Venus and her Cycles…
If you were to take a trip back to early school science class, you’ll probably recall learning a mnemonic device, something like, “My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” that was meant to help us remember the planets and their exact order from he sun. From the mnemonic device, it’s clear that both Mercury and Venus are planets located between the Sun and Earth. Venus has long been called our sister planet.
Astrologically speaking, Venus is the embodiment of the Divine Feminine. She rules both Taurus and Libra. In Taurus she speaks to themes of self. How we relate to ourselves, our bodies, our personal attachments and values. How we nourish and nurture ourselves, and how we use our resources.
In Libra she governs how we relate to other. How we show up in relationship. She is all 1,000 faces of the ever changing, dynamic, Feminine. Ruler of cycles. Guide to the underworld. She is emerging at this time to usher in a new paradigm of balance and union.
**The embodiment of the Fertility Goddess, who gives and takes away. Representing the harvest and abundance of the land, sacred sexuality, cycles of light and dark, descent and ascent, guide of the underworld, and Queen of Heaven. We go into great depth around all of these themes in our 19 month Planetary Priestess Initiation as we explore the power of how Sacred Cycles live through us.
Venus Synodic cycle
Because Venus is closer to the Sun than Earth, she takes roughly 225 Earth days to complete a full orbit around the Sun. Astrology is a geocentric science. Meaning we track the cycles of the planets in relation to the Earth, rather than the Sun centric or “heliocentric” cycles of traditional astronomy.
Synod is defined as “meeting”. Synodic cycles measure the geometric patterns the planets make as they meet with earth, and dance around the sun. From our Earth-based perspective, Venus takes approximately 584 days to travel back to the same spot in the sky (synodic cycle). Each 584 day cycle creates one “petal” in her Venus Rose Pentagonal Pattern. It takes 8 years for her to complete the entire Pentagon.
Here we are measuring the conjunction of Earth, Venus, and the Sun, (interior conjunction 584 days) when Venus is between the Sun and Earth, not the (exterior conjunction) with Venus on the far side of the sun. It’s taken me some time to work out the wording here because it’s easy to get lost with all of the technical jargon. It’s not especially important that you fully grok what has been laid out here. What is most important understand is the pattern Venus makes in her Synodic Dance; the five conjunctions of Venus and Earth make this beautiful pentagonal Star. Called the Rose of Venus or The Venus Blueprint.
Pentagrams hold the mathematical equation of Phi, the Divine Proportion. And each time Venus makes a point on her Star, it offers a profound opportunity for initiation, and transformation through touching into her mystery.
The golden ratio appears in some patterns in nature, including the spiral arrangement of leaves, petals of flowers, and other plant parts. Thanks to the work of Medieval Mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci, the first European to work on Indian and Arabian mathematics, he introduced us to the Fibonacci Sequence. The repeating, fractal, mathematical equation, inherent in the Golden Section. And now, biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists, and even mystics have pondered and debated the basis of its ubiquity and appeal. A secret that the ancient priestess has held for eternity is being rediscovered and meditated upon, her mystery revealed. It is probably fair to say that the Golden Ratio has inspired thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in history. I could easily take us down another rabbit hole of scientific jargon here. It’s just important to know, that proportions of the Venus Cycle are 1.168.
For Venus, the tight inward loops on the diagram are the planet’s interior conjunctions, in which Venus passes between us and the sun. The wide swings are centered on the exterior conjunctions, when Venus passes around the far side of the sun from us. The tight loops are the stamens of the rose, the wide swings are the petals.
The Venus Blueprint
In his book, “The Venus Blueprint” Richard Merrick “makes the startling case that the orbital resonance pattern of Venus as seen from Earth was central to the development of early science, religion and government. Throughout recorded history, the pentagonal cycle of Venus has been repeatedly associated with the feminine aspect of God from Babylonian Ishtar and Indian Shukra to the Saxon goddess Eastre and Greek Aphrodite. New evidence now suggests that the orbital geometry of Venus, tracing out a rose pentacle between the Sun and Earth, was used as a sacred fertility symbol to design the world’s greatest temples. Revealed here for the first time, this is the story of The Venus Blueprint. The evidence begins with the discovery of a Vedic religious symbol known as Mount Meru etched into the sacristy wall of 15th-century Rosslyn chapel. This one symbol leads to a cascade of revelations suggesting this Roman Catholic collegiate chapel was actually designed to celebrate a much older Vedic cosmology known today as The Birth of Venus. A step-by-step analysis explains how the Blueprint symbol was used to design the chapel’s acoustics, placement of architectural symbols and overall floor plan. More significantly, the same Blueprint pattern is shown to match the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Temple of Jerusalem, the Greek Parthenon, Roman Pantheon and St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, among others. Supported by an impressive array of historical research and scientific analysis, the Venus Blueprint geometry is then used to unlock the original purpose of these temples. Used for its resonant properties, it had the power to enhance entheogenic ritual and help induce religious visions. As the ancient “temple template” for a global Vedic empire, this Blueprint was once the key to enlightenment, liberating the gods within. In the end, the Venus Blueprint emerges as perhaps the single most important symbol in human history. Indeed, it is our best evidence yet that an ancient harmonic science did exist and became the inspiration behind the Vedas and many other religions. Through it, one can sense the light behind all religions straining to shine through--a beautiful musical light founded on celestial cycles and the universal harmonic principles of nature.” - Excerpt from the “Venus Blueprint”.
Graphic made by my 10 year old daughter, Eliza
Venus is one of the brightest stars in the night sky. Only the Sun and Moon are brighter. Like the Moon, we see the light increase and decrease as it reflects off Venus along her path around the Sun. There is some variation in this cycle; it ranges between 580 to 588 days for an average 584 days. During half of this time, approximately 292 days, her light increases (waxing), and during the other half, her light decreases (waning).
Venus Cycle as Experienced by the Ancients
Imagine you are living in Ancient Sumer. You do not have access to computer generated graphs, or fancy telescopes. Your entire experience of the Planetary Cycles come from observing the night sky in your backyard star dome. This is how you would experience The Goddess, with your feet on the ground.
The Venus cycle begins just after her interior conjunction with the Sun at her Helical Rise high in the Morning Sky.
If we were to become backyard astronomers, and decided to demarcate Venus position in the sky each month as Venus made her conjunction with the Moon, we would see Venus in begin her Journey high in the Eastern Sky, at her greatest brilliance.
Each month as we continue to track her, she moves further south and west, descending in altitude, as seen on the left hand side of the diagram numbers 1-7.
After 7 months Venus disappears on the opposite side of the Sun making her Exterior Conjunction. Because she is as far from earth as she can get, and completely engulfed in rays of the Sun, her influence on earth is diminished. Astrologers call the period where Venus travels on the far side of the sun, “The Underworld”.
After 60-80 days, Venus finally overtakes the speed of the Sun, and makes her Evening Star Helical Rise low in the Western Sky. The same pattern of observing Venus as an Evening star at the Moon/Venus conjunctions will result in us seeing roughly the same ascending pattern that we see on the graph made by my daughter.
When Venus reaches her greatest brilliance in the Evening Star, she makes her way towards the her interior conjunction between the Sun and the Earth going retrograde for roughly 40 days. This is called her metamorphic phase.
After retrograde, when Venus again rises as Morning Star, she begins her cycle again.
Image from Earth Haven Learning
mythic re-enactment of the Venus cycle
The alchemical journey of Venus, is a conscious, embodied, reenactment of Innana’s Descent and Ascent from the Underworld. “She is from very early times a goddess of the radiant, erratic morning and evening star, awakening life and setting it to rest, ruling the borderlands, ushering in or out her brother the Sun God, and her father the Moon God. She represents the liminal, intermediate regions and energies that cannot be contained or made certain and secure. She is not the feminine as night, but rather she symbolizes the consciousness of transition and borders, places of intersection and crossing over that imply creativity, change, and all the joys, and doubts that go with a human consciousness that is flexible, playful, and never certain for long.” - Sylvia Brinton Perrera. This ritual journey gives women and men the experience of being reborn on a spiritual plane, just as Jesus was when he was resurrected after the crucifixion. And just as Jesus' alchemical journey is the crux of Christianity, so to was the yearly descent and ascent of Inanna for Mesopotamian society.
The visual representation made by my daughter gives new mythical context to the literal descent and the rising.
The benefits of cyclical living allow us the ability to step out of linear time and onto the spiral path, walking the edge of eternal now. Every cycle is a process of transformation with a beginning, middle, and end. Cycles help us map our evolution. Living in attunement to the rhythms of nature help us build resilience, embrace paradox and polarity, entrains spiritual discipline, and sanctifies inner wisdom. As a Planetary Priestess, Astrologer, and Storyteller, my ministry is around helping people connect to the music of the heavenly spheres in order “to know thyself” and our state of becoming. To find coherence in the midst of incoherence.
