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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6287135" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not familiar with the reference, but I think the trick here if you want to have an original diety of this sort would be to broaden the domain of the deity.  Carnal female fertility goddesses tend to be all pretty shallow - the 'bimbo' or the 'tart' is a trope that is as old as dirt.   The tend to be very much fan services and obvious gods made in the image of man.  However popular temple prostitution might be for packing the temples,  I think there is a reason such dieties never seem to have a real hold over peoples imagination.So I would make this deity primarily a deity associated with something other than fertility, sex, or 'love' but have whatever that thing is suggest the rest.For example, a goddess of flowers is a fertility goddess explicitly.  But by being not only an eros goddess (to use the proper term), she loses a lot of the shallowness associated with that particularly in how you can portray her cult.  She picks up gardening and nature as part of her domain, including being the patron of bee keeping, becomes the giver of honey, and so forth.  This gives her some depth and makes her something more than just a stock tramp or pretty faced bimbo the way Aphrodite and similar goddesses come off.An even broader concept would be a goddess of beauty whose primary domain was actually art and artisanship, basically all the muses rolled into one, but who was also the goddess of romantic and perforce erotic love.  Incidently since this is really a goddess of idealized things, if you want to play down the sex aspect and up the marriage/romance aspect of incarnation this would be one possibility.Another way to take this is have the goddess explicitly worshiped as part of a married couple and be explicitly the patron of wives, women and marriage.  In this way you remove some of the shallow bimbo, tramp aspect of it, and the sort of idealization you are going for here is myth making like a romantic comedy or a situation comedy.  I actually have all of that going on in my homebrew.  The pantheon of my homebrew is often called 'the 1000 gods', by which people mean, 'a really large number'.  The ideal at a metagame level is that there really is a deity for everything, and that any way that a person can relate to the world or an aspect of the world has a patron championing that viewpoint.  So, I actually also have Aphrodite analogues as well.   The above ideas are Dianciana the Goddess of Flowers.  Her mother Aymara the Goddess of Beauty (by her husband Lado the Builder, God of Creation).  A couple representative of martial bliss (in all of its expressions) are the fire gods Aratay the God of the Forge and his wife Anwen the goddess of the Hearth, who are patrons of virtue/manhood/fatherhood/work and virtue/femininity/motherhood/domesticity respectively and together make up an extremely popular cult.   Both are effectively gods of passion, but passion in a control sense of desire subordinated to and paired with reason.  And probably the single most popular religious cult on all of Korrel is the pairing of laughing Jord the God of Leisure with his serious acerbic wife Sesstra the Goddess of Work.  Both are in their own way dogs of Joy, pleasure in work and pleasure in relaxation, and sense Jord is also the God of good humor and competitiveness (and in a certain sense laziness), the common folk take great delight in the stories of two dieties affairs with each other the way modern people in the real world,Anyway, my point is that if you see passion, love, and sex in a particular context it becomes much less shallow of a thing than just generic passion and eros.  Start with the idea the deity represents and move toward physicality as part of the expression of that idea, rather than starting with physicality and moving toward its most sterotyped expressions.And of course, I'm sure that there are a lot of jumping off points depending on what you concieve eros is actually about.   For example, if you think it is most interesting as some sort of spiritual and physical transcendance you could concievably have it part of the conception of the god/goddess of gnostic or metagnostic knowledge.  This could be taken one of several ways, either coupling it with reason or making it the enemy of reason, for example a god/goddess of insanity.  Or, and I didn't go into this much, you could take it completely different ways by making the diety male or androgenous.   An example of this would Raniculus of the Daffodils, one of the dieties in my game world who is the god of pleasure, and expresses relaxed, self-centered, selfish, and narcisstic impluses.</blockquote>

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