Love and desire gods compared across eight traditions

What this office actually is, tradition by tradition

The one thing this office reliably is not, across these traditions, is romance. Inanna is desire as a force that destabilises cities — she takes the divine offices from Enki while he is drunk, she has her own husband dragged to the underworld to take her place, and her hymns are as much about sovereignty and war as about sex. Aphrodite in the Iliad is wounded on the battlefield and told to go back to what she is good at, and the poem means it as a rebuke; but Aphrodite is also, in older strata and in Cyprus and Corinth, an armed goddess with a much harder edge than the Renaissance version anybody now pictures.

Freyja is where the modern flattening does most damage. She receives half the battle-dead — half, with Odin taking the other half — she teaches seiðr to the Æsir, and she rides a boar and a cat-drawn chariot. Reducing her to a Norse Aphrodite deletes the two facts about her that the sources spend most time on. Hathor runs in the other direction: love, music, drunkenness and joy are genuinely hers, and so is the massacre in the Book of the Heavenly Cow, where she has to be tricked with beer dyed red to stop her destroying humanity.

The Greek-to-Roman equation is worth its own note here because it is the one most people think is safe. Venus was an Italic goddess of gardens and cultivated growth before she was anything else, and her rise to the top of the Roman religious order is a political event: the Julian family claimed descent from her through Aeneas, and Caesar built her a temple as Venus Genetrix. The Roman goddess ends up carrying a dynastic claim that has no Greek equivalent whatever, which is a good short answer to the question of whether Roman gods are relabelled Greek ones.

How the grid above was built

Nobody decided by hand who belongs on this page. Each figure’s entry carries a list of what the ancient sources named on that page record them as governing, and a figure appears here when one of those phrases falls inside this office. Their own wording is printed beside the name, so you can check the filing rather than trust it. Tapping any two names computes what the two figures actually share — and whether any ancient writer ever equated them, which is a different question and usually has a different answer.

Where a tradition is absent from the grid, no figure in this encyclopedia holds this office in it. That is a statement about eight bodies of surviving material rather than a gap in the research: several traditions genuinely have no god of a given thing, and saying so is more useful than promoting the nearest approximation into a column so the table looks complete.

The other eleven offices with a page of their own: Sea gods, War gods, Gods of wisdom and writing, Smith gods, Harvest and fertility gods, Healing gods, Moon gods, Messenger gods, Gods of justice and the oath, Gods of magic and prophecy, Fire gods. The full tool, with all 29 offices, is at the cross-pantheon comparison, and the pairings argued out at length in prose are in the written comparisons.