These bespoke Venus Talismans are hand-carved on a large lapis lazuli cabochon as Venus was culminating on the Midheaven with the Waxing-Crescent Moon conjoining all in Pisces, the sign of Venus’ exaltation. They were completed and consecrated during a full ritual on an auspicious election on the 3rd of January 2025. At this time Venus was dazzling the world as an evening star.

While in the nocturnal sign of Pisces, the telos and intention entwined within the talisman is to embody the power of the Venus expressed within the sign of her exaltation: beauty, good fortune, sensuality, healing, and gracefulness.

When a planet is in its exaltation, it performs very cleanly, free from extremes, and it is treated like an honoured guest, or as a magistrate who is in their own court, free to make their own rules. Venus exaltation expresses deeply the combined expression of goddess of fertility and goddess of heaven.

Such that Venus acts in profoundly healing and sensuous ways granting the bearer to do the same, for themselves and others — to be in touch with deep life-giving desires, pleasures, and passions, those that move them in the direction of profoundly erotic and healing ways within the Venusian psychic/spiritual domain and physical expression, including the healthy function of the kidneys, loins, and vascular tissues.

Equally, this talisman will grant the ability to accentuate one’s best qualities, both in charm and physicality, so as to be “loved by everybody and you will be well-known and seem sweet-voiced not only to human beings but also to gods.”

There is a uniquely subtle and profound effect at play here, a shimmering that grants us access to the flowing quality of experience. In particular, one can access realms of cosmic beauty, opening access to the sensuousness of one’s being in the sensate world, along with the ability to open this door for others.

Aphrodite let down your hair!

This particular design is my version of “Aphrodite unbinding her hair”. It is inspired by lapis magical gems that were carried by the peoples of the Hellenistic Mediterranean around the 1st century CE.

On the back is a name written in two lines of Greek letters.  This is Aphrodite’s secret and magical name, ΑΡΩΡΙΦΡΑΣΙΣ, pronounced Arorifrasis, which can be translated in modern Greek as “aroma”. This name, however, means much more.

Some scholars have speculated that “the magical name of Aphrodite, ΑΡΩΡΙΦΡΑΣΙΣ, would express perfectly the goddess's duality by calling her goddess of fertility and goddess of heaven in one name, thus combining for the talisman wearer all the powers of the celestial Aphrodite Ourania and the popular Aphrodite Pandemos.”

Each talisman is approximately 30mm x 22mm and will be fitted with a sterling silver pendant bail.

Everything comes from you:

you have yoked the world,

you control all three realms,

you give birth to all,

to everything in heaven,

to everything upon the fruitful earth,

to everything in the depths of the sea,

O venerable companion of Bacchos.

-Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite (Athanassakis & Wolkow, trans)