Welcome to our um love and ether for August 2nd. We are now in the realm of apatia or apaturos. And I'm so excited to share with you today what all the many meanings are of that epithet. But before we begin, if you have them, feel feel free to light a candle or put a water offering or put food or flowers. Um, I'm just going to go light my candle myself. Together, let's recite the civiline hymn to Aphrodite. Ethereal, illustrious, laughing queen, born of the sea and lover of the night. Mother of longing, all connecting, who joins the world in harmony. All things spring from you, oh divine power, the triple fates are ruled by your decree. All the works of craft and love yield to your hand. With a smile, oh Aphrodite, you sway the allenircling heavens, the fruitful earth, and the storming oceans. All obey you. All are awed by you. Companion of the brooml god. Beautiful goddess of marriage. Mother of love. Lover of the banquet. Source of persuasion who grants secret favors. Illustrious born seen and unseen. Gentle lover. Luprical who smiles upon mortals. Prolific most desired lifegiver. Kind goddess. Wielder of the scepter of all the immortals. You bind mortals and every tribe of beasts in magic chains of mad desire. Come lovely Kiprien and bless these rights, whether radiant in the heavens or presiding in the temples of Syria, guiding your golden chariot over the sacred floods of Egypt, or dancing on the azure shores by billowing seas, with circling choirs of mortals and beautious nymphs with ceruan eyes, or riding out along the dusty banks renowned of old, or if in Kipris with your fair mother, where married women yearly come to praise You and the pure virgins sing hymns to you and to Adonis. Come divine union for you I call with holy reverent mind. So our next step in preparation for our vows, if you'd like to take vows to Aphrodite um for either a year or longer, we are going to be doing that on the 16th of August at 11:00 a.m. Pacific, 2:00 p.m. Eastern. Please wear white and have offerings ready. I'll be sending further instructions in the emails. And you'll need, excuse me, your prayer to Aphrodite that you've written as well as a personal vow. And I gave kind of a general vow format that could be used for either a one-year vow or a lifetime vow. And it allows space for you avowing to Aphrodite, choosing an epithet of the year, explaining how what you're going to do in honor of Aphrodite and maybe in honor of that epithet in particular that year. And then to sort of say to her and and as I'm working for you, please help me. And this is where I would ask you to bless my life. bless me with skillfulness, with provision, with love or healing and say, you know, would you kindly help me with this as I am also in service to you and allow yourself to be some kind of a light of devotion in the world and maybe state a few uh virtues that you'd like to bring forward in your work with her. So you're please make it your own of course but this is about the length that you want your vow to be like you know about two paragraphs and or you know 10 sentences at most and you want it to be concise but poetic you know and um it's better if you write it in your own words and then you can always take that and have your um like if you do a gram grammar check or a spelling check or if you like to run the things that you write through chat GPT that's fine but write it in your own words and really grasp the essence before you submit it to any editorial procedures that way it's really coming from your heart today our archetype is the fem fatal and here's a quote from Alice Monroe to be a fem fatal tell you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastry disastrously beautiful. You just have to have the will to disturb. And this is really the essence of the fem fatal. The fem fatal is who she is because her sensual presence and her uh embodiment of grace and light and joy and her uh natural sexuality that just flows forth from her like a sacred spring without any particular destination and not for just anyone but just sort of naturally present. That kind of a woman is disruptive. She's disruptive to patriarchal order. She's disruptive to gender roles. She's disruptive to our ideas about what we think female sexuality should look like or act like. It's disruptive to the over sexualization and under sexualization of women, particularly mothers and women over 50. It's disruptive to the sick sexualization of the young innocent maiden who doesn't understand how blatant her native sexuality is and it seeks to protect her. The fem fatal is the one who says this world was not set up for me to be this way and yet I am this way. And so I will confound this system and I will use this system so that I may survive this system. That is the will to disturb. So the French term fetal usually means deadly woman or a fatal woman. And um we see this really blossoming during um the film noir of the early 20th century. um where you'll have like you know the the um inspect private inspector sitting in his office and you hear his voice. He says she walked in like 5' 3 in of trouble and then she comes in and she often looks like this like smoking a cigarette hair perfectly quafted gloves dressed to the nines but something haunting about her. She's very creos in a way, but more not just black cat, black panther. There's apex predator energy that she's holding that separates her from simply black cat of mystery. So, a fem fatal is usually depicted as like charming and alluring, but also seductive and manipulative and puts men in bad situations. and oh, it's like always her fault. You know, they're really so victimized by her. And you know, the idea of her coming in and like running a muck in a man's life and he gives up everything for her or her coming into a man's life and causing him to risk it all. It actually suggests that men want this. how focused they are on their own sense of how horrible it is. It's almost like me thinks they doth protest too much. The critique of the fem fatal and her dangerous nature is actually a blatant um declaration of what they actually want, which in many cases in the patriarchal view is for her to impossibly overpower them because the system was set up for her failure and yet and his success. And yet here she is dominating him. So this concept can be like explored and we see it reinvented in lots of different ways. Like film noir really gives us a very like um iconic snapshot of this. But we see the fun fatal everywhere. We see her in um you know Juliet. We see her in Romeo and Juliet. We see her in um Kate Shopan's The Awakening. We see her in um you know any story of a woman who is beautiful and dangerous and she's not only dangerous to you, she's dangerous to even herself. So what is the fem fatal for a feminist view? for the priestess of Aphrodite who is empowered, who is in her queenly despina, who is in her, you know, smart Dia, who is in her black cat, Cryios, who is in her empowered pandemos of sexual pleasure, who is in her um, you know, Melissa of sweetness. What is a priestess to do when each of those qualities individually and all of them together are demonized in a woman under patriarchy? To be smart, to be beautiful, to be sexually liberated, to be silent, to have interiority, to have allure. All of these things are deemed somehow by patriarchal standards to be terrible qualities in women, dangerous qualities in women. And so through our feminist lens, the fem fatal is subverting the patriarchal system and challenging the notion that women are passive victims or objects of desire. And in a, you know, a world where you basically have like three to choose from, passive victim, mommy, or object of desire, none of these is like really great, you know? So to opt out of those three and say no, who to whomver I am whatever, but to the patriarchy I am the fem fatal, but I'm not the one who dies in the end. I'm the one who walks away having lit her cigarette on the bonfire of what she has done to the system that was designed against her from the beginning. She also exposes the vulnerabilities of men and in patriarchy of patriarchy being predicated on the idea that if women don't aren't containerized, men will fall prey to us. If you really think about that, who does that mean has the power in that situation? It's us. If we are the ones that are so dangerous that women will, you know, lead men astray, a grown man that he will fall prey to us, a grown man. Wow. How powerful are we? Even as we're being told that we're not, look at how powerful we are. So the fem fatal is the one who exposes the underbelly of the patriarchy and who sort of rakes it with her well manicured claws. What are the weapons of the fam fetal? Well, first is her beauty. And this doesn't just mean conventional beauty. I know that you know the world that we live in has a particular beauty standard but by now we've seen numerous different ways in which our beauty can be conveyed through our wit and wisdom our dia quality through our sweetness our melissa quality through our um detachment and hard to get urania quality all of these are the weapons of the fem fatal And her beauty is expressed through any of these different channels and obviously through all of them at different times. So it's not just about adhering to a standard of beauty. It's about knowing your beauty, knowing it deeply, doing the things for yourself that enhance it and make you feel amazing and then wielding that in the world. And it's only a weapon to someone who poses a danger to you. Otherwise, it's a tool and best it's a gift of you sharing yourself with the world. The fem fatal will also use sex as a way to get what she wants. She isn't afraid of having sex with somebody in a transactional way for the sake of her security when that's what's necessary. And when if any of us are sort of feeling a little judgmental in our hearts about the idea of a woman having sex with somebody for an exchange of any kind, whether it's a house or whether it's safety or whether it's, you know, money or whether it's a car or, you know, let us not forget that most of our grandmothers did this or most of our great and great great-grandmothers definitely did this. It's just that it doesn't always look the same. The way that it's portrayed, for example, the stigma attached to being a sex worker is the wrong stigma. The sh it's in the in the um you know idea of of shame. Really the only shame that's present in sex as as transaction is the fact that it would need to exist at all because of the system in which we find ourselves soaking immersed and no matter how we keep swimming up toward the light, it's like we never quite break the surface. not to, you know, forget the plight of women worldwide, not just in our more progressive circles, but even women our progressive circles have problems. So using sex transactionally is not so far off for any of us that we might sometimes think if we're only looking at it through a lens of shame. But when we look at it through the lens of a weapon to those whom are dangerous, a um blessing to those whom we love, and a tool for our well-being, we can see it in that light. And then finally, secrets are a weapon of the fem fatal, whether they are her own or someone else's. What a woman knows about a man or about someone else can make or break destinies. I'm moved to call upon the, you know, spirit of Marie Lavo who through reading fortunes for wealthy white women who were wives of like Congress and or you know of of governmental officials and wealthy um property owners and um you know tycoons. She gleaned information that she would wield every once in a while with one of those men in order to get them to do something for her. Like, you know, this orphanage needs food and you'd better send some over otherwise I'll have to code word whatever. So secrets and what we know can be the weapon of those to whom you know those whom pose a danger can be a tool for us both our own secrets and the secrets of others. The secrets of others being the, you know, leverage that we might hold, but the secrets of ourselves being the more important ones. We live entire an entire sovereignty in what we don't reveal. This is why so many influencers will say, "Disappear. Reinvent yourself. Come back in a couple of months in a glowed up version of you. don't tell anyone while you're doing it is because there's a sovereignty, an autonomy, a self-control, a reestablishment of agency, a removal of oneself from that patriarchal matrix into a world entirely of one's own, a world where one wields one's secret name, wrapped in one's golden cord of protection and power. And so when we are allowing ourselves to have that secret inner world, we're giving ourselves reprieve from that patriarchal matrix which demonizes every good thing about us whenever we challenge it. Here is a perfect example of a fam fatal in all the best ways. Josephine Baker. She was born Freda Josephine McDonald in June 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri. And she was an African-American entertainer, civil rights activist, and then a World War II spy. Let's get into it. She started her career as a performer in the United States in the 1920s. And she had this act where she would sing as if she was from the islands. and she would dress herself in a skirt made of bananas. The phallic uh implications of that not wasted on anyone. She was in the voler and the casino deer because she left the US. She found that in the US she was being treated horribly and there was terrible racial discrimination. She had limits to her opportunities of places she was not allowed to perform. So she moved to relatively liberal France and she took it by storm. She often just went ahead and stripped down because she made so much money doing that that she was able to accomplish a lot of other things. Um she joined the French resistance during World War II and began working as a spy for the allies. And because she was traveling so much all over Europe as an entertainer and she spoke not multiple languages, she was very popular. And because this is one of these revolutionary things because she was a woman of color and thus exoticized within this largely white context of, you know, World War II Europe where there was a lot of demonization happening of people of color. A lot of people of color were imprisoned. A lot of people of color fled. She was this very exotic. It was almost like she was hidden in plain view because she would show up somewhere and because as an entertainer she caused such a ruckus. Everyone got cemented in their mind that she was an entertainer and no one even thought for a second that she was a spy. And this is an area where she used this exoticization which under other circumstances would be very uncomfortable, very demeaning to her, not allowing her to be a separate self, not allowing her to just be part of a oneness. That exoticization can other someone, but she used it to her advantage. And she was a genius. She was actually a genius. She would hide coded messages on her sheet music or she would pin them inside her underwear so that when she got where she was going, she could share the coded messages with those who needed to see them. She also, because she was such a famous entertainer, had access to highranking officials and diplomats. She would be in the room with them. They did not know that she spoke multiple languages including French and German. That facilitated it. She would just be speaking to them in English or in you know French and then listening in as she was had also learned German. In 1941, she officially joined the Ducian Bureau, which was the like uh CIA of France, and she received formal training in espionage techniques, and she was given all of these different missions. She would hide messages, she would transport documents, she would seduce German officials who attended her performances. She would, you know, we don't know the lengths to which she went to access them, but what we know is that she earned several honors and recognitions, the Rosetta deist, and she was made a shalier of the Lejon Don by the French government. And then after the war, she kept going. She became a civil rights activist here in the US. And she came back to the US. She would refuse to perform for segregated audiences. She used her platform to promote equality. She was the only female speaker at the historic March on Washington where Martin Luther King delivered the I have a dream speech. She was just this master of putting a mistress, of putting herself into places that allegedly women and especially women of color were not supposed to be in positions of authority where she was not supposed to wield the kind of power she had. And she did it all in a banana skirt, half naked with a smile on her face, collecting bank so much money. She passed away on April 12th, 1975. Um, she also like adopted like numerous children, like almost a dozen children. We also have a bonus ancestrous for this uh week, this lesson, which is Matahari. And this is unfortunately a sad ending to this story, but um she was also a magnificent woman. Malgareta Giluda Zel. She was an exotic dancer from uh she was a Dutch from uh Holland and she was a cortisan and she traveled around in the early 20th century. Uh born this month on August 7th, 1876. She actually um was also a spy. Um her childhood was very troubled. Her parents divorced. She was abandoned. She basically was raising herself when she was 18. She um became a bride for hire. And uh that was fine with her cuz it got her out of her um family situation. And she went with him to now place we now call Indonesia. and they had two children together, but they did have um a lot of problems and so she returned to Europe, settled in Paris and reinvented herself as an exotic dancer named Matahari which meant eye of the day in the melee language of the tribes of Indonesia. Her performances were she would blend together elements of you know what they called at the time oriental style dance that was derivative of what she saw when she was in Indonesia. She would dress in, you know, what looks like, you know, kind of a combination of an Egyptian belly dance costume and maybe like a few other embellishments like, you know, that gave her a Middle Eastern flare. Um, and she was very sensual. And so during World War I, you know, is is its eruption, she like Josephine Baker had access to all of these highpowered, influential men, and so she became a spy. However, she was accused of being a double agent and working for both sides and passing on military secrets from the French side to the Germans and the Germans back to the French. And so when the French authorities caught up with her in 1917, they put her through a trial. She was found guilty and she was sentenced to death. She was executed by firing squad in Vincen's France. And you know, there have been a lot of different speculations over the years, both fictional and historical, about whether or not she actually was a double agent or whether she was a spy even at all. But the the fact of the matter remains that enough um you know that maybe she could have been a scapegoat. That's another another thought. But the fact remains that she did have enough access and the kind of skills that Josephine Baker had. And there's no reason to dishonor her memory by claiming her to have no agency whatsoever. She did. And whatever it was that she did, she was again utilizing her body and her ws as a tool of liberation amidst a war, which one can hardly blame her for doing. And we may never know the full story, but what we can tell is that her um presence was galvanizing and to this day still is. Now, we're going to get into this epithet today. Apuros or Apuria. So, there was a place, we've already studied it, that's the temple at Fagoria on the Tam Peninsula on the Black Sea in what is now Russia. Um and it was called Apaturum and it was the the place called Apatou is where Aphrodite Urania was worshiped among the many places that she was worshiped. But remember back to our Urania lesson when we learned about the Black Sea priestess and her jewelry and her grave goods and how close her tomb was to what they believed to be is the temple at Fogoria and potentially is the Apatum. So we know from um Hakatus of Mletus and who um it's like this it's Stefanus of Bzantium quotes Mil Hecatus of Milletus that says Apatum the sanctuary of Aphrodite and Fanagoria mentioned by Stravo in the 11th book. Heaus also knew a bay of Apatum in Asia. These are two different places, but you know, Apachuria Temple may have not been right on that bay, but might have been in proximity to it. Stravo says it was on the coast, right near that water, the Tamman Bay um in Fugoria, and that you would see it if you went to Fanugoria, uh Chepe, Hermonasa, and Apatou. and says, "Sailing into Cororoanditis, one reaches Fagoria, a noteworthy city, and either uh Keepy or Chepy and Emonasa and Apatum, the sanctuary of Aphrodite." Then he also talks about how Fanagoria also has a sanctuary of Aphrodite Apurus which then gives you the realization of okay this is two different cities but they both worship the same Aphrodite or both goddesses of those indigenous regions were named Aphrodite. Then Ply the Elder mentions it in the natural history. He says the towns at the entrance to the Bosphorus are Hermanasa, then the Malaysian colony Chepi or Sepi near Strata Fanagoria and the nearly deserted Apaturus. Now, Ply is writing in the first century and it says like, you know, it's almost deserted. However, um by the second and third centuries, we know that people flooded into that city. So, it may have undergone like an earthquake or some natural disaster or a flood or a war or infighting or a plague of some sort. But where ply is referencing it as almost empty you know around the first century but by the second and third centuries it is you know it's cruisin and um he also suggests that it's coastal so both ply and strabo say it's coastal and then Stephanus of Bzantium quoting Hecatus of Mleus says it is its own place and that there's also a bay. So it's possible that um what Hecatus is writing about is the temple at Fenagoria which was of Apaturus and Urania and also the shrine or sanctuary that was on the bay and that would have also been dedicated to Apaturus and that one was known as Apurum. So, we don't know. That's the short answer. The short answer is there's still debate. We don't know exactly where. And someday I'm going to get to go there and then I'll be able to hike around and then I think I will have a better sense. So, the Greeks arrive at these two distinct sanctuaries, one on the bay and one inland a bit that are both referred to under this name that's local. And the Greeks say, "Oh, this must be um what are they saying?" It sounds like they're saying aura and they through their linguistic filter hear it as having um a a different sound that means something in their own language. So the word apaturos is not actually originally a Greek word. It's not part of the classical Greek language. The word apatate means deception. So, Apaturus means the deceptive one, but um it's not actually the name. The name at that site on the Black Sea on the Bosperus was probably from the Cyian language wherein op means water and tur means moving swiftly. Aura. It's probably there was a sacred spring at the inland temple of Fagoria that was originally a Cyian site could have been dedicated to Artimasa, the sort of Cyian serpentine water goddess, the Iranian Arti, the Persian Anahita, the Armenian Anahit, the Semitic Gastarte. Any of these could have originally been in this place because all of them went through there. But that place um likely was Cyian and meant the place of the fastm moving spring and was dedicated to a local goddess. And then when um and then the other place on the bay or on the sea would have also been dedicated to a local goddess. And maybe they were the same and maybe they were different. We'll never know. But what we do know is that um the Greeks called both of them apuros meaning the deceiver from their word apatate. So, I want to just point out that in this epithet itself, even though it's a very localized epithet, and you don't see it used a lot for Aphrodite, really just locally in that one place, it's still fascinating to me because like the nature of Apurus is to be um a disruptive energy in a colon like a postc colonial patriarchal matrix. And that's exactly what this goddess is linguistically where she gets called the deceiver, but really it just means the fast running spring. She's a quick running spring confounding the colonizer and evading colonization and thus becomes a deceiver. It's like she I don't it's hard to explain but it's almost like she embodies what they put on her like they put this label on her and she was like oh okay obscurity confusing confettulement yeah sure I'll do that no problem and that is the nature of this epithet and the fatal oh I'm the wicked woman okay great let's play wicked woman oh I'm the seducer. I'm the destroyer. I'm the one who, you know, like made you stop playing video games or whatever. Okay. Yes. Call me the destroyer. She adopts it as a power source because she's not here to be obedient. She's here to break the system. Now all the goddesses that I mentioned on that previous page later came to be called Aphrodite by the Greeks and they all have these things in common. Athonic nature or some association with the underworld. They inhabit waterways. So you know as well as the moist and fertile earth. They're goddesses of human fertility, animal fertility, crop fertility, you name it. They're all considered to be kingmakers, civic goddesses, and goddesses of war in their particular precincts. And most of them had unic priesthoods, that is castrati, um men who severed their penises during ecstatic rebels, cast them onto the altar of the goddess, and took vows of um celibacy for the rest of their lives. And so even though we can't say that these are these are corresponding goddesses because and it would be inadvisable for us to try to like lump them all together. It's better for us to say okay each of them has distinctive characteristics related to her culture of origin but they all have enough in common and it's known that all these tribes influenced each other over time during trade and wars and nomadic travel. They all have enough in common that it's possible that each variation on these goddesses, Anahita, Arti, Artasa, Aphroditi, Astarte, um, Ishtar, all of them might derive from an older original great goddess figure whose name we'll never know, but whose name is subtly embedded in the A sound. that is common to the description of this energy in these specific ways in many different cultures. So um beyond the cyian place name of apuros um of apura this epithet the Greek epithet apaturos um or apaturia which is of apaturos applies in kind of three distinct spaces. We see Athena Apuria and paganas writes in description of Greece at fenitea is a sanctuary of Athena Apuria. They say that the goddess got this surname because she deceived Poseidon in some way to protect a maiden. And in this story um which is particularly to the Arcadian uh peninsula or Arcadian region she is um in a town in a village and she is protecting the people of the village and she sees Poseidon come and he's enamored of this mortal woman and he wants to rape her and so Athena disguises herself as the woman and fools him and then he's obviously not able to conquer Athena. So he goes away a little embittered by the fact that his um his uh sexual assault was interrupted. And then we see it in Aphrodite Apuros and that's um written about in Strabo in Fanugoria. There is a notable temple of Aphrodite Apuros the deceiver. Um, critics derive the etmology of the epithet of the goddess by aducing a certain myth according to which the gigantes attacked the goddess there. But she called upon Heracles for help and hid him in a cave and then admitting the gigantes one by one gave them over to Heracles to be murdered through treachery or apati. And so in this you know it's like her sort of seducing them into certain death. It's ultimate fem fatal energy and the like spider in her web. And then we also see this word apaturia describing an Athenian and Ionian kinship festival. Now this root word apatate is not the same as the root word of this one of the festival which is apore which means of the clan or even sometimes means without father. auror no father but it doesn't mean you didn't have a father it's a it's one of these idiomatic expressions that means that um like you through you know you belong primarily not to your father but to your clan so of the clan and it is a time when there would be male rights of passage and initiation so I get the sense from this that it's a time where a young man is basically taken out of his father's house like like officially, you know, taken out from under his father. And um so they're saying he's out, no father, out from under his father, his father's protection in the clan into being a member of the clan, a man in the clan. Just like a coming of age ceremony for a girl would be about, you know, her first moon. Now she's officially a woman. We're taking her out of the the children's area and now she spends time in her days with the women and learns what it is to be an adult woman. So it's similar to this. So when we see if you ever hear of the Apaduria festival, just know that is from a different root word, but it sounds very much the same and um conotes, you know, its own thing. So I want to talk about Apachuria and these um you know this kind of like connection to Artimpasa because we touched on Art Pasa back in um the lecture on um Urania I think that's where it was and you know she's a snake tailed goddess and we also have Atarate or Ataratus, Durquito, other we have fishbodied and fishtailed goddesses. And we have then the legends of mermaids and from this we have the siren. Our modern idea of the mermaid, our modern idea of the siren. So in Greek mythology, first and foremost, the sirens were said to lure sailors to their death and destruction with their beautiful singing and their irresistible songs. And sometimes they were depicted as part woman and part bird. Um, and sometimes they're depicted as um a a part woman and part fish or part woman with something that looks like a dragon's tail. Um, and so they kind of move from being in the cliffs to then in the sea and then instead of a bird woman, they're like more of a fish woman like Arti or Arjumbasa um or a snake woman. And then um out of Greek mythology, you know, it kind of transcends out into other cultures of the world and other cultures also had their own mermaids to begin with. So in different traditions, sirens are depicted in different ways, but there's this common theme of their ability to enchant and lure people in. Um, and I have this classical kind of etching from the Middle Ages of a double-tailed mermaid. And then I have the Starbucks logos down here, which you can see when it first started in 1971, they almost identically copied this um carving. Then they evolved it in 1987, 1992. Her tails all but disappear. this I'll say this region of like what happens where her tails meet her body and the implication of these two tails being like the giant labia of this diff you know terrifying vagina I think is so much that people have a hard time bearing it which is why they've now moved it to where you can basically recognize it and so and there's even like more recent evolution of it that I think is even less about the tales. So, there's definitely something here that's interesting about how our modernday most uniformly rec, you know, universally recognized siren is luring you in to spend money on coffee, but I don't think she's luring you to your death. I think coffee is life and joy. Um, so I just included this. I'm going to leave that for you to read in the slides, but it's a letter from a siren to a modern-day fam fetal. And now we're going to talk about this place and priestess uh Red Fox, who is another priestess of Aphrodite in our temple. Um, priestess Red Fox uh has created a beautiful working at the site of Stavroi in Cyprus. So there's a mountain in Cyprus known as Davrouni. And at the top of the mountain overlooking the sea, there was a temple to Aphrodite that was constructed by the Phoenicians in 850 B.CE. It was very likely from what's been found at the site that the priestesses there kept bees and were Melissi. There's enormous groves of fragrant herbs and flowers all over this mountain. I've been there. And the smell and the aroma in the air is wonderful. And there's lots and lots of bees. Um, over time wars and invasions ruined the temple. And then St. Helen, who's Constantine's mother, she brought Catholicism into uh the Greek culture, uh really um establishing it in 330 CE, founded a monastery up there at the site of the temple and established a reoquary with a piece of the crucifixion cross there and later it became an Orthodox monastery which it remains to this day. And what's fascinating is that even though it was established by a woman, Helen, women are not allowed there. You can only go as far as the little outdoor chapel, the gift shop, and the gate if you're a woman. Beyond that point, no women are allowed inside the compound where they do all of the prayers and masses and everything. The monks keep bees. They make cheese and they make other comstables like wine and jam. I will tell you, I went there and it was like one of the most depressing places on earth. Um I just like right at that gate because it was so many things. Number one, um the parking lot, you know, you're there and you're looking over this beautiful landscape, but then you like turn and there's this kind of big cross phallic things sort of church standing on top of the hill. Then there's all these cars and these men get out of the cars and they go in and the women are just sort of like hanging out and waiting and it just feels so awkward. And then third, when I went into the gift shop, it's actually, you know, one of the places on earth that I have felt was just so like awful. I walked in and there was like behind the desk was this older man and he was passionately lecturing this younger man like heranging him about politics and in and it it was just so it was just so awful. Um I didn't I didn't want to be there. I just left and was like no I'm not buying anything here. I don't like anything here. What Priestess Red Fox does is every time she goes to Cypress, and I've been there with her and we've done this together and we'll do it again, um, she has created a working to reclaim this site. And so after you leave the kind of drab parking lot area, you just drive a little ways down, park on the side, and walk on this one path. And you're still almost at the top of the mountain just underneath the monastery. And there's a beautiful outcropping that looks over the whole island of Cyprus. And we do a beautiful little ritual there. And I've included in your slides this live link so you can go read about the working, but I've included a little of it here. And this is in Red Fox's words. Thousands of years ago, pilgrims forged their way through thorny thickets under the searing sun, but it was not to reach a monastery. Buried beneath the bricks of the monastery are the remains of a temple, a temple to the goddess of love and beauty, temple to Aphrodite. Great feasts and rituals were once held here in her honor. Fragrant incense was burned for her. Flowers were offered to her, and in all likelihood, her worshippers made crazy love in the house of the goddess of love. And who can blame them? Where is that temple now? I hear you ask. We already know the answer. Christianity arrived and her temple was destroyed and replaced with buildings that honored the new father God from the Middle East. I knew that Christianity and other Abrahamic religions bring hope or I know that Christianity and other Abrahamic religions bring hope and comfort and community to millions. However, I cannot help but lament for the temple that was lost. Nevertheless, Aphrodite was adored here for many hundreds of years, and those energies are not so lightly erased. One does not simply remove the goddess of love. And so today I'm here to ascend this mountain and call her back in. And here's the chant that we do. Stavrooni, stavrooney, once great temple of Aphrodite. I call you back into this sacred place once again. This mountain, it is goddess space. And she says, "Words have energy. Words have power. And as I chant, I know that Aphrodite is returning." So you can go read more on the Wild Urban Priestess blog about that. And that is a work that um we do that is like our own version of being the fem fatal to go back and be scampish women laughing and carrying on and burning incense and singing songs and dancing and lifting our breasts to the sun and spending our time there and being the sirens that we are at the foot of this great monastery in honor of Aphrodite. So what is the gift of Apaturus? Well, because there's so many layers to it. There's the name Apatum Apura. There's our tempa and Anahita, Arti, Anahit, Ishtar, Astarte, Atar, Aphrodite. There's so many variations to this. There's the deceiver. There's the agent against evil. There's the one who disrupts and disturbs the system. There's the one who isn't afraid to make her blessings into tools and her tools into weapons as needed. So many layers. So I decided that the gift of Apaturus is shapeshifting and even code switching when necessary. And what does that mean? Well, it means that we learn to adapt and blend seamlessly into different social contexts, navigate various environments with ease and gain access to vital resources and the information necessary for our own survival. And this can be like on the kind of, you might say, the more benign or benevolent side of things where it's like you show up at a party and it's a costume party, so you're wearing a costume, too. You're you don't know anyone there, so you make pleasant conversation. You don't trauma dump on anyone. You listen to others. You smile and you're polite even when someone's kind of not so great or rude. You you get along. And that's a benevolent use of this power of just making the best of it and bringing your whole self and kindness to any given situation. And on the other side, it's I'm going to just go ahead and dress like these people and talk like these people so that I can get this job so that I can make the kind of money that I want to make so that I can travel the world and live the life that I want to live and I don't stay late or on weekends. Then there's also this next gift to alter personas, evade detection, bypass security measures, and avoid those who might pose a threat to one's survival. And where we might see this is, you know, trying to stay ahead in a dangerous game. A woman has decided she's going to leave the guy who beats her up. So, she keeps everything very hidden and secret. She rents an apartment. She goes in to get a new credit card in her own name that he doesn't know about at a bank he doesn't know about. She goes and she gets um you know whatever she needs supplywise. She secrets away some of the grocery money from every week so that she'll have a little reserve of cash. She uh pays for gas for her friends with her partner's credit card and keeps the money for herself when you know her friends give her cash. She goes about whatever she needs to do so that she can escape without getting killed and we wouldn't begrudge her that. And Apurus teaches us to remain elusive and mysterious and arouse intrigue and fascination in others. And it's a step beyond Cios Black Cat. Creios Black Cat says, "I've got a secret and I'm not telling you." Apuria says, "You wouldn't know if I have a secret or not unless I wanted you to." There's where where Cios is like the soft gentle petals of the black rose. Apachuria is the whole stem including thorns. This helps when we need to bolster our chances of thriving in a world where survival can depend on our relationships. So, we have to know when someone's dangerous to us and hold them at bay. We have to know when someone is wishing us harm and evade whatever they're attempting and still be able to go on with our lives, our workings, our doings, our dreams, our goals. It means understanding that we need to have teeth and claws ready but not always use them. And that's survival in patriarchy for most women. So here's the homework. This week you are going to purchase or choose a lip balm or a lipstick or both. and consecrate it to Aphrodite and say when I need to invoke apatia and you would never tell anyone. This is actually an epithet that I probably would not allow you to dedicate to if you decide to make vows simply because um a woman who needs to tell someone that she's apura is not apura. So we don't declare it, we just do it. So, this is like the only time we're going to talk about this one is here she is. She puts on her lipstick. She walks into that meeting. She gets the job. Here she is. She puts on her lipstick. She goes on that date. She listens carefully. She sees all the red flags. She never calls back. She puts on her lipstick. She walks into the supermarket. Somebody comes over to her and says, "Can I get your number?" And she says, "Why don't you give me yours instead?" She goes and puts on her lipstick. She sits down to have coffee. She leaves her lip prints on the cup and he thinks about her later when he's washing his dishes. There's all kinds of ways in which you're silently that girl already. Now is the time to explore that a bit more with this particular week, this particular lesson. And now we'll close. Aphrodite of the sea, friend of dove and sacred be. Queen of sensual. Lay your blessing upon me that I may walk in love and beauty. Hail Aphrodite.