Shape-shifting

Exploring the cross-cultural, gender-bending goddess of Cyprus

Stretching out beyond a valley of rock and cypress trees, beneath a deep blue sky, is an expanse of shimmering sea. Around my feet are scattered stones, increasing in size to immense blocks of crumbling limestone. These are remnants of a temenos (a sacred space dedicated to a deity) and a pillared hall, fragments of what was once an immense shrine complex within the ancient city of Palaepaphos, in modern-day Kouklia, on the west coast of Cyprus. Knowing the vast scale of this ancient site, I do a double take at some of these stones underfoot as I wander the hilltop, as if at any moment I could be crunching over fragments of sacred matter.

For millennia, this site was an important sanctuary to the goddess Aphrodite, a place of worship and pilgrimage for inhabitants of Cyprus, and those in the island’s easterly neighbours of Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and the Levant. Long before this mythical deity took shape, however, ancient Cypriots worshipped another: a figure known today simply as the Great Goddess of Cyprus, or Kypris. The megalithic sanctuary at Palaepaphos (‘Old Paphos’) can be traced back to c.1200 BC, in the Late Bronze Age. The cult of Aphrodite which grew on the island in the following centuries inherited some of the Great Goddess’s characteristics, as well as absorbing stories and symbols from across the water in the Near East, from the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna (later Ishtar), who in turn is closely linked to the warrior goddess Astarte, worshipped by the Canaanites and Phonecians. Since antiquity, Cyprus has been a melting pot of cultures, the island looking north to Turkey, east to Syria and Lebanon, south to Israel and North Africa, and out further west to the Greek islands. Standing at the ruins at Kouklia gives a tangible starting point for exploring a goddess whose origins and history are as fluid as the sea from which she was allegedly born.

Tumultuous beginnings

Aphrodite has a number of origin myths, which tangle across time and geographies, but in the Theogony of c. 730–700 BC, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s genealogy of the gods, she has a memorably bloody beginning. According to Hesiod, Aphrodite is the child of the earth goddess Gaia, and her husband (and also son), Uranus. The pair sired many children; Uranus, however, takes a dislike to some of their progeny and hides them painfully within Gaia’s body. Gaia implores her other children to help her, and it is Chronos who obliges; using a flint sickle made by Gaia, Chronos castrates, and overthrows, his father:

And so soon as he had cut off the members with flint and cast them from the land into the surging sea [...] a white foam spread around them from the immortal flesh, and in it there grew a maiden. First she drew near holy Cythera, and from there, afterwards, she came to sea-girt Cyprus, and came forth an awful and lovely goddess.

In this tale, she is both body and water, divine matter meeting in foaming crests from which she rises. This ties in with the debate around the etymology of Aphrodite’s name. Most enduringly, her name was linked by Hesiod to aphrós (ἀφρός), meaning ‘sea-foam’, but this is now considered a false ‘folk etymology’, perhaps as a back-formation from the myth of her birth. Today, scholars believe the name to be non-Greek in origin, perhaps Semitic, derived from her Eastern counterparts of Astarte and Inanna-Ishtar, but there is no definitive root. Yet ancient Greek word-lore has conjured up some compelling ideas: the second part of her name has been linked to -odítē, ‘wanderer’, and -dítē, ‘bright’. ‘Aphrodite the wanderer’ is a fitting epithet for this goddess who traversed the ancient world, harnessed by different cultures at different times.

Changing image

At each stage of her evolution, Aphrodite embodies some of the social, political, and belief values of the time. Her enduring epithet is the goddess of love, sexuality, and beauty, but as her Eastern predecessors show – as well as her bloody mythological origins and affairs with Adonis, Ares, and numerous others in The Odyssey and The Iliad – this is not an uncomplicated romantic love but one tinged with violence and vengeance – the extremes of passion. In Bettany Hughes’s ‘biography’ of the goddess, Venus and Aphrodite: History of a Goddess (2019), she traces some of these evolutions across time and place, starting with her possible beginnings in Chalcolithic stone female-male carvings and terracotta figurines of deities and worshippers, excavated from Cyprus and nearby lands.

“You can turn man into woman, / Woman into man” In a hymn to Inanna by Enheduanna (c. 2300 BC)

Cyprus is strewn with archaeological finds, such as tiny, pale green picrolite figurines from around 2000-3000 BC, their bodies cruciform in shape, with pronounced vulvas and pregnant stomachs, as well as long phallus-like necks. Often found in graves, the prevalence of these androgynous objects, and their often pierced heads, suggests they were worn as amulets – “taliswomen-men”, in Hughes’s term. Other finds further complicate our gendered interpretations of a feminine, fertile Great Goddess. In 1976, in the village of Lemba, near Paphos, archeologists discovered a statue known today as the 'Lady of Lemba'. Dating from around 3000 BC in the Chalcolithic period, this ‘lady’ bears resemblance to the picrolite figurines, with wide hips and a bulging belly and a long neck that is decidedly phallic. The size of this limestone carving – around 30cm – is extremely rare, however, so the 'Lady of Lemba' was likely an idol upon an altar, rather than a personal, domestic amulet. It is not certain what these intersex entanglements signify, but it is a theme carried through the myth of Aphrodite. A god-goddess named Aphroditos, or Hermaphroditos, was worshipped at shrine sites across the island, depicted in statues with breasts and female clothing as well as a beard, and sometimes revealing male genitalia. In Ovid’s Latin epic Metamorphoses of 8 CE, he describes the union of Aphrodite and Hermes resulting in a son who is eventually ‘merged’ with the Naiad nymph Salmacis, and the two are transformed into a male-female deity named Hermaphrodite.

Against the image

At the sanctuary of Aphrodite, archeologists unearthed another curious object: a large stone, smooth, dark, and roughly conical. This is a baetyl, a stone held in sacred regard. For worshippers, this cult idol would have been considered something like an embodiment of, or perhaps a material entrypoint to, the goddess, bringing the realm of the divinities a little closer and allowing worshippers to ground their prayers and rites in the earthly matter of rocks and stone. This imageless form of worship is thought to have travelled to Cyprus from the East. There is something vaguely, obliquely figurative about these rounded baetyl stones, as if hinting at the most basic idea of human form. Mostly, though, this is an intriguing object with aniconic power – without literal human representation, but imbued with immense potency.

Wandering Aphrodite

By the third century BC, depictions of Aphrodite had departed from the more abstracted, and sometimes androgynous, representations of a powerful female deity; instead, the goddess was more often a classical, life-like, idealised beauty and, notably, often denuded of her garments. This continued through to her transformation by the Romans into Venus (famously depicted in the Early Renaissance as Botticelli’s beauty in The Birth of Venus). One of the goddess’s most renowned sculptural depictions is known as the 'Knidian Aphrodite', thought to be the first fullsize, nude, devotional statue of a female goddess.

Her hand drifts coyly, half-concealing and half-drawing attention to her sex, while the other hand grips a drape of fabric that makes no effort to hide her form. Only existing today in copies, the 'Knidian Aphrodite' was created by the famed sculptor Praxiteles of Athens in the ancient Greek city of Knidos, in what is now south-western Turkey. Hughes notes that the 'Knidian Aphrodite’s' pose of barely-concealed nudity mirrors that of Masaccio’s fresco of c.1425, The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which, even in her grief, Eve covers her sex as she and Adam leave the Garden forever. This isn’t an altogether unusual link between the Greek goddess and Christianity: despite the decline, even desecration, of the goddess as Christendom took hold, elements of Aphrodite seemingly endured in a new form, that of the Virgin Mary. Even today in Cyprus, her presence can be traced within the rituals of an Eastern Orthodox ceremony. At a church in Lemba on Good Friday, I saw women of the village decorating the wooden frame of an Epitaphios (translated as ‘upon the grave, or tomb’), which contains an image of Christ being prepared for burial. This tradition has been linked back to a midsummer festival, in evidence in Athens by the mid-fifth century BC, associated with the worship of Adonis. Women would lie an image of the fatally wounded Adonis on a wooden plank adorned with flowers, and allegedly “beat their breasts” in grief as Aphrodite is said to have done while mourning her deceased lover. The flowers may be in reference to the red anemones (‘windflowers’) said to spring up from the blood of Adonis’s wounds.

In her travels, Aphrodite-Venus is never far away from her tumultuous roots and associations with violence, vengeance, and extremity. In 58 BC, Cyprus fell from Ptolemaic rule to become a province of Rome, and as Hughes shows, the Greek Aphrodite’s transition to the Latin Venus goes hand in hand with the Roman “colonisation of the domain of Aphrodite”, the goddess strategically seized along with Greek lands and reconfigured to suit a society in fearsome flux. Aphrodite’s shape-shifting, boundaryless biography means she is not quite ‘rooted’ in Cyprus, but is nonetheless indelibly connected to the island: the cult tradition of Kypris was not just carried through stories and ritual practice through the millennia but also embedded in stone, from shrine buildings and carved votive offerings to Petra tou Romiou, also known as ‘Aphrodite’s Rock’, another of her claimed birthplaces. In this way, the goddess remains inextricably elemental, and endlessly mutable.

Grace Crabtree is a painter and recently did an artist residency at the Cyprus College of Art. Her artwork can be seen at gracecrabtree.co.uk