A question occurred to me today that hadn’t really come up in the past; it was spurred by hearing a snatch of Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” on the radio.
The very first words are “This ain’t a song for the broken-hearted; no silent prayer for faith departed”. My brain mixed those two lines together.
Many, if not all, pantheons have deities that are considered to be gods or goddesses of love, passion, beauty: Aphrodite and Eros, Venus, Freyja, Aengus and Aine, Erzulie, etc. etc. Many of these deities have different epithets and facets to them: Aphrodite Ourania being different from Aphrodite Pandemos, Venus Obsequens vs. Venus Genetrix, Erzulie Dantor as opposed to Erzulie Fréda Dahomey, and so on.
I’ve never had much connection to any deities of love, and that’s all the more true now that there’s no love (at least, of the romantic or sexual sort) in my life. But part of me wonders if there’s an Aphrodite or Venus or other such deity devoted to those who have been loved and abandoned, loved and betrayed, loved and destroyed. For those who knew love, once upon a time, and then had it ripped away from them. A deity who could comfort them, protect them, assure them that just because someone had once loved them and then threw them away didn’t mean they were unworthy of love, or that their significant other had been right to throw them in the garbage.
That, I think, would be a love god or goddess I’d like to get to know better.
All Their Voices 
February 10, 2015 at 5:02 pm
I’ve always felt Loki is such a God – straddling the worlds, never fully accepted in any. Outlier, Outcast, Rebel, He takes in and accepts those who find themselves unwanted or uncomfortable in other places and societies.
February 15, 2015 at 12:27 am
I’ve had a few dealings with Him in the past, but I don’t have as much connection with Him as I have with others, and it never felt associated with love to me — more like cleverness when I really needed to be clever.
Of course, I know well He’s different for everyone He interacts with, so what’s true for me may not be true for anyone else.