I have long had a difficult relationship with the Goddess of Love and Sexuality and I deliberately requested this book as a way to explore that relationship in a more focused way. Right from the start Aphrodite’s Magic: Celebrate and Heal Your Sexuality struck me as an unusual book. The first words are: "Aphrodite’s Magic is a magical spell" and it is indeed a powerful spell, one requiring intention and focus and sacrifice. But the result . . . absolutely worth it.
Aphrodite’s Magic is a deceptively simple book, written in an easy style and requiring no dictionary to understand what auth Jane Meredith is trying to convey. It describes a series of magical workings for women to celebrate, understand, and embrace their sexuality while healing any psychological damage, all the while creating a Girdle of Aphrodite.
Meredith says:
"Aphrodite, Goddess of love and sexuality was known in ancient times for her beauty, sensuality and sexual freedom. She owned a magical girdle – a belt worn low about the hips – which was forged from precious metals and gave powers of irresistible sexual attraction to whoever wore it."
The ritual described within Aphrodite's Magic enables us to make our own magical girdle - or belt - by weaving seven cords, each representing one aspect of our sexuality. The first cord represents the Goddess within each of us. In "Eye of Beauty," you discover your own beauty and the beauty of other women. In "Voice of Truth," you explore why it is hard to speak the truth, especially about sex, and you are prompted to speak, chant, sing, and write your truth. "In the Heart," you examine love in its various forms and the relationship between love and fear. "Dancing the Body," explores embodiment and how you understand and feel in your body, and includes Sacred Body Bathing, The Painted Body, and "The Edible Body." "Red Womb" explores women’s fertility issues. "Inner Mysteries" is about women’s relationship with our genitals both in contemporary and in ancient Goddess times. In the final part of the ritual these seven cords are be woven together into Aphrodite's Girdle - a belt that can be worn as a symbol of our sexuality, beauty, femininity, power and achievement. Each cord is created individually during the course of a day (or longer). While meditating, dancing, chanting and keeping a journal, each cord involves studying what its aspect means to us, looking into ourselves to bring our own thoughts and feelings to light, and looking in a mirror with honesty to learn to see our own beauty.
Before beginning instructions for the journey itself, Meredith offers practical guidelines in how to do magic, creating and maintaining ritual space, gathering materials that you will need (the cords, sewing things and decorations, journals and pens), dancing and music, and timelines. She gives four different timelines, depending on whether you want to complete the journey in a weekend, a week, a moon cycle, or 7 months.
Highly recommended.
~review by Lisa Mc Sherry
Author: Jane Meredith
O Books, 2010
pp. 190, $24.95
