{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Tender Hour","title":"Sleep Meditation for Self Compassion & Being Too Hard on Yourself · Aphrodite, Greek Goddess of Love · Female Voice · 3 Hours","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":10801,"description":"A soft three hour sleep meditation for the voice that starts up at midnight and reads you your own list. A gentle female voice tells you what the Greek goddess of love actually says to somebody who keeps coming back with the same trouble, and then lets you fall asleep to hours of warm ambient sound. This one is not about romance. It is about the way you speak to yourself when the lights are off.\n\nStart with the fact that the Greeks could not agree on where Aphrodite came from. Hesiod has her grow out of the white foam of the sea and come ashore at Kythera and then at Cyprus, with no mother and no childhood, already there before most of the gods who supposedly outrank her. Homer, writing at about the same time, has her as the ordinary daughter of Zeus and a goddess called Dione, who gets hurt in the fighting at Troy and runs home and cries in her mother's lap. Two different beings with the same name, and the Greeks kept both and never reconciled them. Hesiod also gives us the famous explanation of her name, from aphros, the foam. People who study the language now mostly think that is a story built backwards to fit a name that came from somewhere further east and travelled in by way of Cyprus.\n\nThere was never only one Aphrodite either. Town after town had its own, each with a title. Two of those titles ended up in an argument that has run for nearly two and a half thousand years: Aphrodite Ourania, the heavenly one, and Aphrodite Pandemos, usually translated as the common one. In Plato's Symposium one of the speakers at the party splits love in two along exactly that line, noble love above and cheap love below. But that is philosophy, one character's argument at a drinking party. Pandemos means of all the people, the whole people. Pausanias reports the tradition that her cult in Athens went back to Theseus and was founded when he brought the scattered Athenians together into one city. She was not the cheap Aphrodite. She was the one who held the town together....","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/RV6rkvW5dw7PQo7B9NNH_aBPQmo62cpvlrp87r-UST0/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85OTM2/MWJkMzZlMzliYzJh/Y2M4YzUwNDVmYjM2/ZDZhOS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}