John Wadsworth – Dance of Venus
There are a number of examples of geometric harmony in our solar system which, according to hard scientific logic, shouldn’t really be there. The most compelling of these is the elegant dance that Venus does for the Earth every eight years, as if to demonstrate to us her astrological qualities of love, beauty and grace. For while the two planets are orbiting the Sun in the way we know that they do, Venus appears to be secretly expressing her love for the Earth, offering her a perfectly formed five-petalled flower.
Venus Kisses the Earth
If we plot Venus’s position in the zodiac, day-by-day, against her distance from the earth over an eight-year period, we observe her drawing out an extraordinary rose pattern, returning to almost exactly the same point in the zodiac before the repeating the pattern again. The petals of the flower are defined by the ‘loops’ she makes five times during those eight years, while she is in her retrograde phase, where she reverses her direction through the zodiac for a period of 40 days each time. During these phases, she makes her closest approach to us, ‘kissing’ the Earth at the moment of her intimate retrograde conjunction with the Sun. As I write this in early November 2018, we are currently in a Venus retrograde period, a few days after her most recent ‘kiss’, with Venus in her own natural sign of Libra.
The Venus Double Pentagram
This remarkable dance is composed of five heart-shaped movements, during which two conjunctions with the Sun are made; one of these during her closest retrograde approach. Over the eight years she makes five superior conjunctions with the Sun when she is in direct motion and on the far side of the Sun from us, and five inferior conjunction when she is in retrograde motion and on our side of the Sun. When these ten conjunctions are plotted out, they form two perfect pentagrams, the superior conjunctions forming the larger, and the inferior conjunctions the smaller of the two five-sided figures. Another remarkable example of Venusian harmony.
Aphrodite’s Apple
We associate Venus with the heart, as a symbol of love, and immediately recognise the rose as being synonymous with Venusian beauty and sensuous pleasure; its seductive perfume offering up the ultimate aphrodisiac. And then we have the pentagram too, a primary symbol of the goddess, always associated with Venus as divine guardian of harmonic order and proportion. Both the heart and the pentagram can be found when we slice open an apple. We see a pentagram revealed in its five-pipped core when cut it one way, and a heart when we cut it the other way. The apple itself is a symbol of Venus (Greek: Aphrodite). The goddess of love is awarded a golden apple when she wins the fated beauty contest, judged by Paris, and instigated by Eris, the uninvited guest whose mischief brings about the greatest of all wars, at Troy. It is said that when students began their first day at the Pythagorean mystery schools, they were each handed an apple sliced in half and asked to meditate upon it. Apple blossoms also produce five petals.
Venus & The Fibonacci Sequence
Back to the numbers, for there are more mysteries of divine harmony in this yet. Consider, that for every eight revolutions of the Sun that the Earth makes, Venus makes precisely thirteen. In other words, eight Earth years equates to exactly thirteen Venus years. It is, in fact, the difference between these orbital periods, that produces the five petals of the rose pattern. Five, eight and thirteen are numbers widely evidenced in the flowering patterns of plants, and are key numbers in the Fibonacci sequence where each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 etc). These numbers produce the famous fibonacci spiral, commonly found in nature; from ammonites and snail shells, to pine cones, pineapples and sunflower heads.
Venus & the Golden Ratio
As the Fibonacci sequence goes on, it approximates with increasing precision to the Golden Mean or Golden Ratio. Being the only way to divide a line so that the whole and parts are related to each other in the same way, the golden ratio epitomises the harmony we find in nature and it is the founding principle of sacred architecture. Furthermore, it is perfectly embodied in the pentagram, which is the only polygonal shape entirely governed by the golden ratio. Each of its five sides are crossed by another at its exact golden ratio intersection. The pentagram is a truly golden figure and we are remained of it in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite; for it is the copper-haired goddess upon whose head the gods place ‘a crown of finely worked gold’.
Venus & Her Elegant Courtesy
Venus revolves very slowly; once every 243 earth days, which is 2/3 of an Earth year, and she makes twelve full revolutions in the eight earth years that it takes to for her draw to the pentagram. This is why she always shows her same side to the Earth, as if making a courtesy, at the moment of the retrograde ‘kiss’, adding another level of elegance to her dance. Over the eight-year period a near-perfect harmonic resonance is demonstrated between the Venus day, the Venus year, and the Earth year. The synodic period of Venus (the time it takes for her to return to the same point behind the Sun) is 584 days or 1.6 earth years (golden ratio within 0.08%), and she makes five of these synodic cycles every eight years, as she forms the rose pattern.
The Sun-Centred Pattern
Remarkably a similar pattern is made when we place the Sun at the centre and draw a line between Venus and the Earth in their orbital relationship every couple of days. Over the eight-year cycle, a sun-centred version of the five-petalled flower emerges! It seems that Venus wants to demonstrate her beauty, her harmony and her love, whichever way round we look at it!
© John Wadsworth 2018
Find John here: www.kairosastrology.co.uk
References:
Martineau, John, A Little Book of Co-incidence in the Solar System (Glastonbury: Wooden Books, 2001)
Kollerstrom, Nick: Venus, The Path of Beauty (London: New Alchemy Press, 2014)
Evelyn White, Hugh G., (trans, 1914), The Homeric Hymns – http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/homer/hymns.htm
All images courtesy of John Martineau unless otherwise stated.
