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Sapphic Flame ~ Handmade Candle inspired by Sappho for LGBTQ+ Youth Support
‘Sapphic Flame’: A LGBTQ+ Youth Support Candle Inspired by Sappho, Poet of Lesbos and Muse of Love and Longing
She who sings of love in shadows and lights the hearts of exiles.
Sapphic Flame is a celebration of longing, poetry, and love unbound by time or convention. It opens with the top embrace of cherry and tobacco leaf ~ darkly sweet, intoxicating, a whispered secret passed between lovers beneath moonlit skies. At its heart, the supple depth of leather and the creamy warmth of almond intertwine, evoking both intimacy and strength, the softness of touch and the fire of desire. As the base settles, the smooth caress of vanilla and tonka bean lingers like a lover’s last words, etched on the skin, unforgettable and eternal.
Sapphic Flame honors Sappho’s undying legacy, a fire that refuses to be extinguished, a testament to passion, poetry, and love that defies time. A portion of the proceeds from each purchase will go toward supporting LGBTQ+ youth, advocating that every soul can love freely, live authentically, and be embraced for who they truly are.
Curious about how the layers of scent unfold? Learn more about scent profiles ~ top, heart, and base notes at this blog post: Scent Profiles, Top, Heart, and Base Notes.
Our candles are lovingly handcrafted in our home studio, Nimue’s Lair, nestled in Walnut Creek, CA. Each one begins with a luxurious blend of coconut-apricot wax, carefully infused with premium fragrance oils. Poured by hand into elegant glass vessels and amber jars, they’re finished with hand-cut labels and enchanted final touches. Every candle is a small ritual, infused with magick, intention, and the quiet glow of story.
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Scent Notes:
Top: Cherry, Tobacco Leaf
Heart: Leather, Almond
Bottom: Vanilla Tonka Bean
EssentialOil: Patchouli Oil MD
Seasonal Resonance: Autumn’s Verse 🍂🔥
A fragrance steeped in the warmth of words unspoken, where golden light lingers on parchment and the air hums with the richness of autumn’s embrace. Bold yet intimate, this scent unfolds like a well-loved poem, layered with smoky depth, velvety sweetness, and the quiet indulgence of stolen moments by the fire.
🔥 Primary Category: Spicy & Warm
Tobacco leaf, leather, and tonka bean weave a bold, smoldering warmth, reminiscent of ink-dark musings, firelit reflections, and the slow burn of timeless reverie.
🥃 Secondary Category: Gourmand
Cherry, almond, and vanilla lend a luscious, honeyed depth, softening the intensity with a whisper of sweetness, like a verse lingering on the lips long after its final breath.
A scent that mirrors autumn’s poetic soul ~ deep, indulgent, and laced with the warmth of longing. 🍁✨
Please visit this blog post for more information on Scent Profiles, Top, Heart, and Base Notes.
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12 oz Deluxe – Aura Glass · Coco Apricot Wax
Burn Time: 60+ hours
Bold and enduring, this candle fills your space with myth and memory. Crafted for spacious sanctuaries, this candle shines in wide-open living rooms, high-ceilinged studios, and sacred hearths ~ places where scent is free to roam and the flame becomes a luminous companion to stillness and story.8 oz Classic – Amber Jar · Coco Apricot Wax
Burn Time: 50–60 hours
A perfect size for quiet corners and thoughtful pauses. Let it warm your reading nook, home office, or bedside altar, where its flame flickers like a whisper of intention.4 oz Petite – Amber Jar · Coco Apricot Wax
Burn Time: 20–25 hours
Small in size, rich in presence. This candle is ideal for travel, gifting, or sanctifying intimate spaces - guest rooms, personal altars, or quiet corners where scent and flame are invited to linger with intention. -
For detailed information about our waxes, wicks, fragrance blends, and vessels, please see our Ingredients & Materials Guide.
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For guidance on how to tend your flame with care, ensuring the cleanest, safest, and most enchanting burn, please visit our Candle Care Guide.
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Please visit the Shipping and Returns Information page for details.
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All photographs, images, and written content on this website are original works of Hekate's Torch Apothecary, LLC (doing business as Hekate’s Flame Apothecary) and are protected by copyright. They may not be used, altered, shared, or reposted on any platform without explicit written consent. All label designs, photos, images, and content are the exclusive property of Hekate's Torch Apothecary, LLC.
For inquiries regarding the use of our content, please contact: care@hekatesflame.com
© 2025 Hekate's Torch Apothecary, LLC. All rights reserved.
Content Warning:
This post explores ancient myths that include themes of violence, including assault and warfare, which may be sensitive for some readers. Please proceed with care and be mindful of your well-being while engaging with these stories.
Sappho’s Eternal Flame: A Legacy of Love, Poetry, and LGBTQ+ History
Across the millennia, the name Sappho lingers like the smoke of a sacred flame, curling through time, whispering words of longing and devotion. Like embers carried on the wind, her poetry drifts through the ages, igniting hearts with its tender ferocity. Her verses, fragile as ancient papyrus yet burning with unyielding intensity, have survived wars, censorship, and the erasure of centuries. Her words, once sung beneath moonlit Aegean skies, now echo across history, woven into the fabric of love and longing. She has been called "The Tenth Muse," her poetry revered and reviled, yet never silenced. To read her is to step into a world where desire is a deity, where love is both wound and wonder, where longing is immortal.
Sappho’s Life: The Shrouded Biography of a Poetess
Sappho, or Psappha in her native Aeolic dialect, was born around 620 BCE on the island of Lesbos, during a cultural renaissance that saw lyric poetry rise to prominence. Historical records, fragmented like her surviving verses, suggest she was of noble lineage, married to a wealthy man, and mother to a daughter named Cleis. She spent most of her life in Mytilene, where she led a thiasos, a community of women devoted to the arts, Aphrodite, and the divine mysteries of love. These communities, akin to sacred academies, served as spaces for young women to be educated in poetry, music, and the refinement of grace—an existence deeply entwined with the goddess of love.
Yet much of Sappho’s life has been obscured by legend, refracted through the prisms of ancient biases and later moralistic revisions. Some claimed she leaped from the Leucadian cliffs in despair over unrequited love for Phaon, a tale dismissed by scholars as the invention of later dramatists and comic poets. Others condemned her poetry, altering and censoring it across centuries to fit their narratives. By the medieval era, Christian moralists ordered her verses burned, yet echoes of her words persisted, inscribed in the works of others.
Her influence was undeniable. Plato hailed her as The Tenth Muse, and her image adorned coins, statues, and vases for centuries after her death. Even in times of suppression, she was too powerful a force to be forgotten. As Strabo, the ancient geographer, wrote, she is a "marvel.”
The Lyric Voice: Sappho’s Poetry and the Language of Love
Sappho transformed the landscape of poetry by shifting the gaze inward, writing not of gods and heroes but of human passion. Her words are intimate, pulsing with raw emotion as though drawn from the very heart of longing. She did not merely describe love. She embodied it, rendering its tremors, its consuming fire, its exultation and agony in words that have outlived empires.
Her Hymn to Aphrodite, the only complete poem that survives, is an invocation dripping with urgency, a plea to the goddess of love to bend fate in her favor:
Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind,
child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you
do not break with hard pains,
O lady, my heart
but come here if ever before
you caught my voice far off
and listening left your father's
golden house and came,
yoking your car. And fine birds brought you,
quick sparrows over the black earth
whipping their wings down the sky
through midair—
they arrived. But you, O blessed one,
smiled in your deathless face
and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why
(now again) I am calling out
and what I want to happen most of all
in my crazy heart. Whom should I persuade (now again)
to lead you back into her love? Who, O
Sappho, is wronging you?
For if she flees, soon she will pursue.
If she refuses gifts, rather will she give them.
If she does not love, soon she will love
even unwilling.
Come to me now: loose me from hard
care and all my heart longs
to accomplish, accomplish. You
be my ally.
Sappho captures the physical symptoms of love with breathtaking precision: the trembling, the loss of voice, the fire beneath the skin. Love, in her poetry, is both a sacred visitation and a force of destruction, something that wounds as profoundly as it exalts. She describes the sensation of watching a beloved with such vividness that centuries of poets, from Catullus to Shelley, borrowed her words, unable to match their intensity:
For whenever I look upon you for an instant I can no longer find a single word, but my tongue is broken, and instantly delicate fire runs beneath my skin, and I see nothing with my eyes, my heart pounds.
Her poetry was revolutionary, not just in form but in intention. She crafted personal lyric poetry in an era when poetry was predominantly public, recited to glorify warriors and gods. Instead, she sang of stolen glances, of whispered desires, of the way longing could shatter a person and leave them reborn in its wake.
Sappho and the Divine: Aphrodite’s Chosen Poet
Sappho’s poetry is suffused with the presence of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, whom she addressed not with distant reverence, but with the intimacy of a confidante, a sister, a force woven into the very fabric of her being. Unlike the epic poets who invoked the gods from afar, Sappho summoned Aphrodite, imploring her to intervene in earthly affairs, to bend love to her will. The goddess was not an abstract deity but an ever-present force, guiding passion and heartbreak alike.
Her thiasos functioned as a sacred space where women honored Aphrodite through music, dance, and poetry, celebrating love in all its forms. These gatherings were more than artistic pursuits; they were initiations into the mysteries of desire, the divine nature of longing. In this world of veiled glances and whispered devotions, garlands of violets and roses adorned soft skin, perfumes drifted like prayers, and golden light bathed the sacred rites of love.
The connection between Aphrodite and Sappho extended beyond prayer; it was as though the goddess herself whispered through the poet’s lips, transforming fleeting emotions into eternal verse. Her poetry reveals love as a force neither tame nor passive, but wild, consuming, radiant, and sometimes cruel, mirroring the capricious hand of the goddess who ruled over it.
Sappho’s Legacy: Love Beyond Erasure
Few poets have been as fervently revered and reviled as Sappho. In antiquity, she was sculpted into stone, immortalized in bronze, and stamped onto coins, testaments to a poet whose words were deemed worthy of preservation in metal and marble. Yet alongside reverence came erasure. Christian moralists, fearing the sensual and subversive nature of her verses, ordered her works burned. By the medieval period, nearly all of her poetry was lost, surviving only in quotations woven into the works of later scholars and poets, a handful of verses scattered like embers from a smothered flame.
The erasure did not end with the burning of manuscripts. Through the 19th and 20th centuries, translations of her work systematically obscured her queerness. Feminine pronouns were neutralized, lovers transformed into mere “friends,” and her devotion to women diluted into ambiguity. This literary censorship sought to reshape her into an image deemed acceptable by later moralities, stripping away the passion and specificity that defined her voice.
Yet Sappho’s legacy, like love itself, proved impossible to contain. The 20th and 21st centuries have seen a powerful reclamation of her identity, both as an artistic genius and as a symbol of Sapphic love. Scholars, poets, and LGBTQ+ communities have resurrected her words, restoring their original beauty and intent. She has become a beacon of lyric poetry and defiant love that refuses to be erased, her voice resounding through time.
From Sappho to Stonewall: The Enduring Fight for LGBTQ+ Rights
Sappho’s voice, nearly silenced by time, echoes in every fight for the right to love freely. From the sacred poetry circles of ancient Lesbos to the defiant protests on the streets of Stonewall, the struggle for LGBTQ+ recognition has been one of resilience and rebellion.
Her name gave birth to “Sapphic” and “Lesbian”, yet her legacy transcends labels. Love, unabashed, unshackled, was the pulse of her poetry, and it remains the heartbeat of a movement that has faced centuries of oppression yet refuses to be extinguished.
Ancient Queerness: A World Without Criminalization
In Sappho’s time, relationships between women were neither criminalized nor erased, existing within the sacred traditions of thiasoi and cultural rites of passage. While same-sex relationships flourished in certain historical contexts, later empires and religious institutions imposed restrictions, altering societal acceptance.
The Rise of Oppression and Resistance in the Modern Era
As the tides of history shifted, same-sex love, once honored in poetry and sacred rites, became a target for suppression.
1924 – The Society for Human Rights was founded in Chicago by Henry Gerber, and it became the first documented gay rights organization in the U.S.
1948 – Alfred Kinsey publishes Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, revealing that same-sex experiences were far more common than mainstream society acknowledged, challenging rigid definitions of sexuality.
1952 – The American Psychiatric Association (APA) classifies homosexuality as a mental disorder in its first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-I), fueling decades of discrimination.
Photo by Karly Jones on Unsplash
Stonewall and the Spark of Revolution
On a humid June night in 1969, the streets of Greenwich Village, New York, erupted in defiance. The walls of the Stonewall Inn, long a refuge for those forced into the shadows, became the frontlines of a revolution. With each thrown brick and defiant cry, history was rewritten.
Led by trans women of color like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the rebellion against police raids at the Stonewall Inn ignited a global demand for equality. For six days, the streets of Greenwich Village burned with righteous fury. One year later, the first Pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, ensuring the world would never forget the fight for love and liberation.
Legislative Victories and Cultural Shifts
Photo by Brian Kyed on Unsplash
From the decriminalization of homosexuality to the legalization of same-sex marriage, LGBTQ+ rights have made extraordinary gains:
1973 – The American Psychiatric Association removes homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses, a landmark decision that begins dismantling medicalized homophobia.
1981 – The AIDS crisis begins, devastating the LGBTQ+ community. The first reports emerge in The New York Times, describing a rare pneumonia and aggressive skin cancer affecting 41 gay men in New York and California. Initially, the CDC classified the disease as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency), reinforcing harmful stigmas. However, as cases are identified outside the gay community, biologist Bruce Voeller, one of the founders of the National Gay Task Force, successfully lobbies to change the name to AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome).
1987 – Amidst government inaction and widespread discrimination, activists form ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in response to the devastating toll of the AIDS epidemic on the gay and lesbian community in New York. ACT UP stages bold demonstrations targeting pharmaceutical companies profiteering from AIDS-related drugs and government agencies failing to protect patients from exorbitant prescription prices. Their activism forces public awareness and compels policymakers to confront the crisis, transforming the fight against AIDS into a global human rights movement.
1993 – The U.S. military enacts “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, a policy that prohibits the armed forces from discriminating against LGBTQ+ individuals while simultaneously requiring them to conceal their identities. Under this directive, applicants are not required to disclose their sexual orientation. Yet, they are still forbidden from engaging in same-sex relationships or openly acknowledging their identity. This paradox forces LGBTQ+ service members into silence, perpetuating systemic discrimination while giving the illusion of progress.
2003 – The Supreme Court strikes down sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, effectively decriminalizing same-sex intimacy nationwide.
2004 – Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage, ruling that the prohibition of gay marriage violates the principles of dignity and equality. This landmark decision paves the way for further legal victories, with states like New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Iowa, and Washington D.C. following suit in the next six years.
2010 – The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ends the policy that forced LGBTQ+ service members into secrecy, finally allowing them to serve openly and authentically in the U.S. military.
2011 – President Barack Obama announces that his administration will no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which had previously banned the federal recognition of same-sex marriages. Originally signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, DOMA restricted marriage rights to heterosexual couples, denying LGBTQ+ couples critical legal benefits. Clinton later expressed regret over the law, acknowledging its harm to the LGBTQ+ community. The Obama administration’s decision to abandon its defense of DOMA was a pivotal moment in the fight for marriage equality, setting the stage for its eventual repeal.
2015 – The Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right in all 50 states, fulfilling the dreams of generations who fought for the dignity of love.
Even as legal victories accumulate, the need for support remains urgent. The fight for safety, dignity, and belonging continues, especially for LGBTQ+ youth facing crisis today.
Supporting LGBTQ+ Rights: A Portion of Proceeds Donated
Sapphic Flame is part of Hekate’s Torch Apothecary’s Candles for Causes line, with a portion of proceeds donated to The Trevor Project, an organization dedicated to crisis intervention and suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth.
Founded in 1998, The Trevor Project offers 24/7 confidential assistance through a toll-free crisis helpline staffed by trained counselors who provide immediate support for young people in distress. Beyond crisis intervention, the organization is committed to fostering safe, accepting, and inclusive environments through education and outreach, offering guidance to parents, educators, and communities to ensure that LGBTQ+ youth have the support they need at home, in schools, and across society.
By supporting The Trevor Project, this candle helps provide life-saving resources, advocacy, and mental health support to those in need, ensuring that every LGBTQ+ soul can live with dignity, safety, and love.
Sappho, an Icon of Queer Love and Resistance
Reclaimed by feminist and LGBTQ+ scholars, Sappho is a patroness of love unconstrained by societal dictates.
Her poetry has been used as a rallying cry for those seeking to live authentically, reminding us that the fight for LGBTQ+ rights is not just political. It is poetic, personal, and eternal.
Time and fire may have stolen much of Sappho’s poetry, but her voice still flickers like an undying ember. She prophesied her own immortality:
Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time. ~ "Six Fragments for Atthis" (trans. Sherod Santos)
Her words, though fragmented, remain luminous, carrying the weight of history and the promise of recognition. From the shadows of ancient Greece to the frontlines of modern LGBTQ+ advocacy, her spirit endures in every voice that refuses to be silenced.
Picture the flickering glow of the Sapphic Flame candle casting its warmth in defiance of erasure, in celebration of love, and in remembrance of all those who have fought for the right to exist freely. With each flame kindled, we remember, we celebrate, and we continue the legacy of those who dared to love boldly. Just as Sappho’s verses continue to inspire across centuries, your support fuels a movement of acceptance, hope, and resilience.
References:
Academy of American Poets. (n.d.). Sappho. Poets.org. Retrieved February 20, 2025, from https://poets.org/poet/sappho
Brooklyn Museum. (n.d.). Sappho. Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, The Dinner Party. Retrieved February 20, 2025, from https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/sappho
Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2025, February 11). Sappho: Greek poet. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved February 20, 2025, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sappho-Greek-poet
Mark, J. J. (2021, June 10). Sappho of Lesbos. World History Encyclopedia. Retrieved February 20, 2025, from https://www.worldhistory.org/Sappho_of_Lesbos/
PBS. (n.d.). Milestones in the American gay rights movement. American Experience. Retrieved February 20, 2025, from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/stonewall-milestones-american-gay-rights-movement/
Poetry Foundation. (n.d.). Sappho. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved February 20, 2025, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sappho
Sappho. (n.d.). Deathless Aphrodite (A. Carson, Trans.). Poetry Foundation. Retrieved February 20, 2025, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1621146/1-deathless-aphrodite
