Venus has been described as perhaps "the most original creation of the Roman pantheon",[6]: 146 and "an ill-defined and assimilative" native goddess, combined "with a strange and exotic Aphrodite".[b] Her cults may represent the religiously legitimate charm and seduction of the divine by mortals, in contrast to the formal, contractual relations between most members of Rome's official pantheon and the state, and the unofficial, illicit manipulation of divine forces through magic.