Reflection and Conclusion

I wish to use this final posting to bring my investigation of ancient Greek religion, using Aphrodite as a vehicle, to a close and to reflect on my experiences of academic blogging.

I chose Aphrodite as the vehicle with which to explore ancient Greek religion throughout this blog as I wished to discover whether there was more to her than the romantic, serene goddess that I had a pre-conceived image of. Throughout the various topics we have explored over the course I can firmly claim that there is definitely more to her than that! I have discovered that Aphrodite is a complex goddess who had enough power to pose a threat to and, even, deceive the King of the Olympic gods, Zeus (Polytheism, Power and Aphrodite post). She has complex connections with the other gods, including Zeus, Hera and especially Dionysus (Polytheism, Power and Aphrodite and Love, and other drugs posts). She also had many characteristics and aspects of her personage that could be considered chthonic (Aphrodite and the Olympian/chthonian binary post). 

However, what I was not expecting was for the emerging complexities of Aphrodite to reflect the chaotic nature of ancient Greek religion as a whole. Aphrodite’s character could arguably be used as a representation to show the wider complex relationships, ideologies, symbols and anomalies of the entire Greek religious system. Every topic that I have approached during this course has seemed to be a simple enough topic to begin with, for example Polytheism, but when analysed they have proved extremely complicated and intricate, with no black and white answers.

Thus, arguably Aphrodite is a byzantine goddess within an extremely chaotic religion. Which is, therefore, why I chose the Omaste Witkowski painting (also at the start of this posting) entitled Cosmic Connections and Chaotic Love Affairs as the background image for the blog, as I believe it illustrates this conclusion fittingly in both name and appearance.

When I began this course and started planning out and writing drafts of my early postings I was admittedly treating each posting as a ‘mini-essay’ by which I mean I approached each posting as a separate topic and I wrote each one in a word processor and transferred it to Blogger, adding images to make the blog aesthetically pleasing. 

However, as the course continued and I became more comfortable with the medium of blogging I began to reassess how I was approaching the assignment. Even though each posting has a specific topic, I could see a common theme emerging, that of the complexity of Aphrodite’s character and the chaotic nature of Greek religion, which I embraced and emphasised to give the blog a thematic flow throughout. I began to carefully select which images I used to ensure that they added to the themes and arguments of the posting and were not simply there to look nice, I also tried to use various styles of images and graphics to bring diversity to the blog. As I revised each of my postings I began to find ways of bringing the blog to life by utilising the media; for example, creating hyperlinks to the online sources used and linking some of the images to their source websites. It was a challenge to find the right level of formality as I have never created an academic blog before, however I hope that I eventually found a balance which fits the academic criteria whilst allowing my narrative voice to come through.