Wisdom comes in many forms. From the cool strategic wisdom of a lecturer to the calculated wisdom of a General to the wisdom that comes with age and experience in the human experience. In the Hellenistic Religions, it is Athena who is given credit for wisdom, but since there are many kinds of wisdom, we must accept too that there are aspects of all the Gods that share wisdom with humanity. In the case of Aphrodite, it is emotional wisdom.
What is emotional wisdom?
As I see it, emotional wisdom is the ability to feel deeply yet apply to those feelings a sense of logic that allows us to examine them and learn from them. When we love, we often lose our sense of logic. When we hate it is often irrational. When we desire we often fail to consider the consequences.
Emotional wisdom is our ability to be spontaneous while still putting thought into the things we do or have done. Learning about ourselves and the way we relate to the world by examining our own feelings.
Why Aphrodite?
Of the Olympian Gods, I tend to think of Aphrodite as the only one that has a realm of influence that is almost totally committed to emotions. Love, Lust, Desire, Compassion, and even such emotions as Jealousy and Hatred are part of her considerable arsenal.
The ability to learn from these, to adjust how we live and how we manage our reactions, has to also be part of her arsenal. The shield, if you will, in the hands of Aphrodite, the warrior.
The primordial God Eros is impulse and compulsion. He is also that which draws things together, like gravity on a cosmic scale, but as desire and longing on a human scale. These are also parts of the domain of Aphrodite, and love, that primal emotion that forces us to care for our children, hold our parents in awe, and to feel the very power of the Gods themselves is her greatest weapon.
I use the metaphors of war because emotion, and thus devotion to this Goddess, is very much like a war. It is, as the myths would tell us, the union of Aphrodite and Ares. A conjunction of divinity which should not make sense yet fits perfectly together.
It is here that the wisdom of Aphrodite emerges in its importance. Within all of us is a war of thoughts, impulses, and emotions. And within us is the ability to come to terms with all of these and balance them so that we can live a life of well being. Aphrodite, her wisdom, is what allows us to love and not be swept away to such an extent that we lose ourselves, and to not accept that wisdom, that ability to control one's emotional reactions and act in our own best interest.
Too often, those of us in the Pagan world look upon Aphrodite as a chaotic goddess. A goddess of pure emotion and physical immersion in those emotions. A goddess that would have us gorge ourselves in orgies of sexual activity until we are exhausted, but that ignores her wisdom. It ignores that Aphrodite not only gives us that love of sexual acts, but the love of innocent children, and the love of our parents, and that loving feeling between friends. She can give us a lust for sex but also a lust for living, a lust for beauty, a lust for knowledge.
We too often dive into Pandemos and ignore Ourania, and that is a lack of wisdom on our part. A crying shame, really.