PlanetVenusOther Names
Aphrodite (Greek), Venus (Roman), Freyja (Norse, in her love/seiðr aspect), Inanna/Ishtar (Sumerian/Akkadian), Hathor (Egyptian), Rati (Hindu, goddess of love and desire), Kamadeva (Hindu, god of erotic love), Oshun (Yoruba), Parvati (Hindu, in her consort/lover aspect), Shakti (Hindu, creative feminine power), Xochiquetzal (Aztec, goddess of love, beauty, and flowers), Erzulie Freda (Vodou), Aengus Óg (Celtic, god of love and youth), Turan (Etruscan love goddess), Astarte (Phoenician), Prende (Albanian), Lada (Slavic love goddess), Eros/Cupid (Greek/Roman, as a cosmic principle, not merely a cupid)
Akin Ghosts
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Translations:
High Church:
Sexus (seksus)
Sanskrit:
काम (kama)
Church Runes:
Sex corresponds to Aphrodite in the Greek world, not merely the goddess of erotic love but of the generative power of attraction itself, the cosmic force that draws unlike things together and from their meeting births something new. In Hinduism she is present in the Shakti traditions, where the creative feminine energy of the universe (Shakti) unites with pure consciousness (Shiva) in the cosmic union that sustains all of creation, a teaching depicted explicitly in the yab-yum iconography of Tantric Buddhism, where deities embrace in sexual union to symbolise the inseparability of wisdom and compassion. In Chinese philosophy this is the dance of yin and yang, not merely their coexistence but their active interpenetration, the way each contains the seed of the other and together they generate the ten thousand things. In Norse mythology, Freyja rules over love, fertility, and also seiðr—the magic of weaving and fate—reflecting the ancient recognition that creative union and magical practice share the same root energy. The Sumerian Inanna, who descended into the underworld and returned, embodies the same principle: that the most profound creation requires the most profound vulnerability, the willingness to be unmade so that something new can be made.
Rumi: "The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along."
If War is generative through comparing and contrasting differences, Sex is generative by bringing differences together to create something new. Sex is not merely physical union, or even merely love. It is the very act of differences between people dissolving to birth something that neither could have produced alone. This is part of the great creative and beautiful generative joy of sexual love, but it is also what happens when two singers blend their voices in a duet, when collaborators solve a horrible problem together, when a teacher and student meet in a moment of genuine transmission and understanding passes between them.
This intimacy is everywhere within nature, day to day. Pollination is Sex. Symbiosis is Sex. The way a river carves a valley and the valley shapes the river, that mutual becoming, that reciprocal creation, is the energy of this Ghost at work in the world. Wherever two things meet and from their meeting something emerges that did not exist before, Sex is present.
The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi (Sumerian love poetry): "He has sprouted; he has burgeoned; he is lettuce planted by the water. He is the one my womb loves best. My well-stocked garden of the plain, my barley growing high in its furrow, my apple tree which bears fruit up to its crown."
And some reject it. Out of a fear of annihilation, out of vulnerability. Lonely narcissistic executives who cannot let anyone close enough to truly affect them. Avoidant workaholics who fill every waking hour with tasks so they never have to sit in silence with another human being. People who can never be honest, who can never let go, who live behind a wall of performance and irony because the alternative—to be truly seen, to be truly known, to risk being truly changed by another person—is too terrifying to contemplate. This rejection of Sex is as destructive as the rejection of War, and it is far more common. It produces a world of surfaces without depth, of connections without communion, of people who are surrounded by others and yet profoundly, utterly alone.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.3 (The first loneliness—the origin of Sex): "He was not at all happy. Therefore one who is alone is not happy. He desired a second. He became as large as a man and woman in close embrace. He caused that self to fall into two pieces. From that arose husband and wife."
Venus, the planet, is often called Earth's twin, similar in size and composition, yet shrouded in impenetrable cloud. This is fitting. The energy of Sex is the closest Ghost to our own Earthly experience, the most intimate and personal of the cosmic forces, and yet it is also the most veiled, the most easily obscured by ego, fear, and the accumulated armour of a life spent protecting oneself from genuine contact.