And all the while they saw the brightest star in the sky, which either rose early in the morning or was the first to be seen in the evening, depending on the time of year, and they knew... well the knew it wasn’t you. But they could look up at that brightest of stars and think of you, and think of the city you paved the way for, for them to have, and be thankful.

Time passed, as time does. Borders expanded, as borders do. And along the way you passed from one culture to another, expanding to include more and more deities and identities. Among these was of course the Greek Aphrodite, with her lust for love, her sensual pleasure, her desire, and of course her birth. The story goes that, in killing his father, Zeus castrated him, and threw his remains in the ocean. The ocean began to foam and bubble, and from that sea foam emerged you; beauty. And so this image became central to the idea of you, the emergence from the ocean, as you emerged not just as a god worshiped by the people of one town, but a central element of what historians would eventually call ancient Western culture.

And then nothing. Silence for almost a thousand years. You were usurped by a different kind of god, who represented a different kind of love, or at least, a different kind of love than the love you had transformed into. I can imagine it might have hurt to have been so loved and worshiped for so long and then to have been silenced. But there were still some. Still those who held your name as a whisper on their lips. And perhaps it was refreshing. Perhaps it is even better to be loved so much by so few, than it is to be loved so little by so many.

Of course, we’re all familiar with the story. You would emerge again, as the cultural consciousness became consumed with the idea of the classical, the antiquities, the rebirth. This time not upon the lips of the priests but in the hands of the artists. I don’t know if the transference of your worship from priests to painter changed the nature of your divinity, but this is where some of your most famous depictions would emerge, like the painting of you on the seashell, being blown by Zephyr and Aura into the arms of a nymph, the Hour of Spring. As this transference happened, you became something more than a meditation, more than a thought upon the glance at a brightest star, more than a reflection on the nature of love and lust. You became an icon, a symbol.