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Archetypes are a useful and supportive way to understand relating and sexuality.
If you haven’t checked out my article, Mars and Mercury Sex: Which Kind Are You Having?, I think you might find it interesting, especially if, like me, you enjoy using archetypes to understand what is happening beneath the surface.
Here, I want to look specifically at the abandonment wound through the archetype of Venus, or Aphrodite.
Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love. Venus is her Roman counterpart, and the planet Venus was named after the Roman goddess. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll refer to her as Venus.
According to one of the most well-known versions of the myth, Aphrodite was born after Uranus’s severed genitals fell into the ocean. From the foam that rose around them, she emerged fully formed.
Venus is the embodiment of love, beauty, attraction, desire, and the magnetic force that draws us toward one another. Within the esoteric tradition, Venus is also connected to the Fifth Ray: the ray of mind, knowledge, and intelligence. Venus represents the emergence of love through the directing power of the mind.
In this sense, Venus is the intelligence that sees.
She is love with sight.
What this translates to is when we adopt the archetype of Venus, not only are we embodying beauty, love, attraction, desire, and magnetic force, but we are embodying an intelligence of love.
Venus had affairs with both Mars and Mercury. If you have read my article about Mars and Mercury sex, you may already understand some of the different archetypal energies that each represents.
Mars is emotional, lustful, passionate, and intense. Mars sex is the kind where you want to rip each other’s clothes off. It is physical and urgent. It moves through the sacral center and the solar plexus. It is the heat of desire and the force of the emotional body.
Mercury sex is more like the proverbial cigarette after sex and the conversation that follows. It has an intelligence to it. Mercury wants to talk, understand, connect the pieces, and make meaning from what has occurred. It brings consciousness into the experience.
I don’t necessarily place these forms of sexuality within a hierarchy. Each contains its own intelligence and gives birth to something different within us.
Venus’s affair with Mars resulted, in one tradition, in the birth of Eros.
Her union with Mercury, Hermes in the Greek tradition, resulted in the birth of Hermaphroditus, who later became the perfect embodiment of both the masculine and feminine.
These two affairs give us a way of understanding what I call the rise and fall of Venus.
When Venus falls, she falls into Mars.
“Falling” is specifically when Venus’s sight looks down to her solar plexus and sacral, where the emotional body and energy is leading.
She falls into heat, passion, intensity, urgency, and the emotional body. She wants to merge with someone completely. She wants to fall into them, wrap herself around them, and lose herself inside the experience of love.
This parallels the experience of “falling” into our abandonment wound.
We meet someone. Desire is activated. Our emotional body becomes flooded. We want to merge. We become wrapped up in the person, the relationship, and everything we imagine the relationship could become.
Love and the emotional body become entangled.
Venus and Mars begin their full-fledged affair.
This is often when the abandonment wound becomes activated. We want more contact, more reassurance, more intensity, and more evidence that the other person is still there. We begin searching their words, silences, and behavior for signs that we are safe—or signs that we are about to be left.
The intelligence of Venus becomes overtaken by the emotional urgency of Mars and Venus loses her sight.
She sees the relationship from inside of the activated wound. And this shows up in the attachment style becoming activated. She tries to understand why the other person has pulled away, what she did wrong, what wound she touched in them, and what she needs to do to restore the connection.
One of the things I find so ridiculous about much of the attachment literature is that it often treats this fall as evidence that something has gone wrong. We become ashamed of our activation. We believe that if we were more healed, more secure, or more evolved, we would not have fallen.
But Venus has to fall. In order to rise again.
Venus learns through falling and it is a necessary part of the intelligence of love.
There is no shame in the fall. Her passionate affair with Mars gave birth to Eros, and we need Eros in order to live. Eros is the force that pulls us toward life. It awakens desire, movement, creativity, sexuality, and longing. It disrupts our carefully constructed ideas about who we are and what we need.
We need the heat of Mars. We need the experience of being overtaken. We need to discover the places where love causes us to lose our sight.
The lesson is found within the fall.
When Venus turns her gaze upward toward Mercury, she begins to rise.
She does not abandon Mars or deny the passion that moved through her. She carries the experience upward into consciousness. She begins putting the pieces together. She becomes curious about what the relationship revealed and what her activation was trying to show her.
Venus regains her sight.
The risen Venus can hold love and intelligence together. She can feel desire without losing her capacity to see. She can experience the abandonment wound while remaining in relationship with herself. She can allow Eros to move through her without making the other person responsible for keeping her alive.
This is the more Mercurial state of Venus: love moving with awareness.
From the union of Venus and Mercury comes Hermaphroditus, an archetypal joining of the masculine and feminine. We might understand this as an inner integration: the part of us that desires and the part that can witness desire, the part that opens and the part that remains rooted, the part that reaches toward another and the part that stays connected to ourselves.
This is the gift of Venus rising.
The fall into attachment is part of the initiation. It shows us where love overwhelms our sight. It reveals the places where our emotional body takes over and where our fear of abandonment begins directing our choices.
And the fall is meant to happen, over and over again. Sorry folks.
When Venus rises, she brings something back with her.
She brings the knowledge she gained from the relationship. She brings a deeper understanding of her own wound. She brings the capacity to see where she disappeared, where she tried to merge, and where she confused intensity with the ability to love.
Each fall gives Venus another opportunity to develop sight.
The goal is not to prevent ourselves from ever activating our attachment wounds. The fall is how we encounter the wound. It is how we discover the places in ourselves that still believe another person’s presence is the source of our aliveness.
Venus falls into Mars and gives birth to Eros.
Then she rises toward Mercury and gives birth to a more integrated form of love.
I write these articles about attachment and the abandonment wound because they are part of my own continued journey with love. It is my hope that you take what you need from them and find little snippets that support you on your own path of love. Recognizing, that we all fall, and there is no shame in the falling.
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