Aphrodite exacted from her devotees certain prescribed ceremonies, testimonies to their communion with the goddess, palpable evidences of their total mystic and spiritual absorption in the sacraments she demanded of her votaries.
The ritual followed an established design. At sunset the catechumen is conducted to the temple. Then, facing the East, the priest raises his left hand skyward and with his right he seizes a bronze knife, plunges it into boiling water, and then performs the ritual sexual rite with respect to the catechumen.
Then followed solemn and hieratic instruction in the amatory procedures, including the methods of arousing erotic sensibilities, provocative postures and gestures, words and formulas, osculation and its pervasive corporeal significance. There were, furthermore, illustrative consummations, considered without lewdness, but accepted as formal elements in the grave cosmic scheme. There was a musical accompaniment that softly intertwined in the sequence of the various rituals and presentations, a kind of amatory, seductive litany, enfolding the entire ceremonial in a sacred aura of mysticism. In the concluding phase of these rites, there appeared the phallic procession, the symbolic glorification of the creative urge, and the actual illustration of this potency culminated in an abandoned sexual orgy, indiscriminate and incestuous, exultant and fleshly, carnal and spiritual in one fervid syncretism. A concomitant of this vast sensual exhibition, this release of the physical carapace, was prostitution itself, which for long retained a ritualistic character.
The next step in this genesiac process was sacred prostitution, whereby the woman symbolized the solemnity and the compulsiveness of the Aphroditic cult, while the man was the visitant, a suppliant for the favor of the divinity. And the hierodule thus was a kind of prototype, associated with wise skills, a vestal of the goddess, initiating men into secret amatory and sacred rituals: an adept too in concocting love philtres to further genesiac exultation, to induce total participation in a sort of Aphroditic gnosticism.
The Aphroditic injunction embraced, in a sense, the entire cosmos. It involved primarily self-love, love of being, awareness of the significant entity, the ego itself, marked by dignity, by esteem. Then followed the love of the social milieu of which one formed part, and of the impulse to maintain its equilibrium by contributing one’s own efforts, one’s personal function, to the totality of the social frame. Lastly, there was a kind of all-embracing, comprehensive cosmic love, directed to a synthesis of corporeal love that mystically rose to a sublimated spiritual-amatory zone.