Was burning like a silver flame
The summit of beauty and love
And Venus was her name
She's got it
Yeah baby, she's got it
Well, I'm your Venus, I'm your fire
At your desire"
This character is regarded as a deity of love (which, more often than not, includes sexual lust as well). Most likely a member of the setting's ruling pantheon, but could be any character (including a mortal) who is regarded by other characters as a goddess of love. Male love gods are included in this trope. It is called "Love Goddess" rather than "Love Deity" because the females are much more common, owing to love being associated with the feminine.
The Matchmaker is her God Job; her role in any given plot is most likely to put characters into a relationship. Thus, she is a walking defiance of tropes such as Will They or Won't They? and Twice Shy. Naturally, this does not preclude a Match Maker Crush. She may also be a Fertility God, who either has a bunch of babies herself or encourages others to make them.
As a character, they're likely to be an Ethical Slut, Good Bad Girl, Hot God, Sex God, or all of the above. If she is like Cupid, then she will have archery skills. Often overlaps with a Food God as well to associate different types of fertility.
Historical Domain Characters like Aphrodite and Freyja count as separate examples when they appear as characters in separate works of fiction. For example, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess count, since Aphrodite is a character in some episodes, while The Order of the Stick so far does not count: Freyja is a part of the northern pantheon, but unlike Thor, she has so far never really been part of the plot. note Aphrodite, on the other hand, has made a cameo appearance, but that's just it: a cameo appearance in which she and her entire pantheon were unpersoned.
Contrast War God, this trope's polar opposite.note Although there are a lot of of goddesses of love and war; Ishtar, Freya, The Morrigan... Even Aphrodite herself was seen this way in Sparta. Mythology and media in general tend to pair these two up regardless, in a sort of cosmic example of All Girls Want Bad Boys.
These deities will often need The Power of Love to live and function while The Power of Hate can outright kill them. Subtrope to Stock Gods.
Sometimes, they may be depicted with doves (due to their relation with positive concepts).
Strictly speaking in terms of historical cultural significance, gods of love were often considered one of the most powerful members of the pantheon. God of love does not just cover romantic love; it covers all types of love, including love for violence, war (especially with the War God) and alcohol (hence why Aphrodite wandered about the battlefield at Troy), and the obsessive kinds that make you stupid, evil or crazy. This makes them gods you never, ever want to cross.
Compare Cupid's Arrow.
Examples:
- Ah! My Goddess: Urd likes to consider herself a Goddess of Love, but Peorth is a love goddess in a more sexual sense.
- Dragon Ball:
- Dragon Ball Z: The Namekian Dragon is also the Namekian God of Love. It is worth noting that Namekians are mono-gendered and reproduce asexually, which probably explains why it's the side-portfolio of a low-ranking high end wish-granter, rather than the central role of a major deity like for most human religions.
- Brianne de Chateau/Ribrianne from Dragon Ball Super intended to use the Super Dragon Balls to make herself one of these if her universe won the Tournament of Power.
- Fushigi Yuugi: Suzaku is the God of Love. His rival, Seiryuu is the God of War.
- Gate: Rory Mercury is the oldest demigod (961 years) in that world under the god of destruction, chaos and war, and she loves fighting with actual ecstasy just by being close to a battlefield (or simply people fighting). She wanted to become the goddess of love when she upgrades to the god status (at the 1000 year mark of becoming a demigod). Seemingly no other gods have taken up the place in their world.
- Kamisama Kazoku: Venus, mother of main character Samatarou, is the goddess of love.
- Kamisama Kiss: Mikage was a god of matchmaking, which is assumed to continue on with his successor Nanami.
- Life with an Ordinary Guy who Reincarnated into a Total Fantasy Knockout: The main characters were brought to another world by its Goddess of Love, a very attractive woman with rabbit ears. Her followers are shown to worship physical beauty, wearing Stripperific clothing as ceremonial garments, and her chosen champion, the Gender Bent Tachibana, is so beautiful that men will fall over him due to his presence alone, and he has to use a Perception Filter to avoid causing chaos everywhere he goes.
- Red River (1995): The proposed divinity of Yuri is linked to Ishtar (see mythology below).
- Sailor Moon: We get a strange example from the Sailor Moon manga and its prequel Codename: Sailor V: Minako may be of human birth, but is openly described by Artemis and others as the goddess of beauty, love and war, unable to ever find her true love (in fact the one person she had ever truly loved died by her hand at the end of Sailor V because he was a Dark Kingdom underling, and it's made clear she would always choose duty over love) but capable of bringing lovers together with her mere presence. Artemis at one point even refers to Minako as an avatar of the goddess Venus, though what exactly this means isn't elaborated on. Note that she is the only character in the series ever called a goddess or anything divine (with the exception of Sailor Pluto, who has been described as a goddess of time).
- The World God Only Knows: A slight variation in Katsuragi Keima, who is the God of Conquest. He is able to make any girl fall in love with him in games and, apparently, in reality too.
- Aphrodite of Menophantos: It is a portrayal of Venus, the Roman Goddess of Love. In particular, a version of her that is self-aware of her Head-Turning Beauty and therefore tries to cover herself up. This element is present because here, she's young and still a virgin, just learning the ropes of being a goddess.
- The Birth of Venus (Botticelli): Venus, the Roman Goddess of Love, is the subject of the painting. This status is represented by several symbols: the color pink, her naked state, the flowers, and the seashell she's standing on.
- William-Adolphe Bouguereau:
- The Birth of Venus: The painting's central figure is the Roman goddess of love. The piece makes this evident by showing the nymphs and centaurs around her in sheer shock and adoration at the sight of such a beautiful woman. As if they've fallen in love with her. Or with each other because of her presence.
- Psyche and Cupid: Or Love God, as is the case with Cupid.
- The Planet Venus depicts Venus, the Roman Goddess of Love. This portrayal, in particular, highlights the sexuality aspect of her domain by focusing on Venus' Angelic Beauty.
- The Rape of Proserpina (Rubens):
- Venus, Roman goddess of love and sexuality, is one of the goddesses trying to rescue Proserpina.
- The putti are meant to represent Cupid, the Roman God of Erotic Love.
- Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time: Both Venus and Cupid are depicted in the forefront giving a flirtatious kiss in witness to the other characters. Considering the personification of folly is about to shower the two in rose petals, this is likely a bad move, especially considering both Venus and Cupid are infamous for their tendency to cause problems.
- Venus and Cupid (Gentileschi): Venus and her son Cupid, the subjects of the painting, are both love gods from classical mythology.
- Venus de Milo: Her assigned name suggests that it's a sculpture of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of erotic love.
- Fine Print: The Cupids, who spread love by firing golden arrows into humans which cause love (they can also be used on Cubi, but it causes pleasure instead).
- "Golden Eyes" and Her Hero "Bill": There's a towheaded cupid👁 Image
following the protagonist who's alternately referred to as Love, "LOVE," and "The God of Love." - Green Lantern: The Predator Entity of the Emotional Spectrum seems to be one, as it is the embodiment of the violet light of love.
- The Incredible Hercules: Aphrodite resigned from the role because she no longer felt she could serve in that role. She was succeeded by the siren Venus.
- It should be noted that Venus, who starred in her own comicbook series in the 50s, was supposed to be THE goddess of love; that she was a siren with identity issues all along is a later Retcon.
- Marvel Universe: Mistress Love is one of the cosmic forces.
- The Mighty Thor: Amora the Enchantress technically counts as she used to be Freyja in a previous Asgardian incarnation, and her power emphasizes seduction and sex appeal.
- Valhalla: Freya is one of the main characters and is presented as an Ethical Slut and one of the saner members of the cast. One album ("Freya's Necklace") focuses on Heimdall, Odin and Freya and how she as Goddess of Love embodies both the physical and emotional acts of love (Odin is only interested in her sexually, while Heimdall is only interested her platonically).
- Wonder Woman: Aphrodite is one of the main patron goddesses of the Amazons.
- Absolute Trust: Alec is brought into the Avatar world by Lady Ài, the Love Spirit. True to the trope, she's an absolute bombshell, and her name even means "Love" in Chinese and Japanese.
- Chemistry: Deconstructed. The Winged Unicorn Cadance is the Goddess of Love and, subsequently, Lust as well. Without medication, she goes into a heat-like state where she has an attraction to everyone and suffers from love magic Power Incontinence.
- In a Dungeons & Dragons fanfic, even orcs have love goddesses.👁 Image
- Kislova: goddess of "light, kindness, mercy, growth, life, love, family"
- Baalibastus: goddess of "love, beauty, fire, passion, animals, children"
- Loki: Agent of Doomgard: A variant; the Loki of Metropolis 51 is the goddess of Seduction and Intoxication. While she mostly covers the sex and conquest-related aspects of her love domain, she presides over mind-altering substances (including but not limited to alcohol).
- Pony POV Series: In this series, Princess Cadence isn't the Alicorn that represents love as My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic implies, but rather, she's the Alicorn of Music and Harmony; the role of Love goddess falls to her older sister Venus instead. It's just that Cadence's powers are similar enough that she can remind ponies that they're in love. At one point, Entropy, the goddess of nothingness, claims that love comes from nothing, so she also represents love.
- Ravenloft: Outlander Chronicles: Wyatt's Warlock Patron, the Planetar Sapphira, states she was created by one before she was summoned to and trapped in Ravenloft. It's implied her goddess was Sune of the Forgotten Realms. Sapphira chose Wyatt because he was most aligned with Sune's values, which Sapphira was created to encourage and uphold, and she requires Wyatt to feed her by encouraging joy, beauty, love, and sex.
- Theogony👁 Image
: Shizuru is the goddess of charm, persuasion and seduction. Hade's daughter Natsuki catches her eye.
- Uma Thurman played Venus in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
- Ursula Andress played Aphrodite in the 1981 Clash of the Titans.
- The film One Touch of Venus and its remake have a statue of Venus de Milo coming to life and understandably causing wacky hijinx in the protagonist's life.
- In Around the World in Eighty Days, Sir Francis Cromarty points out a statue of Kali, and says that she is the Hindu goddess of love and death. "Of death, perhaps," replies Passepartout, "but of love — that ugly old hag? Never!"
- There are number of love goddesses in Adam R. Brown's Astral Dawn series.The most notable goddess of love is Ixchel of the Mayan pantheon. She's also ironically Caspian's love interest.
- The Death Mage Who Doesn't Want a Fourth Time: Vida is the goddess of Life and Love and one of the eleven High Gods of Lambda, who was sealed by Alda the God of Order thousands of years ago for creating several races that disgusted Alda. She is considered the biggest patron of Vandalieu the protagonist.
- Discworld has at least three.
- Astoria the Ephebian Goddess of Love. According to the Great God Om, "a complete bubblehead".
- Petulia, Ephebian Goddess of, er, Negotiable Affection might count, too.
- And the troll pantheon has Chondrodite, who makes trolls fall in love by hitting them with a rock.
- Discworld astrology has a sign called Astoria's Flame: this is a large single red star. People born under Astoria's Flame are said to be naturally drawn towards Seamstressing and negotiable affection.
- Syph from Divine Misfortune started out as the Goddess of Love (her pantheon is never specified). Then after she fell in love with Lucky only for him to dump her, it changes her so fundamentally that she turns into a Goddess associated with Heartbreak and Tragedy. She spends literally a millenia wandering around as a depressed vagrant before eventually being inspired to use her godly powers to avenge scorned lovers.
- Everworld gave a cameo to Aphrodite when the group went to Olympus. She basically struts out, sexfully supports her lover Ares in an argument, and then struts away, having made the male protagonists temporarily forget their own names. Meanwhile Eros hovers nearby and makes lewd gestures at April.
- There's also Hel, who could be called a sex goddess. In the most horrible way possible. Half of her body is the most magically irresistible woman possible, while the other half is a corpse.
- In Another World with My Smartphone: The Goddess of Love first advises Touya about dropping his beliefs from his original world and not worry about marrying multiple girls. She later descends to the mortal realm and passes herself off as Touya's older sister, often giving him and his fiancées advices to push their love lives further.
- Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?:
- Freya is a goddess of love and beauty famed for being the World's Most Beautiful Woman even among Inhumanly Beautiful Race of gods. All of her children are enraptured with her and are willing to fight each other (and other familia) to the death for her favor. She also possesses Charm Person and The Pornomancer powers that she can use at will even without releasing her arcanum, making her especially powerful and dangerous to mortals, who are almost completely incapable of resisting her abilities.
- Ishtar is another goddess of sex and beauty who runs Orario's Red-Light District. Jealous of Freya's power and attention, she schemes to usurp her as the leader of the most powerful familia in Orario while also possessing similar, but not as potent, Charm Person powers. Her children are also workers in her network of brothels throughout the district and many of them are as promiscuous as their goddess is, as shown when Bell is nearly torn to pieces in a Lover Tug of War between her children after he stumbles into her domain while looking for Mikoto.
- Aphrodite appears in the Memoria Freese spinoff. Hephaestus' former lover and yet another goddess of beauty, she's prone to butting heads with the virgin goddesses Hestia, Athena, and Artemis, telling them that they're "2,000% missing out on life" without the allure of love.
- One of the Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996) novelizations "All You Need Is A Love Spell" has a family from Greece move to Westbridge. They turn out to be Mars and Venus and their son Cupid. Venus is portrayed as stunningly beautiful but a complete airhead and quite manipulative. Cupid meanwhile is actually being manipulated by his parents into thinking that Sabrina is his Psyche from mythology. He also misuses his powers to make the wrong couples fall in love at school.
- The Redemption of Althalus has Dweia, who loves all things but especially Althalus. She's an interesting variation in that it's primarily maternal rather than romantic love: her brothers are The Maker and the Destroyer Deity, and she looks after everything in between.
- Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis, as a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, includes the primordial Ungit as a love goddess, and the God of the Mountain, as a love god.
- The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant introduces the Lover, a third Anthropomorphic Personification on par with the Creator and the Despiser, who is characterized as female. Except that the Despiser didn't much care for that, so he seduced the Lover and betrayed her, to taint all love forever, and both of them got trapped in the Land for their troubles. The Despiser became Lord Foul; the Lover became She Who Must Not Be Named.
- The Camp Half-Blood Series, being an adaptation of Classical Mythology, has Aphrodite. Her children have a cabin at Camp Half-Blood.
- In The Titan's Curse, Aphrodite shows up to tell Percy to rescue Annabeth, and that while she wants them to get together, she's going to arrange a lot of indecision and confusion beforehand to make things more interesting. Notably, she changes her appearance to whatever the viewer finds most beautiful; to Percy, she looks like a mix between Annabeth and a TV actress whom he used to have a crush on.
- In The Mark of Athena, Annabeth, Piper and Hazel meet Venus, who isn't very different from Aphrodite. Her appearance changes to make Annabeth jealous.
- In The House of Hades, Jason and Nico meet Cupid. He's a bit more of a jerk than his mother, forcing Nico to admit his crush on Percy, though he'd probably argue that was for Nico's own good.
- Freya appears in Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard. She shines with so much light that it illuminates her entire realm of Folkvanger, and her smile is so beautiful that Magnus thinks that he would give up his own life to keep it fixed on him. Which is a little weird when you find out that she's his aunt. Also, she's the mother of his half-dwarf friend, Blitzen.
- Xochiquetzal, the Aztec goddess of lust and childbirth, features prominently in Servant of the Underworld, the first book of the Obsidian & Blood trilogy.
- Psyche features both Aphrodite and her son, Eros, who falls in love with the Princess Protagonist, when he is pricked by his own arrow.
- The Saga of Billy: In the pantheon of Erenner, Mélène represents maternal and compassionate love, while her sister Ytia embodies a more romantic and sexual love.
- R'hllor, The Lord Of Light of A Song of Ice and Fire, represents fire, life and sex.
- Legends of Ithyria: Ithyria, the benevolent goddess worshipped by the Kingdom of Ithryia, is a goddess of light, goodness, spirit, and love. The latter is why she takes her shaa'din as her lovers and is dismayed by her priestesses swearing oaths of chastity.
- Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess:
- Aphrodite was portrayed as a Valley Girl with Hidden Depths and an even more Hidden Heart of Gold, played by Alexandra Tydings.
- These shows also feature her son Cupid (portrayed by Karl Urban), and an Alternate Universe where Ares is the God of Love. In "A Comedy of Eros", Cupid's son, Baby Bliss, steals Cupid's arrows and causes chaos by indiscriminately causing people to fall in love.
- The Hallmark version of Jason and the Argonauts leaves out Aphrodite but has Hera ordering Eros to shoot Medea with one of his arrows and make her fall in love with Jason. This version portrays Eros as being made completely of fire.
- Hathor pops up in a season 1 episode of Stargate SG-1. Of course, since the Goa'uld are The Empire and controlling the masses by posing as gods, "love" equals "brainwashing gas makes you act infatuated while carrying out Hathor's every whim."
- In Supernatural, angels of love are called "Cupids", who manifest as nude men rather than diapered babies.
Cupid: (hugging Castiel) Love is more than word to me you know. I love love. I love it and if that's wrong I don't wanna be right.
- Though later seasons retcon this a bit, by presenting Cupids as being of both genders and, you know, wearing clothes.
- Charmed:
- In a two-part season finale, the girls were given the powers of the Greek gods, with Phoebe as the goddess of love. Men fell in love with her instantly and she basically created a harem-cult when the power was going to her head.
- The series also shows Cupids a few time, who are basically spirits who spread love. Phoebe ends up marrying one.
- Vanna White played Venus in a forgettable 1988 romantic comedy TV movie titled (what else?) Goddess of Love.
- The Almighty Johnsons, a show about Norse gods hiding in New Zealand, had two:
- Michele (Sjofn) is a minor goddess (as everyone keeps reminding her), but a goddess of love, lust, and mischief.
- Freya, goddess of love and marriage, is much more restrained, and her human identity is a mystery for much of the series.
- Several Indo-European dawn goddesses, such as the Hindu Ushas and Baltic Aushrine, a function that was probably inherited by the common Proto-Indo-European goddess from which they descend, Hausos👁 Image
. Hausos was the embodiment of Venus, the Morning Star, which means that most of her derivatives, especially Eos from Classical Mythology may have also been love goddesses. - Norse Mythology has Freyja, the goddess of love, sex, war and witchcraft.
- Egyptian Mythology has several, including Bast and Hathor, who (to complicate things further) were occasionally regarded as being different aspects of the same deity (Egyptian mythology is like that).
- Hathor is effectively Aphrodite's Egyptian counterpart (in fact, they were sometimes believed to be the same deity) and is the Launcher of a Thousand Ships in Egyptian mythology — it's probably easier to find a god she hasn't been paired up with in some myth or other. She's a goddess of love, sex, food, music, drunkenness, joy, beauty, motherhood, the stars, and the sky; she also has a connection to fate and is one of a few goddesses that helps the dead in the afterlife. She's also very, very sexual, even by the standards of Egyptian mythology; in one myth, Ra was sulking on the floor, so she "exposed her vagina before his very eyes", which led him to laugh and get up.
- Bast was a goddess of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood who came to be depicted as a cat, perhaps because cats were regarded as protective of their offspring.
- It should be noted that both Hathor and Bast had much darker aspects, though — either or both were believed to have a much darker aspect known as Sekhmet (or Sakhmet or a number of other spellings) that came out when they were particularly angered. Interestingly, Sekhmet was primarily a goddess of war, plagues, and poisons (although sometimes also of healing), showing that the line between Love Goddess and War God isn't always that thick. In one myth, the gods unleashed Sekhmet to punish humanity, but she quickly went far beyond their intentions, and she got so literally (not figuratively) bloodthirsty that she threatened to wipe out humanity entirely. Ra's solution was to fill a lake with beer and dye it red to make her believe it was blood. After she drank the entire lake, she got so drunk she forgot about her rampage and returned to being Hathor. Egyptologists hold that the dichotomy between Sekhmet and Hathor (or Bast) illustrates ancient Egyptians' conception that femininity, in Carolyn Graves-Brown's words, "encompassed both extreme passions of fury and love."
- Classical Mythology has two or four depending on whether or not you consider the Roman pantheon to be separate or the same pantheon with different names:
- Aphrodite in Greek Mythology. As much a goddess of lust as of love, encouraging people to get it on as much as possible whenever and wherever they can, which is how she started The Trojan War.
- Some theorists (notably Plato) divided Aphrodite into two aspects or personas, Aphrodite Urania, the "heavenly Aphrodite" of sublime love, and Aphrodite Pandemos (known in the Roman version as Venus Vulgivaga, the "Venus of the people"), who was in charge of purely sexual love. In some versions Aphrodite had a dark aspect; for instance in Sparta she was portrayed wearing armour and one of her epithets was Androphonos, "the man-killer".
- It should be noted that the ancient Greeks (or at least some of their philosophers) didn't view "love" between a man and woman as a good thing. Partially because it was considered an animal instinct and a distraction from more important things such as war and philosophy depending on the area, and partially because they believed women to be objects, and therefore loving them was inferior to their "people"-centered loves of agape and philia. This led the ancient Greeks (or, again, at least certain mythographers and poets) to see Aphrodite as a villainous figure.
- The Romans identified Aphrodite with their native goddess Venus. It's not entirely clear what Venus was originally like, but after the Greeks colonized Italy in the early Iron Age, Venus took on Aphrodite's description as a goddess of various forms of physical and emotional love and was portrayed similarly in art.
- Eros (or Pothos) in Greek mythology, Aphrodite's son, sent (sometimes reluctantly) to put his mother's nefarious plots in action. Depending on who told the story, he could be portrayed much more sympathetically than his mother. In Hesiod's Theogony, Eros is one of the primal gods (brother to Gaia and Tartaros) and thus older than Aphrodite. Also in most myths Eros engages in all kinds of mischief without needing Aphrodite's orders to do so. The story of Eros and Psyche, where he is portrayed as her reluctant servant, is so late that it can be considered literature more than actual mythology. The Romans identified Eros with their own Amor or Cupid(o) in a similar manner to Aphrodite and Venus.
- There were also a few less well-known love deities, for instance Anteros, the god of requited love who was particularly associated with homosexual love, and Himeros, god of sexual desire. There were also some minor deities belonging to Aphrodite's train or sometimes assisted her, most notably the three Graces and Peitho, goddess of persuasion (who helped Aphrodite to get Helena in bed with Paris).
- Dionysos or Bacchus, while not a god of love per se, was god of ecstasy, which included sexual ecstasy, as became evident in the Bacchanalia.
- According to some Bible students, Artemis of the city Ephesus was worshiped as the goddess of love.
- Eos, the goddess of dawn, may originally have had this role, based on similar other indo-european dawn goddesses, and her own promiscuity, though ultimately her functions passed to the deities above. Almost as if lampshading this, she is cursed with lust by Aphrodite in surviving myths.
- Helios and Selene were apparently this, as Pindar writes that men would pray to him and women to her for help in love matters.
- Aphrodite in Greek Mythology. As much a goddess of lust as of love, encouraging people to get it on as much as possible whenever and wherever they can, which is how she started The Trojan War.
- Mesopotamian Mythology's Ishtar/Inanna was a goddess of love and war. Cynics might argue that those aren't all that inappropriate together, though; and as would Shakespeare and a number of others say, "All's fair in love and war." Later, this deity became part of the Phoenicians' pantheon as Astarte, who brought her images and myths to their trading outposts in southern Greece — where, on Cythera and in Sparta, they gave rise to the first cults of Aphrodite, who like Astarte began as a goddess of both love and warfare in her earliest forms.
- In Celtic Mythology, Aengus Og is a male example, associated with love and sexuality as well as youth and beauty. The Morrighan is primarily a war goddess, but has strong elements of fertility and sexuality, similar to Ishtar.
- Christianity:
- The Bible describes God as the embodiment of love itself, creating the infinite universe as an expression of His endless love while simultaneously being a War God that punishes those who love evil more than Him or their fellow man on our behalf. One of the first things we see Him do after creating Earth is make the first married couple Adam & Eve. The Bible speaks at length on how to foster healthy relationships while avoiding hollow lust, with adultery being seen as a capital offense under Biblical law before Jesus advised mercy.
- While God is seen as the embodiment of love itself, the Holy Spirit in particular is considered to be the Anthropomorphic Personification of His love for us, which works in our lives by encouraging us to properly love one another. According to conventional doctrine, the only thing that can make a person Beyond Redemption is blaspheming the Holy Spirit, which means spending the entirety of your life rejecting God's love and teachings through Pride or Despair, and going to your grave having sacrificed all opportunities for personal & spiritual growth. All this means that as long as you live God will always love you, but you need to make an honest effort to return the favor in life for that to carry over past death.
- In Voudoun (better known as Voodoo), Erzulie Freda is the lwa of love. (There is one God in the Voudun pantheon, and the lwa are intermediaries between him and the mortal world: they have distinct, multifaceted personalities, like the Greek Gods, but are considered more like the equivalent of angels).
- The related religion Santeria, a blend of Catholicism and the religion of the African Yoruban people, has Oshun (also spelled Oxun). She's the orisha (a divine intermediary similar to lwa) of romantic and sexual love: people concealing Santeria under the guise of Catholicism represent her with a figure of the Virgin Mary.
- The Bible describes God as the embodiment of love itself, creating the infinite universe as an expression of His endless love while simultaneously being a War God that punishes those who love evil more than Him or their fellow man on our behalf. One of the first things we see Him do after creating Earth is make the first married couple Adam & Eve. The Bible speaks at length on how to foster healthy relationships while avoiding hollow lust, with adultery being seen as a capital offense under Biblical law before Jesus advised mercy.
- Hindu Mythology has at least two. First is Kamadeva, who's equivalent to Eros. Other is Lakshmi, who's also associate with fortune, wealth and wisdom.
- Buddhism has an interesting version: the demon king is named Mara, which means "death," but can also be called Kama or Mara-Kama, with kama meaning "love." He basically symbolizes everything that can keep someone from enlightenment, and tried to tempt the Buddha from meditation with his three daughters, Taṇhā (Craving), Arati (Boredom), and Raga (Passion). However, the Buddha only saw them as decrepit old hags, and his resilience was enough to earn their praise. Mahayana/Vajrayana forms of Buddhism also have a more straight example in Tara, a female Buddha with many attributes, granting love among them.
- Aztec Mythology has Xochiquetzal for erotic love, Chalchiuhtlicue for chaste love, and Xochipilli for same-sex love.
- Chinese Mythology has Yue Lao👁 Image
and Tu'er Shen👁 Image
. Yue Lao is a lunar god of marriage and love who acts as a matchmaker for opposite-sex couples, binding them together with a Red String of Fate. Meanwhile, Tu'er Shen manages love and sex between men (though his patronage has expanded in the modern era to encompass the LGBTQ+ community as a whole).
- The Dark Eye has at least two: Travia for familiar love (and home and hearth), and Rahja for romantic love and lust (passion, wine and horses, too)
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- A number of "default" deities not specific to any one setting include a number of these:
- Ai Ch'hing is the Kara-Turan goddess of love and marriage.
- Evening Glory (Libris Mortis) is a lesser goddess of love, beauty and immortality through undeath.
- Iallanis is a lesser goddess of good giants, love, forgiveness, mercy and beauty.
- Isis (also known as Ishtar) is the Mulhorandi goddess of weather, rivers, agriculture, love, marriage and good magic.
- Kiltzi is the Maztican god of health, love, happiness and children.
- Lastai, from the Book of Exalted Deeds, is a demigoddess of pleasure, love and passion.
- Sehanine is a goddess of illusion, love and the moon.
- Sheela Peryroyl is a halfling goddess of nature, agriculture, weather, song, dance, beauty and romantic love.
- Sheyanna Flaxenstrand is a gnome goddess of love, beauty and passion.
- Wee Jas is the Sune goddess of love, beauty, death, magic and law. The combination of law and love makes her the goddess of Perfectly Arranged Marriage.
- Eberron: Arawai is the most traditional love goddess, being the Sovereign of Life and Love, patron of fertility. However, just as the Sovereigns and the Dark Six have the Three Faces of War, they also have the Three Faces of Love: Arawai is the love that brings life, Boldrei (Sovereign of Hall and Hearth) is the love that binds, and The Fury (Dark Sovereign of Rage and Revenge) is the love that burns.
- Forgotten Realms: Sharess is the goddess of lust, love, sensual fulfillment and cats (she apparently used to be Bast, but got hit by wanderlust in the distant past and fell out of the Mulhorandi pantheon and semi-warrior goddess status and into the Faerûnian pantheon).
- A number of "default" deities not specific to any one setting include a number of these:
- Exalted has Venus, the Maiden of Serenity. Love is only one of the many things she's goddess of — she handles health, positive emotions, and pleasure in general — but it's one of the more focused-on. (Venus also wears blue, which is why such diverse items as wedding dresses; flags of truce or surrender and brothel lanterns are all asociated with the colour.)
- GURPS: The "Dungeon Fantasy" sub-line features classic dungeon fantasy-style clerics and holy warriors, and allows for the possibility of them worshiping a range of deities. Gods of Love are an option, and their worshippers tend to become adventurers to promote giving happy endings to good stories, as most tend to be romantics at heart, or to combat evil monsters and undead abominations that their patrons oppose.
It may be harder to explain why their priests should get involved in dungeon delving. If the god has a desire to preserve communities, their interest in fertility makes them hate any “blight on the land.” Alternatively, priests (or their gods) may well be romantics at heart — keen to help enact good stories with happy endings — or tricksters — amused by anything that makes fools of mortals. More simplistically, such clerics may venture into dungeons because their deities are gods of life and thus opposed to undeath, or gods of beauty and thus enemies of ugly monsters.
- Pathfinder: Shelyn is the goddess of love, art and beauty. She was originally purely a deity of art, music and beauty, as the love goddess was her mother, but she inherited control over love after her half-brother Zon-Kuthon murdered their parents. She was originally a flighty, selfish and inconstant deity, but the goddess of love also turned her into an All-Loving Hero by giving her understanding of both selfless love and mortals' ability to love anyone and anything, and she now perceives beauty and worth in quite literally everything. She is also very explicitly not a goddess of lust, fertility and physical passion; she draws a strong distinction between love and lust, and while she doesn't object to it as a concept she tends to prioritize emotional intimacy over the physical kind. As a result, her paladins are big on Courtly Love.
- Ponyfinder: Lashtada is the goddess of love and passion, and perceives all of life through that lens. She is firmly neutral in alignment as a result, as she cares very little for the struggle between good and evil or order and chaos, as love rarely discriminates between one's allies and foes anyway, and likewise only cares about mortal morality and philosophy insofar as it affects the ability for love to thrive — in a choice between a tyrant who nonetheless allows people to pursue their own romantic lives and a fair ruler who insists on arranged marriages, Lashtada would always support the tyrant.
- Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 have two gods of love: One god of sexual love (eros), and one god of parental love (storge). These gods are named Slaanesh and Nurgle, and with Warhammer 40K being the Crapsack World that it is, both gods are genocidal soul-devouring demon-lords with maximized Squick factor (Slaanesh is a hermaphroditic incarnation of desire spawned by millennia of depraved hedonism by a psychic species; Nurgle feels love for everything, it's just that germs, bacteria and vermin outnumber sentient species, and they need love too...).
- Once on This Island features four main gods, including Erzulie, the goddess of love.
- One Touch of Venus features the Greek goddess of love in Living Statue form.
- The goddess Freia, Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.
- Aphrodite, Freya, and Hathor are all minor deities in Age of Mythology.
- Asura's Wrath: Olga's Mantra affinity is Lust and she is the only woman among the Seven Deities.
- Castlevania: Circle of the Moon: As a reference to Classical Mythology, the Venus action card depicts the "goddess of love and beauty".
- Civilization V: The "Goddess of Love" pantheon gives one point of happiness for each city with a population of at least six citizens, so it makes sense to take it if you have (or plan to have) a lot of fairly well-populated cities and wish to suffer less from unhappiness issues.
- Destiny/Destiny 2: The Hive's Blue-and-Orange Morality means their War God, Xivu Arath, is their god of (platonic) love. Not as in being a god of both love and war, but as in love and war being one and the same concept to them. The love shared between the gods of the Hive meant they fought and killed each other as often as possible so they would learn to survive and live forever, but Xivu Arath was always the most emotional and affectionate of the three, and held her brother Oryx in particularly high regard. Discovering his true death drove her to extremes of rage and grief, in contrast to her sister, the Trickster God Savathûn, who had a much more measured and introspective response.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- The Aedric Divines pantheon has two, representing different aspects of love. Mara, actually called the Goddess of Love, represents the platonic, marriage, and family aspects of love. Dibella, the Goddess of Beauty, instead represents sex and passionate, romantic love.
- Conversely, while "love" is stretching it, Mephala is a Daedric Prince whose sphere is "obscured to mortals", but who is associated with manipulation, lies, sex, and secrets. As one can probably guess, she represents the darker and manipulative aspects associated with sex, specifically its ability to make mortals betray one another and destroy trust.
- The good-aligned Erollisi Marr is the Goddess of Love and Hunting in EverQuest and EverQuest II. There's also Tholuxe Paells, the evil Demi-God of Lust. Not just sexual lust, but bloodlust and any other forms.
- Played for Horror in Fear & Hunger with Sylvain of The Old Gods, the goddess of love, fertility, and creation. She has Blue-and-Orange Morality that results in a very broad definition of "love", endorsing necrophilia (but despising rape and pedophilia). Her Bunnymask cult engages in an eternal, anonymous orgy that the party can potentially be trapped in. The Player Character can engage in a Sex Magic ritual under her purview called a "Marriage" that acts as a Fusion Dance, turning themselves and another party member into a Humanoid Abomination with better stats.
- Final Fantasy XIV: According to Eorzean mythology, Menphina the Lover is the goddess of love and the divine lover of Oschon the Wanderer. Rather than solely representing carnal or romantic love, Menphina presides over love in all its forms. She's said to reward those who give as much love as they receive and her followers beseech her for solace, shelter, and hope. When she appears in the Euphyrosyne raid, she's overflowing with compassion for everyone, telling the heroes that the Twelve listen to each and every prayer even though they do not have the power to answer them all.
- Aphrodite appears in God of War III. Naturally, it includes a sex scene between her and the player character, Kratos.
Such power!
- In Hades, Aphrodite is one of the Olympian gods who can offer boons to Zagreus to help him escape. Her boons are focused around applying either the Weak status effect, which reduces damage dealt by enemies, or the Charm effect which makes enemies briefly fight alongside Zagreus. Her boons also offer very high damage boosts to Zagreus' attacks. She is explicitly described as one of the most dangerous of the Olympians, and if Zagreus angers her she will bombard him with very accurate and persistent projectiles.
- In Legend of Mana, the Goddess of Mana is often said to be this, or sometimes even stated to be love itself. And as the game will show you through its story, this is NOT a good thing.
- Nexus Clash has Alonai, the Earth Mother personification of love, innocence and life. While she initially seems too kindly and naïve for the setting, she's sometimes portrayed in roleplay in more depth as codependent, violently protective of those she values, and willing to use More than Mind Control to keep their allegiance.
- Pokémon Legends: Arceus introduces the Fertility God Enamorus, who alongside her Weather Trio brothers cultivates the land. While Tornadus, Thundurus, and Landorus enrich the soil, her love is said to seed it with new life. Additionally, her tail is covered in heart patterns and her signature move Springtide Storm is said to attack enemies with "fierce winds brimming with love and hate".
- RuneScape: Love is part of Seren's ambit as goddess of light, harmony, and peace, and the mutual love between her and her elves is a defining element of their relationship. However, her presence compels people to love her, and she admits that that can be every bit as intrusive and painful as the forced loyalty her brother Zaros inflicts.
- Smite:
- Both Aphrodite and Cupid (the Roman god of love, not simply the more popular name for the Greek god Eros) are playable deities. Aphrodite being a Support Mage whose gameplay revolves around forming and breaking soulmate bonds with a teammate as her 'lover', while Cupid is a marksman/ADC with love-based themes and can toss out life-restoring hearts to help his allies.
- The game also features Freya, Vanir goddess of love and beauty, but her Love Goddess aspect is downplayed in favor of her status as Queen of the Valkyries.
- The Wild ARMs series has Raftina, the Guardian of Love and one of the Guardian Lords that rule over the other Guardians.
- Nixvir has Varya-Aphrodisias, the World Oak's counterpart to the Trope Codifier Aphrodite. The spouse of one of the Hephaestus expies of the World Oak, she also happens to be the Saucepan Man's mother, who rejected him because he was too ugly (ironically, in a scene which has more in common with Hephaestus' birth).
- The World Oak also has Varya-Aphrodisias' son Eroszth, who is the World Oak's version of Eros, albeit armed with an 1850s European-style revolver rather than the cliche bow-and-arrows.
- In The Gamer's Alliance, Hivena is the Goddess of Love and Fertility. She is quite amoral, willing to use mortals as pawns for her own sinister ends.
- Aphrodite and her eternally adolescent son Eros in Thalia's Musings. Aphrodite's preferred lover and one of Eros' possible fathers is, of course, Ares.
- Aphrodite shows up in Chrono Hustle.
- Don't Hug Me I'm Scared has Malcolm, a gigantic gravel-munching stone head who's worshipped by a talking butterfly and his band of deranged love cultists. It makes about as much sense as it sounds.
- In Hercules: The Animated Series, Aphrodite appears as a secondary character once in a while. Her main trait is her Theme Tune.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The Alicorn princess of love, Cadance, seems to be the pony equivalent of a Love Goddess. She can renew or spread love in others, recover and drastically increase magical strength and vitality in the ones that she loves, create a city-wide force field powered up by the hope and love within the inhabitants of the city that is strong enough to hold off and hurt a gigantic and ancient Advancing Wall of Doom / Eldritch Abomination , dispel evil magic with hearts or create an extremely powerful Heart Beat-Down using The Power of Love with some help from others. Along with this, she has your typical Mind Over Matter and Projectile Spell magic that a lot of unicorns have. She even has a heart-shaped jewel as her cutie mark.
- In The Smurfs (1981), Cupid appears more as a cherub who spreads love than a true god of love.
- A music artist called The Love God appears in Gravity Falls as a headliner act at a music festival. Turns out, he's actually the Love God, and Mabel stealing one of his love potions is what kick-starts that episode's plot.
- DuckTales (1987): The Valentine's Day Episode "A DuckTales Valentine" sees the Duck squad not only finding Cupids Arrows, but also introduces Aphroducky, the goddess of love who falls in love with Scrooge after being hit by one of the arrows.
