Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Liz Williams, author of the new Modern Handfasting. Many of the couples whom we handfast ask us to acknowledge Venus in the ceremony. It's a logical choice, since she's one of the great Classical love goddesses. But lovely though the image is, there's a lot more to Venus than a smiling naked woman on the half shell: her worship was found in many different forms across the Roman world, and in the Greek pantheon in her earlier form of Aphrodite. Paphos in Cyprus and Cythera in Crete were the centres of the worship of Aphrodite. Her statues were often modelled on courtesans, and were thus a little bit scandalous. One of the oldest rituals