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Chapter 3 Seeing Venus Six months after its superior conjunction, Venus climbs highest in the sky after sunset. Then five weeks later it attains maximum brilliance. A month later it vanishes into the sunset, while midway between these events begins its retrograde motion. Let's quote the US outdoor-astrologer Daniel Giamaro: 'it is greatly significant that the retrograde cycle always occurs when the planet is brightest, closest and most prominent'4. It then re-emerges some eight days later as the Morning Star. During this invisible sojourn it makes an 'inferior conjunction' with the Sun, then reappears still moving retrograde. The events of this cycle are symmetric around the solar conjunctions. The diagram was envisaged & designed by Melanie Reinhardt. We need to live our way into this cycle a bit more. The period of Venus' maximum brilliance may be just the time for that enchanting cocktail-party you were meaning to organise; or, for a feminist conference to meet, every eighteen months. The eight-year Venus-mandala comprises five synodic cycles, and its loops are the inferior conjunctions. At each loop, Venus draws in towards Earth as the Evening Star, and then withdraws as the Morning Star. We experience this in terms of dualities: of evening and morning, rising and setting, visible/invisible, East/West, retrograde/direct, and in front of/behind. Perhaps we should take more notice of the ancients having two names for Venus, Hesperus for the Evening Star and Lucifer for Morning Star.
For current dates of this cycle, checkout www.astro.com/swisseph/ae/venus1999.pdf See if you can tell which applies to a chart: Venus in front of the Sun, ie of greater longitude, means it was Lucifer the Evening star, while Venus behind the Sun in a chart is Hesperus, the Morning Star. There seem to be no astrological traditions concerning Venus in these different conditions, as would offer an opportunity for complimentary remarks to be made to clients, if perchance their Venus were at maximal brilliance (36 days either side of the inferior conjunction), or highest in the sky (45-46° from the Sun). The Babylonians experienced the Morning Star, rising ahead of the Sun, in terms of a war-goddess while the Evening Star was the goddess of love5. Their omen-tradition gave good tidings over days when Venus was reappearing in the sky. As mentioned, Babylonian tablets of this Venus-cycle, called Enuma Anu Enlil, date from the 2nd millenium BC. They seem to record a somewhat shorter period of visibility, more like eight months and five days, three weeks less than the modern figure6. Perhaps there were mountains around their horizon. Taking ten degrees either side of the Sun as Venus' limit of visibility, as is often done, would give somewhat less than the standard 263 days, and more like a two-week interval of invisibilty at inferior conjunction. Venus is normally said to have 263-day periods of visibility1 on average, and one notes that this interval measures the human gestation period, from conception to birth. To quote from a modern textbook, 'The period of gestation is 266 days from the date of conception'2. The interval of 266 days is equal to nine lunar months of 29.5 days. The best estimates of this period are now coming from artificially-induced pregnancies, which give a mean period between 260 and 266 days. Its mean duration thus appears as being inscribed in the sky by the two traditionally 'female' planets. Weaving The Pentagram The pentagram of Venus is a five-pointed star inscribed in the zodiac by its meetings with the Sun. These pentagrams are fully woven every eight years, but each of the five points of this pattern in the zodiac is reinforced every four years by alternating inferior and superior conjunctions. Thus the 'inferior' conjunction on 20 Aug 1999 (sun-Venus-Earth) was at 27° of Leo, just as the superior conjunction (Venus-Sun-Earth) of four years earlier on 20 Aug 1995 likewise chimed at 27° of Leo.
To the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the musical interval generated by Venus and Earth was a 'sixth', given by dividing a string in the fraction 5/8. 9 He said the relation was a 'marital' one and varied between the 'masculine sixth' G# - E and the 'feminine' one of Gb - E10. This ratio of 5 to 8 is the key to the pattern traced by Venus against the stars. The rotation rate of Venus on its own axis was discovered in 1967 by means of radar, which was able to peer through the dense mists surrounding the planet. It found a rotation period of precisely two-thirds of an Earth-year, or 243 days. Strangely enough, it was in the opposite direction to its rotation around the Sun. This meant that, in an eight-year period, Venus revolves exactly twelve times on its own axis. The numbers 5, 8 and 12 are here interacting. It follows from this that, each time Venus comes nearest to Earth in an inferior conjunction, the same part of its surface will be pointing towards Earth. Over one synodic period, Venus as we have seen revolves 1.6 times around the zodiac, while it will have revolved on its axis 360° x 584 / 243 = 2 x 360° + 145°, i.e. it will be 145° from its previous position. That is two quintile angles - it is helpful indeed vital to visualise the biquintile division here. As it has then gone three fifths around the zodiac or 216°, that is three quintile divisions, in the other direction, it is again pointing towards Earth, and this is within less than one degree! One cannot do this computation any more accurately because it involves an approximation of ignoring the elliptical nature of the orbits. Astronomers surmised that some mysterious resonance was operating to produce the tie-up. To quote from a book by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, 'There are too many such numerical coincidences in the Solar System ,.for this to be mere coincidence, so it seems that it is the Earth which controls the length of the Venus day, possibly through some tidal interaction.'11 But there is no such tidal interaction, as far as anyone knows. Others have referred to the phenomenon as 'synodic resonance'.12 An Australian meteorologist discovered that the Earth's magnetic field quietened down over the days when Venus came closest to Earth (i.e., the geomagnetic storm index tended to minimise during the Venus inferior conjunctions).13 To account for this it was supposed that Venus had a strong magnetic field which could interfere with or affect the Sun's magnetism as it streamed towards Earth; however it turned out that this was not the case, and Venus had only a weak magnetic field, so how could it exert this mysterious tranquillising effect? No-one could answer this, and so the discovery has been forgotten. The Mandala: Rose and Heart The pattern made by Venus relative to Earth was hardly seen or described by astronomers prior to the mid-1980s, when it emerged from the computers of astrology enthusiasts.14 The experience of this mandala is recent, it cannot be found in old books. After all, astronomers are not concerned with the geocentric perspective which it involves. In Britain, this orbit-pattern was described by Michael E.O'Neill in 1984 or thereabouts. Before that, some credit for priority of this beautiful discovery belongs to Astro-Computing Services in the U.S.15 The rose-pattern shown revolves very slowly in sidereal space, moving by just over two degrees every 8-year cycle against the stars. The planet Venus revolves in the opposite direction to that of its orbit, such that anyone performing the 'dance of Venus' faces towards the centre (i.e. Earth) at each point of nearest approach, then revolves so that they come facing the centre three more times between each of these positions. The pattern shown is circular, since both Venus and Earth have orbits of very low eccentricity, i.e. almost circular. All the other planets have more elliptical orbits: Mars is about ten times more elliptical in its motion around the Sun, and so a diagram of the kind shown for Mars would lack any such symmetry. This geocentric plot is free from any interpretive assumptions, such as that the Earth orbits around the Sun, and just shows the uninterpreted motion of Venus around the zodiac, as seen from Earth - what an astronomer sees every 8 years, by measuring distance as well as position. It doesn't indicate the disappearance from view of Venus every time it draws into a solar conjunction.
If a dancer were to start at the base of the heart shape, then in order to arrive facing towards the centre when she reached the inferior conjunction position at the top, she would have to start by facing south-west (South 55° West). She then rotates clockwise. One notes that such an angle cannot be calculated mathematically, but can (I believe) only be derived from computer diagrams such as the one shown. Also, as the diagram shows, the dancer would proceed much more slowly over the inferior conjunction positions. Astronomers are fond of describing Venus as a barren, rock-strewn planet surrounded by boiling sulphuric acid vapour, when sneering at the tenets of astrology, implying that astrologers are incapable of looking at facts straight in the face. It would help them to develop beyond so sadly limited a viewpoint if they were to contemplate the marvellous significance of the Venus orbit. Michel Gauquelin kept rather quiet about his discovery that Venus is linked to the births of eminent musicians and artists throughout Europe. Surely the harmonies generated by the orbit of this planet enhance one's appreciation of this discovery.16 The Magic synchrony of Venus
References and comments
1) For example, D.M.Hunter, Venus, U. of Arizona 1983 p.24 cites 263 days |
The cycle of Venus formed the subject of the world's oldest astrological text, a Venus-tablet from Nineveh. It was part of a series called Enuma Anu Enlil, the 'book of the gods of heaven and earth', and was dated to the seventeenth century B.C. It effectively recorded the five synodic periods of Venus, giving a series of ten omens over the eight-year cycle, through the pattern of Venus' appearance and disappearance from view.
