A lot of ways to believe in Aphrodite, Ἀφρόδιτα, whom Sappho calls ἀθανάτ and ποικίλοφρον, athanatos, poikilophron, deathless and spangled in mind, as I wrote about once here.
She could be for you an outer being as real as mom or dad or auroch or furniture. Or did anyone ever believe in spirit beings in quite that way? Maybe only atheists ever have.
She could be something liminal, a threshold being, as she seems to have been for Sappho in that astonishing Hymn, nor outer nor inner, but bridging that perhaps in her time widening divide (Heidegger, comment here?). Gist of so many of her invocations being, come here, to me; bring her, to me. To, unto, into.
She could be what we, now, dissociated, have liked to call an “objective correlative,” an external object saturated with an inner state, longing for what we cannot have, let alone be.
Phenomenological to the core, I spit TSE on your objective correlative – as I know you wished to, too.
One thing more I learn from my student is, wiccans, like monty pythons, fear bunnies among them, as well they might. Check it out.
Another is, witchery is about intimacy, not harming what you’re close to, and seeing you’re close to all of it. Check that out.
Addendum. A book in the mail by my old teacher, Don Revell, out of which these lines, which I am still plumbing (as am I them all).
(In Paradise, remember to tell Hart Crane Tom Eliot was his kitten in the wilderness; the fact that Tom grew up into three white leopards is neither here nor there. That Bohemia should be an island crowded with magical shepherds is neither here nor there. Canons are funny that way.)
Neither here nor there because the Imagination is every where.
the art of compost 