What was aphrodite weaknesses

One beach in Cyprus is said to be where this event happened. Aphrodite is often pictured with a mirror and a magical girdle which caused everyone who saw her to fall in love with her. Represents passion and selfless devotion to another person. It also extends to the things that make our hearts sing, like music art or nature. The shadow aspect is obsessive passion that completely takes over our lives and negatively impacts on health and well-being.

Aphrodite is the Greek Goddess of Love , a perfect example of the Lover archetype. He was not viewed as a threat due to his ugly and deformed appearance. Extremely vain, Aphrodite was unsatisfied with her marriage to the ugly god. She was repeatedly unfaithful, known to entertain several lovers, both gods and men.

Her undesirable behavior was the cause of conflict in many relationships. Aphrodite has been known to end marriages by stealing a man's heart away from his wife or lover. Because of her beauty and uncontrollable desire, she was seen as a threat to interrupt peace between gods because of jealousy. Zeus married Aphrodite to Hephaestus , when the god demanded her in order to release Hera from a magical trap. Zeus also saw this marriage as a solution to prevent others from their rivalry to possess the goddess of beauty.

This, however, didn't stop Aphrodite to have her affairs. Most notably and most desirable was the one with Ares , with whom Aphrodite was having a passionate but secret love affair.

The fruits of this affair were Phobos god of fear and Deimos god of terror. They usually accompanied Ares into a battle, causing fear and terror before destruction. And there were also Erotes which include Eros love , Anteros counter-love , Himeros sexual-desire , Pothos yearning and Harmonia harmony. However, for each of these, there are many sources connecting them to other origins and bloodline. For example, according to Hesiod, Eros is a primeval god and there are no reference to him by Homer.

Aphrodite is also noted for having an affair with Poseidon who showed her support when Aphrodite and Ares were chained on the bed by Hephaestus for displaying adultery in his chambers. She was grateful to Poseidon who managed to get them released from the chains and she mated with the god of the Sea.

Allegedly, she bore him a daughter Rhodos , a sea-nymph of the island Rhodes. She was also having a short affair with Dionysus , a god of wine and pleasure. They succumbed into having the pleasures of love under the influence of wine and Aphrodite then allegedly gave birth to Priapus minor god of fertility.

As part of a wedding gift to Psyche, Zeus made Psyche immortal. The two couples lived on Mt. Olympus for eternity. They bore several children. Most famous of those children was the goddess of Pleasure Volupta in Roman mythology. All across ancient Athens, Cytherea, and Cyprus, Aphrodite received large cult following and admiration from the people.

Cytherea was considered the exact place she passed by in order to fully emerge at Cyprus. As a result, there were numerous temples and shrines littered all across those places in honor of her.

In Cyprus, she was considered the great goddess of the city. Over the years, it has also been revealed that the ancient city of Odessus was a huge and thriving hub for the worship of Aphrodite. Generally speaking, the kind of reverence the ancients gave to Aphrodite was a bit more personal and intimate. It bordered on issues pertaining to building love, harmony, and mutual relationship.

Aphrodite was often heralded as the goddess that people prayed to when their relationships needed to be mended. It is for this reason why she is often called upon for unity and agreement — elements that are vitally needed in every human interaction, be it trade, politics, warfare or marital issues. Whenever two conflicting parties needed to put aside their differences and work, it was not uncommon for them to pray to Aphrodite.

As a result of this, she was considered a huge player in seeing to it that the Athenians had a stable democracy or political discussion. Over the centuries, Aphrodite has been shown in a multitude of ways and classical ancient arts. The only trait that runs through all those depictions is that she is painted or sculpted wearing beautiful garments of Cyprian or Archaic origins. She does not have any specific feature or attribute. Most of her statues after the 4 BCE were made to show her nude, or in some cases semi-nude example, the Venus de Milo.

Her features are also in a very symmetrical manner. In almost all cases, she has been seen as young and full of eternal beauty, flying a chariot pulled by sparrows. A great number of the statutes and sculptures of the goddess Aphrodite or Venus crouching were in vogue during the ancient times, particularly the Hellenistic periods.

Many of those of sculptures depict her in bath or crouching position. Again, this is a subtle reference to her birth story. The Venus of Cnidos , sculpted by Praxiteles in the 4th century B. Even before the Greeks emerged, Aphrodite had long been seen as a crucial figure in the world of lust and love of popular and advanced cultures.

Her stories had an immense effect on the Sumerians, Mesopotamian, and the Syro-Palestinians. In civilizations around Mesopotamia, for example, there was the goddess Ashtart sometimes called Astarte or Ishtar.

Goddesses like Ashtart were primarily responsible for both war and love. What the above means is that the Greeks were not the first to have a goddess that had traits like that of Aphrodite. Regardless of this, her myths and stories continued to be a huge source of inspiration to Renaissance artists and thinkers.