Aphrodite is perhaps one of the most misunderstood and transformed goddesses of the ancient world.
We tend to know her as the goddess of beauty, sexuality, love and seduction. But I have become increasingly interested in a more primordial Aphrodite: the goddess who rises from the sea foam, emerging from the depths and connected with the regenerative and creative forces of nature.
There is something powerful about this image of a goddess born from the sea. She emerges from the meeting of elements, from the movement and mystery of the natural world. Her beauty is not something imposed upon her. It is something that arises.
And perhaps this is where we might begin to understand Aphrodite differently.
Beauty as an expression of life
Her beauty, to me, is not beauty for vanity's sake, nor beauty offered for the pleasure or approval of another.
It is the beauty that emerges when we feel whole, alive and true to ourselves. The beauty of being at home in our bodies, connected to our desires and open to the experience of being alive.
This is a very different understanding of beauty from the one we are so often offered.
We are surrounded by messages about how women should look, how we should age, what we should change and how we might become more desirable. Beauty becomes something to pursue, maintain and perfect — something measured against an external ideal.
But what if beauty were not something we needed to achieve?
What if it were something that could emerge when we stopped measuring ourselves against the expectations of others?
Perhaps Aphrodite invites us to remember a beauty that is not dependent on approval. A beauty that belongs to us, because we belong to ourselves.
Love as a creative force
Aphrodite is also known as the goddess of love, but I don't think her story needs to be confined to romantic or sexual love.
Love can be a force of connection, devotion and creation. It draws us towards one another, towards the things that move us, and towards the experiences that make life feel meaningful.
It can be found in the relationships we nurture, the art we create, the bodies we inhabit and the world we care for.
Love, in this sense, is not simply something we receive from another person. It is also a force that moves through us, shaping what we bring into the world.
There is a kind of creative power in allowing ourselves to feel deeply, to desire, to make, to connect and to be moved by beauty.
And this, too, feels connected to Aphrodite.
The beautiful woman: object and scapegoat
The story of Aphrodite also makes me think about the way women's beauty and sexuality have been understood throughout history.
She was beautiful. Men desired her. And somehow, in the stories that followed, the woman became responsible for the desire of the men around her.
The beautiful woman became both object and scapegoat.
We can see echoes of this idea in the ways women are still judged. We are told to be beautiful, but not too beautiful. To be desirable, but not to invite desire. To express our sexuality, but only within boundaries determined by someone else.
A woman's body can become a surface onto which other people's expectations, fears and desires are projected.
I find this transformation deeply revealing. What happens when a woman's beauty is no longer understood as something that belongs to her, but as something that exists for others to look at, possess or judge?
And what happens when she begins to reclaim it?
Reclaiming the feminine
Perhaps Aphrodite invites us to reclaim something that has been lost: the understanding that a woman's beauty and sexuality belong to her.
That the female body is not an object.
That desire is not something to be ashamed of, and beauty does not exist for the gaze of another.
This isn't about rejecting beauty or denying the pleasure of being seen. It is about changing our relationship with both.
We can adorn ourselves because we love colour, texture, symbolism and the way a beautiful object makes us feel. We can celebrate our bodies without needing them to meet an ideal. We can explore our sensuality without making it a performance for someone else.
We can choose beauty for ourselves.
For me, this is part of the deeper meaning of sacred adornment. Jewellery and objects can carry stories, memories and symbols that remind us of who we are and what matters to us. They can become small, tangible expressions of something we feel within.
Not a means of becoming someone else, but a way of honouring who we already are.
The beauty of emergence
I keep returning to the image of Aphrodite rising from the sea.
Something emerging from the depths. Something beautiful coming into being through the movement of the natural world.
Perhaps this is the beauty she invites us to remember: not something we must strive for, but something that can arise when we become more fully ourselves.
Beauty, love, emergence and regeneration.
Not ideals to live up to, but experiences we can return to, again and again.
And perhaps the invitation is simply this: to come back to ourselves, to honour the bodies we inhabit, and to allow our own beauty to belong to us.
Love, Nadiah