The dark side of Venus — goddess of war as well as love

Bettany Hughes has spent a decade, she tells us, exploring the origins of the goddess Aphrodite, first for a BBC documentary aired in 2017 and now for this book. I think it’s fair to say that if you saw the documentary, the book won’t have much more to offer you. If not it’s an intriguing tale that tracks the gorgeous and omnipresent Venus of western civilisation back 6,000 years to a series of strange little knobbly figures with penis-heads and emphasised vulvas found on Cyprus, presumably connected with a fertility cult.

In the fourth millennium BC, a fearsome trio of goddesses swept into Bronze Age Cyprus from Mesopotamia. Innanna, described in a poem written c. 2350 BC ‘of blazing dominion/clad in dread/riding on fire-red power’ was worshipped in 180 sanctuaries in Babylon alone, while Ishtar  was immortalised as ‘she who vanquishes all’; Astarte, riding in the bows of a Phoenician boat, encapsulated war, death and destruction as well as life and sex.