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Apohrodite / Venus
Greek / Roman

The goddess of love, beauty, passion, relationships, fertility and sexuality goes almost equally by both her Greek and Roman names. She is generally not worshipped by Wiccans as their main deity, and I can suspect the reasons why. Love is a powerful and dangerous thing. It can spark jealously and cause distraction from other issues in one's life. Fondness for beauty can easily turn into vanity and narcissism. Instead, she is generally invoked only when needed: to repair rifts in relationships, strengthen bonds between lovers, and attract suitors.

Aphrodite is strongly associated with the element of water, because she arose from the sea fully grown, generated by Uranus's severed genitals. Water is also associated with emotions.

While Aphodite's sphere of influence is particularly concrete even for a Greco-Roman god, she covers all aspects of those areas. She is not only love, but lust. Those who slighted her might find their spouse suddenly in love with someone else. And it was she who sparked the Trojan War, Promising Helen of Troy to Paris in exchange for him declaring her the most beautiful goddess above Hera and Athena.

One guest in Plato's Symposium distinguished two Aphrodite, though more as philosophical reflection than mythological account. The elder, Aphrodite Urania (Heavenly), he called the daughter of Uranus, of no mother born, and the younger he called Aphrodite Pandemos (Common), daughter of Zeus and Dione. These two Aphrodite stand respectively for a nobler and meaner kind of love. ¹

Fidelity means nothing to her personally. While married to Hephaestus (Vulcan), Aphrodite look numerous lovers, including Hermes and Dionysos (Bacchus). She fell in love of Ares (Mars), the god of war, continuing the tradition of association between love and war evident in older Babylonian and Summerian mythos in the forms of Astarte, Ishtar and Inanna.