestations multiplied and offered man a variety of experiences, motifs, recreational facilities and diversions, the woman as such came into her own, and Aphrodite established her sacred and profane sanctuaries at the crossroads, in sundered islands of the Aegean Sea, on the highways, in luxurious retreats, and in rural fastnesses. And, casting aside all spiritualities in man’s search for a teleological significance to existence, made Eros the alpha and omega, the final purpose, of cosmic being.
Initiation into the cult of Aphrodite was known by the Greek expression mysterion: the mystery. The participants, the mystai, after bathing in the sea—and the sea itself was symbolic, for it was the source of Aphrodite’s own birth—, they assembled in the evening in the Mystery Hall. Torches were lit, casting flitting shadows and tenebrous shapes through the chamber.
Then the ritual began. There were recitals by the initiates. Sacred objects were shown to the awed gathering, as well as certain phenomena about which too little knowledge has been transmitted. Then some kinds of performances were presented, all associated with the portentous relation between mortals, striving toward passionate intimacy with the divinity, and the puissant deity herself.
Three degrees of initiation were in force: the first initiate approach: the preliminary stage: and the highest rites. This final ritual, it is believed, brought into communion the adept and the deity. Erotic and sexual symbols were dominant factors in this ceremonial.