Kimberly Steele

Hi Everyone,

 

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. I take reading requests until 8pm Central Time (Chicago Illinois USA) on Sunday night. Though I am flattered that people want readings after the deadline, I decline reading requests made after 8pm Central Time on Sunday night without exception.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

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Ogham readings are concluded for the week of April 23, but feel free to leave additional comments on existing readings.  Also, consider a BuyMeaCoffee membership for an extra reading every month... you can quit anytime. Thank you and see you next week for more free readings! 

Making the words and lives of other people into objects of obsession conveniently places self-realization upon a high, impossible shelf. The life of the revered person or people becomes a Wendigo — a monster that cannot be satisfied and that always cannibalizes its own tribe and eventually itself. Westerners have had a long time fad of fetishizing Eastern religions and (bastardized) Eastern meditation. Eastern religions often act as a Wendigo to someone born and raised in the West. Their practices, divorced from the land, become poisonous. Much of this is because of the conflict with the spirit of the land in which they are adopted.

Exotic fetishism is a syndrome that results from feeling embarrassed about one’s humble origins, feeling unmoored or uninspired by one’s traditions, and longing for someone else’s birthright. Exotic fetishism is a way of displacing the appreciation of the here and now for the cherished other, who always lives in another land, another time, another social class. For instance, a Westerner who throws himself into Buddhist transcendental meditation while holding down a salary class job and while living in the West is likely to piss off the land spirits without knowing it depending on how grateful or ungrateful he acts in his daily life. If he’s lucky, the beings of the unseen ecosystem around him will be forgiving or at least ambivalent. If he’s not so lucky, he will be beset with personal tragedies, unhappiness, and misfortune. Buddhism is a religion of ancestor worship and if he leaves that part out, he’s missing too huge of a chunk of that religion to be doing it right. If he’s a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), he isn’t likely to understand ancestor worship on a fundamental level because he will not have been raised that way. There are hard limits to where and how he was born and he did not accept them or work with them; instead he pretended they weren’t there and supplanted his potential with a mantle of faith that wasn’t appropriate to him or the land from whence he came. He rejected the spirits of the land as they were, refused to work with them, and never thought they could do the same to him.

A Little Thing Called Self-Worth

There's a woman I know who has always been tortured by exotic fetishism. Like many exotic fetishists, she has traveled the world. Though she has an interesting ethnic background and is not entirely white, she is ashamed. She is embarrassed by her family's wealth but also embarrassed that they are not filthy, Hollywood mogul rich. She loses all self-worth when she is around celebrities and is the sort who would camp out in dreadfully uncomfortable and potentially degrading circumstances for days if it meant she could spend five minutes chatting with a rock star or top-tier politician. She name-drops insufferably, always presuming that other people are just as impressed by famous people as she is. She has spent her life wondering why she is so miserable, yet it has been under her nose this entire time.

The Land Can Reject Us Too

The land reaches out to us all the time, but if we make fetishes of other times, lands, and cultures, the land spirits around us have no choice but to show us the same rejection we show them. By fetishizing the foreign, we become foreigners on our own soil: anchorless, nomadic, here today, gone tomorrow. We become unworthy of investment. When we refuse to communicate with the spirit of place where we are, the spirits don’t give us much in return: they ignore us and we ignore them.

Obsession with technology is its own sort of exotic fetish. When I walk in the forest preserve, I often see joggers and bikers dressed to the nines in the latest style of designer spandex suits. Their bikes likely cost more than my 16 year old car is worth. They wear sunglasses, noise-cancelling headphones, Apple watches, helmets, and special designer shoes as if they were going to be photographed by paparazzi during or after their bouts of exercise. They don't go through the forest preserve slowly enough to connect with the spirits of the land. They huff and puff too much to notice details like hummingbird moths or wild roses and blackberries. Their headphones cancel the calls of rare sandhill cranes and the distinct song of red winged blackbirds. They wouldn't know a red sumac from a poison sumac until it was far too late and it doesn't occur to them to learn. At least they manage to get to the forest preserve though, because for every one of them there are five of their peers glued to a screen who rarely go outdoors at all.

The Ungratefulness of Exotic Fetishism

There's another irony in that we can make fetishes of our own culture and background and alienate the spirits around us that way. For instance, if I decide my German grandparents, now deceased, are the pinnacle of human transcendence, and I make a fetish out of their lives and become a snob about how great they were, once again I fail to listen to the spirit voices around me and the land that gently guides me every day. I ignore the love of my family who are alive now. I become uncaring about the Earth that generously offers me spaghetti to eat and black tea to drink because it does not exactly match the spaetzle and beer of the past that I imagine my grandparents had. I fail to love the Eastern red cedars and the maples because my grandparents had hawthorns and black pines. I spend my life studying German when I could easily learn Spanish, which is what half my neighborhood speaks.

If I put my head in the clouds of an imaginary land, I am also prone to make stupid mistakes. I could make a small mistake, such as wearing clothing that does not suit me, but I wear it because it is from a culture I admire. I could easily spend too much money, buying trinkets and doodads from the exotic land I am obsessed with, or I could spend thousands traveling. The worst outcome is if I make a major life choice based on my exotic fetishism: marrying someone not because they are right for me, but because they suit the fetish, or wallowing in the fetish as if it is an all-consuming addiction and becoming useless and dependent.

Like it or not, we are spirits in the material world tasked with learning the onerous burden of being human so we may one day free ourselves once again to rest in the arms of God. I can deny my burden and rail against it all I want, but my refusal to learn my lessons will not enable me to pass the class without the usual groundwork.

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Here are some terms that were not in place when I grew up in the 70s/80s: woke, equity, social justice.  Political correctness of the type that is currently de rigueur was laughed at.  Nobody would have dreamed of putting a biological male on a women's swim team, let alone a women's prison.  Racism of various stripes was allowed to slide when it was not baldly displayed out in the open.  In my teens, I had a relative who used the word "gook" to refer to Asians.  It was not uncommon to hear white people using the N word to refer to black people, and not in a friendly, trying-to-be-cool way.  In the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's, Mickey Rooney did a turn as the ostensibly-Japanese Mr. Yunioshi, a buck-toothed, thick-bespectacled idiot landlord.  In elementary school, we swung our bodies on the jungle gym to this refrain:

Chicky chicky China sitting on a fence
Tried to make a dollar out of sixty-five cents
She missed, she missed, she missed like this
Have you ever seen a China girl who missed like this

The acceptance of everyday racism and sexism made every interaction with non-white people awkward.  I felt this especially as a child, being the worst of both worlds: half-yellow and half-white.  Half-breeds everywhere know the pain of not being colored enough for the color of one half and not being white enough for white people.  As a girl, guys did not wait for my boobs to come in order unsnap my fledgling bra and to grab my butt in the halls of junior high.  This kind of walk-by molestation was called a "goose" because that is what they yelled as they did it.  To this day, I think it is a miracle I did not murder anyone in junior high or high school.  Back then, if you were a girl or a woman, you just took it.  For thirty years of my life, I was thought not to think much of it if a guy cat-called me.  

As weird and icky as it used to be, I would gladly take yesteryear's racism and sexism over the current reign of Generation Cuck and the Thought Police who get their binders in a twist when they spot a minor transphobic infraction to report to their ghoulish social media followings.  At least the goosers, the racist movie directors, and extended family members had a sense of humor.  The politically correct scolds of the modern era are as joyless as  a skiing accident.  

Consider the toxic masculine pyramid of the 1980s: at the top were Gordon Gecko types and electric guitarist/singers of hair bands who wore as much and more makeup than their 2020s drag queen equivalent, yet did so while calling themselves straight.  The pendulum took a dramatic swing, passing right through a moderate period during which it wasn't OK to call Asians gooks at the dinner table but it also was not OK to lump all white/straight people into an evilly evil blob slated for Stalinist persecution.  By the 2000s, toxic masculinity was on its way out, taking its refuge in game culture.  By the 2010s, the last of toxic masculinity hid in the chans and attempted to assert itself through the MGTOW movement.  Toxic femininity exploited the vacuum left in the wake of toxic masculinity.

Shame

It is a human thing to project the shadow.  Anytime a human does not want to deal with something she is doing, said human props up an enemy that resembles herself and then pretends the enemy is the only person doing the wrong thing.  Toxic feminists seek to shame because they carry a great deal of unprocessed shame.  This is their Achille's heel.  If you want to destroy a toxic feminist from the inside out, tell them they ought to be ashamed of themselves and that you and they already know why, even if you are completely talking out of your ass.  

Look underneath the hood.  Toxic feminists try to pretend they are shameless, but they hate the bodies they pretend to be so "body positive" about.  They know they are hypocrites and their troll act is just that... an act.  They despair over the empty, vacuous lives they try so hard to paint as interesting on TikTok and Instagram.  Deep down they are horrified about just how deep they have dug, but they cannot yet look in the mirror and admit it.  Consequently, they wag fingers and scream EVIL instead of being honest and throwing down the shovel.

Chasing the Unlimits

At its core, toxic masculinity is a refusal to accept the limits of masculinity and a placement of excessive limits on femininity.  Toxic femininity, on the other hand, attempts to remove any and all limits, including the hard limits of natural law.  Toxic femininity at its core is a refusal to discriminate about anything: gender, beauty, law, getting up in the morning and going to work.  

When I saw the Broadway production of Wicked in the 1990s, I remember making a mental note about how many of the songs were about the removal of limits.  Many years later, I made the same mental note about the film musical The Greatest Showman, which features the song A Million Dreams (because a mere thousand or hundred dreams would never do) and Never Enough:

Towers of gold are still too little
These hands could hold the world but it will
Never be enough, it will never be enough

In the decade of the Millennium turn, McMansions got larger just as hard limits were slamming down everywhere else.  For many, many years, the salary class and the politicians who make its existence possible have done whatever they possibly could to continue kicking the can down the road.  In the 1980s, what was left of American manufacturing was sent overseas to China and its satellites, gutting the American lower-middle class and propping up the salary class with obscene wealth.  In the 2000s, inflating property values and tech bubbles to frothy highs did the job until that had to be bailed out in 2008.  After 2008, toxic femininity began its ascent because there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go, and no resources left to cannibalize.

Toxic femininity is a kind of cannibalism.  It cuts through the gills in order to scrape the last bits out of the tube.  By removing the limits of human decency, it enables sexual access to children.  By lumping in morbid obesity and freak show amputation/disfigurement into an amorphous standard of beauty, it opens the floodgates for medical profiteers to cash in on mental illness and dysmorphia.  By making it acceptable to shame white and/or straight people for the appearance of their skin or their natural sexual urge to cohabit with the opposite sex, it provides endless avenues for vice disguised as virtue.  

Communism

The gay luxury communist utopia where nobody works and everybody eats bugs (ahem delivered by drone) represents a toxic feminine ideal of detached, isolated, self-hobbled bliss.  Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates are the ultimate figureheads of the lifestyle and they both have the man-teats to prove it.  Toxic feminists love communism because they love violence: they advertise their love of it all the time by trying to equate free speech with violence.  Communism itself is a symptom of the ongoing decay of monotheism: it creates demiurges like Pol Pot and Stalin who create mini-Apocalypses in their urge to re-create the world in their own images.  Communism is feminine.  It wants to conquer by infection in equal proportion to dominating via military might.  The irony of communism is its domination by male leaders, and this is also the irony of modern toxic femininity.  It is dominated by males, whether it is transitioning males on the playing field or XY chromosome holders with Her/She bars in hand.

Covid: Attack of the Killer Couch Potatoes

The lockdowns and vaccine hysteria of the 2020s were quite successful (but ultimately failed) attempt at installing toxic feminine communism worldwide.  Without placing males at the heads of its nearly-unlimited hydra, toxic femininity cannot force its will at the end of a gunpoint because it does not know how to handle firearms without men at the helm.  That is why for every Theresa Tam there are three or more male equivalents calling the shots.  Toxic femininity is a cult of people who want to stay home and continue being poisoned, brainwashed, and spoon-fed.  Toxic femininity is soft, pliant, and wants to take in and consume everything it touches.

In its current incarnation, toxic femininity is the juggernaut of the salary class.  The toxic feminine takeover of masks, vaccines, and lockdowns was the most psycho in salary class strongholds.  Neurotic, sclerotic rich people in cozy enclaves fought as hard as such types can fight for keeping Versailles peasant-proof. 

Lockdowns are like McMansions in the way they are designed from the inside out.  In the McMansion, there are enormous rooms the size of small houses that are bundled together in what from outside looks like a packed-together village.  On the inside, there is always a cavernous foyer, a dining room, a living room, a finished basement with another huge living room/wet bar, a master bath, ostensible kid's and guest bedrooms, and at least seven large bathrooms.  What the outside looks like hardly matters as long as all of these standard features are present. 

Similarly, the toxic feminine salary class did not care about practical concerns  such as a functioning economy and the state international shipping as long as it got its wishlist.  The wishlist was mostly a removal of limits on the salary class.  They were sick of commuting, so the primary goal became to give themselves couch time (Netflix and chill and GrubHub) while dictating orders to lower classes from a virtuous perch. 

The handover of wealth from small businesses to mega corporations was fairly obvious when people were allowed to shop at Target or pick up Burger King at the drive thru but the tiny gift shop and café on the corner were forced to close.  Of course the rules were childish: they were endorsed and followed by stunted adults who bought the luxury communist ideal hook, line, and sinker when they were not pressured into accepting its worst parts via shame and threats.  

Subtle signs of yet another pendulum swing are lurking about.  Shirts that read Nobody Cares, Work Harder are suddenly all the rage.  The mainstream TV news media has to try extra hard to drum up interest in the latest failed effort to indict Donald Trump.  Experts are coming out of the woodwork condemning Covid vaccines and all hope of censoring their dissenting voices has been dashed.  I only hope that as the pendulum swings, it finds a few more stops in the middle this time.    

One of the reasons I was a lousy Christian is I am far too eclectic to worship only one god.   The colorful pageantry of polytheistic religions can seem extremely foreign and a little scary to a born-and-bred Protestant Midwesterner... not this Midwesterner.  From nearly day one, it looked like the other religions were having a great deal more fun than Protestants.  One of the reasons I made a lousy atheist is that even Protestant Christians appeared to have much more fun than atheists.  If I had a twenty for every bitter, lonely, childless, vegan, apocalypse-immanentizing atheist I ran into in my first decade of being vegan, I could easily buy a building to house my music studio again... in cold, hard cash.

Technically I am a Druid of about six or seven years ever since starting a daily habit of discursive meditation, the Sphere of Protection, and Ogham divination.  I started these practices under the aegis of the Ancient Order of Druids in America but quickly siphoned my energy into my own little corner as usual and did my thing.  Nobody was more surprised than I was when the Greek pantheon entered my life via the Orphic Hymns.  I still tend to think I did not entirely have a hand in it.  Considerable meditation leads me to believe that my past experiences as a musician, including possible experiences in past lives, have led to this.  

To make a long story short, I have come to believe it is time for a revival of the Greek gods and Greco-Roman ideals of balance, discourse,  respect for nature, and beauty, including the prioritization of beauty in our built environments.  We have gone too long as a civilization into extremes and the fetishization of extremes.  We have allowed the collective conversation to fall into utter disrepair, and the ugly result is stark division among class lines, normalized violence, and broken families and friendships.  Our disrespect for nature has rendered the average person an atheist drudge no matter how religious they claim to be -- this is why we have Catholic priests who have no idea how to banish a demon and Hindu devotees of Dhanvantari getting themselves shot up multiple times with government subsidized MRNA-hijackers at Walgreens.  

Hating on all of these problems and imbalances is unproductive at best and toxic at worst, so the remedy is not to try to stop the violence but to throw energy into nonviolent pursuits.  Enter Aphrodite.  The benefit of multi-god worship is the specific tailoring the lowly human can use the relationship with the god to remedy his or her own particular problems.  Astrology can easily pinpoint the specific troubles of any one human incarnation with laser accuracy and the human can take it from there, throwing energy into the god or goddess best suited to overcoming those issues.  The gods of the Greek pantheon are reaching out to us in this demonic age of collective astral trashiness to lift us out and heal us, one by one.  Just as collapse happens one person at a time, redemption happens one person at a time.  Through the gods we can broaden our perspectives to include better things than the pursuit of material impulse-gratification and false transcendence.  We can learn how not to be so small and petty.  

Of all the gods and goddesses, including many deities outside the Greco-Roman tradition, Aphrodite is by far the easiest to work with and the hardest to piss off.  This is not to say that she has no wrath: it is my opinion that Christianity and other monotheistic sects are doomed to obscure, fringe religion status in a few hundred years because of what their followers did to piss off Aphrodite over the last couple of millennia.  The virgin/whore complex and the uglification of the built environment were two biggies that ensured Aphrodite's wrath, and though she is very forgiving, there is a rubicon that was crossed long ago that I believe wrote the doom of monotheistic dominance into the package.  Aphrodite plays the long game.  Of course I could be wrong, but I don't think Christianity, Islam, or Judaism will be the big bullies on the playground when the twilight of industrial civilization fades permanently to black.

With that in mind, I get to the point of this article, which is how I believe we humans can at least attempt to please Aphrodite.  

Cooking and Cleaning

These two very mundane tasks may not seem to suit the Goddess of All Beauty, but when you scratch the surface, the alchemy of cooking and cleaning is the creation of harmony, beauty, and health within the home.  All of the above are sacred to Aphrodite.  Learning to cook a healthy, well-balanced meal while keeping it affordable, simple, and seasonal is no small task and I think Aphrodite recognizes the effort.  The good cook has a knack for using what is on hand and improvises hearty meals and delicious snacks at a moment's notice.  The energy brought to the kitchen and put into the food heals all who are lucky enough to eat it.  True health begins with food and the appreciation of the etheric labor necessary to provide nourishment.  

Cleaning is a form of gratitude.  A spoiled child leaves his toys strewn on the floor or sloppily crams them into an overflowing closet or under the bed, not caring about them once their newness has worn off.  When we leave our piles of stuff lying all over the desk and let the bathtub walls become caked in scum, we are nothing more than overgrown, spoiled children who not appreciate their wealth of toys.  Everything is sentient, including the plants I eat as a vegan, the car I drive, the cats in the yard and the squirrels they chase, and the computer, keyboard, and mouse I am writing this article on.  If everything is sentient, it can all be thanked and appreciated.  There is no better way of thanking a door for keeping you safe than oiling its squeaky hinges and cleaning off the scuff marks and dirt from filthy human hands.  Aphrodite is the queen of the sentient home.  When you clean the door and put your shoes away on a special shelf, you engage in a form of conversation with Aphrodite: "I thank you, Aphrodite, for all of these wonderful gifts."  Whether you say it aloud or simply put it into practice by thinking it while you clean your living space, the result is the same.

Pets

Aphrodite is the queen of domesticated animals, especially cats.  I believe Aphrodite and Bastet may be the same deity or potentially have some overlap.  To care for animals in your home is another recognition of non-human sentience.  Anyone who has properly cared for domesticated animals knows that even the allegedly low-maintenance ones take a huge amount of energy, time, money, and love to thrive.  Every time you train your dog to do a new trick or buy a new, improved sun lamp for your lizard's habitat, it can become an expression of adoration for Aphrodite.  

Beauty

Modern civilization and the legacy of monotheism has earned Aphrodite's ire because of its embrace of the hideous and the ugly.  From the ugliness of 20th century "art" to sprawling one story malls and office parks to the horrific results of too much plastic surgery, tattoos, body mods, and piercings, our culture has a lot to answer for.  Once again, the sheer ingratitude of not appreciating what one has is responsible for the new strip mall (the old one could have been rehabbed, or never built in the first place) and the body mods (the perfectly healthy, attractive person did not appreciate intact, functioning ear and nose cartilage).  Putting honest effort into improving the appearance of things in ways that don't involve massive overhauls are the domain of Aphrodite, and she is often kindly willing to help out if your self-improvement efforts come from a place of humility.  The person who takes a wrecking ball to an already palatial kitchen in order to replace a builder's new $625 stove and oven range with a $5000 designer oven range is not showing gratitude for the gifts of Aphrodite.  I tend to think people who do that create terrible karma for themselves, but again, I could be wrong.  To my mind, it is far more appreciative to keep remodeling costs to the minimum necessary, always using what you have and only buying what you need, not what you need to show off to snobby neighbors and people on Instagram.  Making the most of what you can by leaning into the good things already present in the space makes far more sense.  A coat of paint or stick on tiles can work wonders, and by not going gonzo, you show that you appreciate Aphrodite by not trying to start over by clearing out all she has provided for you.  When you beautify a space by cleaning it up and giving it some modest decoration, it shows you care.  You aren't blind to the details of what Aphrodite has generously provided for you.  You invoke her through your use of color, your creative re-use of what you have, and your eye for design.  

The same conservative principle holds when it comes to improving your appearance.  There are many ways to lose weight, and one of them involves reducing the stomach to a tiny pouch and getting pounds of cellulite sucked out and turned into biowaste using a cannula.  The other one is eating fewer calories and exercising.  I believe Aphrodite wants us to be healthy, and surgically quartering and re-routing the stomach is not a road to health.  The dysmorphia of our age, once again, is the legacy of monotheism and its hatred of the flesh.  When the flesh is a source of temptation that only exists to damn the soul to eternal hellfire, it follows that some will react by mortifying their flesh as they still live.  This is the secret reasoning of obesity and anorexia both: they are extreme sides of the same coin of mortification.  Aphrodite wants you to find a balancing force in your flesh and even take pleasure in it on occasion.  

Courtesy

We live in a rough age.  Since I stopped swearing a couple of years ago, I cannot help but notice that everybody swears except me.  Everybody in my family swears, including the members of the tribe who are technically elderly.  My husband often swears.  My teenage students swear.  If I listen too carefully or engage them in conversation, the store workers swear.  Every time my husband swears, I silently give thanks for three things.  I counter his curse with three blessings.  This often becomes exhausting, but it is far less tiring than swearing myself.  By carefully limiting my language, I am the change I want to see in the world.  I want a more genteel world where traditions are maintained and not a source of anxiety and hysteria.  I want to go back to a time when you didn't see certain things in polite society.  It is easy to be rude.  It is much harder to be deferent, kind, and polite.  When grandma starts talking a blue streak about an old, half-remembered scene, we can either correct her (rude) or let her go on at length so she can get the benefit of whatever fractured memory she has left.  When I am cut off by another driver on the road, I can either honk at them and chase them down into a parking lot somewhere in order to make them pay (rude) or I can mentally walk away from it and curb my anger, which after all emanated from the fear of being hurt.  Every time I do a considerate act, such as cleaning up a household mess or doing something gracious, it is an opportunity to devote myself to Aphrodite.

Literally Devoting Yourself to Aphrodite

Sometimes the best way of working with a god or goddess is to do magic in order to get their attention.  Aphrodite seems to like candles and incense, so if you want to work with her, grab a candle, preferably green, and burn it during the hour of Venus on a Friday while focusing your thoughts on Aphrodite.  You could recite the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite, or if you want to one-up your approach, you could listen to the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite.  If you want to up your approach even further, you could go full throttle and learn to play and/or sing the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite yourself.  Interestingly, the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite is the most popular arrangement among all of the Orphic Hymns I have arranged so far.  At the time of this writing, it has 39,000 views on YouTube. 

Music in general is sacred to Aphrodite, and as a musician, I can guarantee that you need to make practicing a daily habit if you want to be any good at music.  Music, as I will assert in my upcoming book Sacred Homemaking, is one of the easiest and best ways for a human to pray.  

Plants

Aphrodite seems to love green, especially in the form of plants.  Growing a garden, helping in someone else's garden, and caring for indoor plants are all ways you can beautify a space and worship Aphrodite at the same time.  Being in gardens and in wild and semi-wild spaces opens the door for Aphrodite to enter your life.  The Japanese have a practice of shirin-yoku or forest-bathing that uses the awareness of the plant ecosystem to cleanse the aura.  Shirin-yoku is not rocket science: just go to the garden, the forest preserve, or the wild space and take a deep breath while opening yourself to the other consciousness around you.

Speaking of Bathing...

People often misconceive Aphrodite as being entirely about sex and sexuality, specifically feminine sexuality.  She certainly has sexual aspects, but you don't have to be sexual whenever you are thinking about her.  Dedicating your bath to Aphrodite could involve some self-pleasure, but it does not require it.  All that is required is an appreciation of how wonderful it is to have running water inside the home or a clean lake or pool in which to take a dip.

All Etheric Labor is Sacred to Aphrodite

Etheric labor, often called emotional labor, is the mundane work that makes life bearable.  Skeptics like to dismiss the flurry of planning, cooking, cleaning, and organizing that is mainly handled by women as unimportant, but a world that has a problem with etheric labor also has a problem with etheric starvation, and etheric starvation happens to be the most common malady of our times.  For this reason, the simple act of folding clothes and linens is one of those basic etheric labors that puts you in the good graces of Aphrodite.  Beautifying anything that would otherwise be disheveled, plain, and thrown in a corner shows your love for both the object and Aphrodite herself.