Choosing with Your Trouser Snake: Bad Idea

Old and new stories warn us about the cost of cherry-picking the divine feminine (chasing Aphrodite with your trouser snake) instead of embracing the goddess in totality.

Over Christmas, I re-watched the film Love Actually with my family. One storyline centres on Harry (Alan Rickman), a successful middle-aged businessman with two school-aged children, married to Karen (Emma Thompson). Harry embarks on a brief affair with his secretary, Mia (Heike Makatsch). Karen accidentally discovers the affair when she finds a gift-wrapped necklace hidden in Harry’s jacket.

It’s a familiar story on the surface — husband chases younger, sexier woman — but beneath it lies something much deeper: a collision between ancient feminine archetypes. Which got me thinking: what might we reveal by overlapping mythic and modern stories?

Love Actually scenes: Harry and Mia dance at their work Christmas party (left); Karen discovers the betrayal (right)

Harry stands between two women faced with a timeless choice. On one side there is Mia, the manifestation of Aphrodite energy: youth, erotic magnetism, novelty, the intoxicating feeling of being seen as desirable rather than responsible.

On the other side is Karen, Harry’s wife, the embodiment of Hera: marriage, legitimacy, shared history, vows — and also Demeter: care, emotional labour, the invisible physical and emotional work that keeps a family afloat. Karen is not passionless, but she is structural. She is the home, the continuity, the emotional climate, the functional stability that underpins family life.

And all this got me thinking about Paris. Not the place — the prince.

You may be familiar with The Iliad, Homer’s epic tale that tells the story of the Trojan War. The action begins when Paris, a prince of Troy, absconds with the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. The complication is that Helen is already married. Her husband, Menelaus, the king of Sparta, takes the affair as a personal insult (fair enough) and runs straight to his brother Agamemnon, the power-hungry king of Mycenae. Agamemnon agrees that the insult demands retribution. His response is to assemble a who’s-who of Greek heroes and a fleet of boats that sails to Troy to retrieve Helen — “the face that launched a thousand ships.”

If only it were that simple...

What should have been a brief and one-sided conflict becomes a ten-year war of attrition, marked by bloody battles and bruised egos. Agamemnon sulks. Paris sulks. Achilles sulks. Hector honours everything except his own survival. The gods meddle freely, treating the battlefield like a personal family feud. When brute force fails to breach Troy’s walls, the Greeks resort to deception. They pretend to sail away, leaving behind a gigantic wooden horse as a token of surrender.

The Trojans haul the oversized decor item inside their city and celebrate the apparent victory. Little do they know that Greek soldiers are concealed inside the horse’s hollow belly. Once the city sleeps, the warriors emerge, open the gates, and Troy falls in flames. Priam, the noble Trojan king, watches his citadel crumble. His sons are slaughtered, his grandchildren thrown from the walls, the women taken as slaves, the temples plundered.

Troy is reduced to rubble because Paris couldn't keep it in his pants! And this, it turns out, was not Paris’ first catastrophic lapse in judgement...

The lesser known prelude to Troy takes place on Mount Olympus, during a wedding feast of the gods. Every deity is invited except one: Eris, goddess of discord. Living up to her reputation, Eris crashes the party by hurling a golden apple into the crowd. Inscribed on it are the words “for the fairest.”

Argument ensues. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each claim the prize, but Zeus refuses to adjudicate. Instead, he appoints a mortal judge: Paris. Yes — the same Paris, prince of Troy.

Each goddess offers him a bribe...

Hera goes first: queen of Olympus, goddess of marriage, family, and sovereignty. Powerful, regal, and protective of order. Crown her the fairest, and she promises Paris power to rule over mortal men.

Next comes Athena: born from Zeus’ head, committed to virginity, goddess of wisdom, strategic warfare, craft, and foresight. Her offer is victory. Paris is promised mastery in battle and triumph through intelligence.

Last comes Aphrodite: goddess of love, beauty, desire — attraction itself. Her reward is not political or strategic, but sensual. Crown her the fairest and she will give Paris her equal on earth: Helen of Sparta.

Now, a wily operator might have begged leave, declared a three-way tie, or conveniently choked on an olive pit. Paris does none of these. He consults his trouser snake and awards the prize to Aphrodite. That is how the dominoes begin to fall. Paris’ choice sets in motion the destruction of himself, his family, and his entire city.

So, can you see why Zeus refused to judge the beauty contest? Why he declined to elevate one goddess above others?

Because the notion of “fairest” is an error. As mythologist Joseph Campbell reminds us, the Great Goddess, from which all specialised goddesses spring, is whole and complete. She is nature; the divine portal of transformation. She is birth and death, creation and destruction, body and mind, and all the complex workings in between.

We mortals may divide the goddess into aspects for the sake of analysis but, in reality, she is indivisible. All the goddesses roam within the forest of the psyche (one's personal nature), each expressing different powers at different moments.

Returning to Love Actually...

The Aphrodite energy that initially drew Harry and Karen together has quite obviously matured over time into more stable, rhythmical, and structural goddess qualities. Hera and Demeter have already been mentioned. The other goddesses are there too: Artemis, who finds autonomy and solitude in the music of Joni Mitchell; Persephone’s crossing from the upper world of trust into the dark underworld of truth when she discovers the secret necklace; Athena, who creates order out of internal emotional chaos when she organises the family for the Christmas concert, and so on.

Harry falls at the feet of Aphrodite, holding out a jeweled offering, forgetting that 'desire and beauty' is no longer the primary goddess who sustains him. Desire is a powerful force for attraction and bonding, but it is a poor load-bearing structure over time. Harry’s marriage — as well as his professional success, family, and friendships — is now upheld by other powers: Hera’s capability, Demeter’s care, Athena’s resourcefulness, Persephone’s acceptance: the shared labour of years.

Look at the hero Odysseus...

He is the hero who, after the fall of Troy, took ten more years to find his way home to Ithaca. Along the way, he is repeatedly offered Aphrodite equivalents. Calypso, for example, offers him eternal youth, sexual bliss, and immortality. Circe offers erotic power, magic, and a suspension of consequence. But to accept such outcomes — to opt for comfort and pleasure over the rewards of responsibility — would be to emotionally stall. Calypso and Circe are feminine fragments: desire without continuity, pleasure without responsibility, eternity without legacy. Odysseus rejects them. He returns to his wife and, in mythic terms, passes the test that Paris fails.

As a woman, I find exploring these different goddess energies particularly useful for understanding myself — especially since my prime Aphrodite years are behind me. I now sense a far subtler and more complex mix of forces at work within me, a whole pantheon of psychic energies. Bu the same token, I'm conscious that mythology often overstates female biological archetypes (women as reproductive vessels), functional roles (women as carers and homemakers), and commodified identities (objects of sex, power, or beauty).

But then... so does modern culture.

Contemporary media is more fixated on youth, beauty, and desirability than ever. The psyche is pushed into an impossible race against time and unsustainable aesthetic standards. Exhaustion is the inevitable result. Aphrodite energy can sustain biological life through attraction and procreation, but it cannot, on its own, support an individuated or meaningful life.

Back to Love Actually again….

As the storyline culminates, Karen confronts Harry. He immediately admits his foolishness. She responds: “You’ve made a fool out of me. And you’ve made the life I lead foolish too.” It is more than a betrayal. Harry has undermined the very meaning of Karen's choices: the marriage, the years, the emotional labour, the life she believed she was building with him.

Mythically, this is the moment when Hera and Demeter withdraw their support. This is when the sustaining, stabilising structures begin to fall, crumbling, stone by stone, like the walls of Troy.

The myth warns: this is what happens when you elevate Aphrodite — when desire is mistaken for judgement, ego for wisdom. This is the consequence of indulging one's pleasure over what sustains the whole. Oh yes, it feels intoxicating. It feels immortal. But inevitably, it collapses.

Aphrodite energy can ignite life, but cannot endure. Real success — the kind that lasts — demands something more complex. The mature hero must meet the goddess as a totality; not reduced, nor idealised, but subtle, whole and powerfully complete.

The goddess is never a prize. She is earned.