Abstract
The planet Venus is the brightest body in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. Venus is an internal planet, that is to say, its entire orbit lies closer to the Sun than the Earth’s.
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Notes
- 1.
These values are a rounded average of modern values for five consecutive synodic periods of Venus. Mesopotamian tables present very similar values for the analogous positions of Venus (see Swerdlow 1998, pp. 218–219).
- 2.
The difference in these motions arises from the way in which the planet and the Earth move, and the way that the plane of Venus’s orbit is inclined with respect to the plane of the Earth’s orbit.
- 3.
5 × 584 = 8 × 365 = 2,920.
- 4.
In other words, the 584 days of Venus’s synodic period correspond to around (584 ÷ 365.25 =) 1.6 years or (1.6 × 12 =) 19.2 months. It follows that on completion of one of Venus’s synodic periods, viewed from the Earth, the planet makes a full revolution of all 12 signs of the Zodiac and starts another revolution of (19.2 − 12 =) 7.2 signs, equal to (7.2 × 30° =) 216°.
At the end of the fifth synodic period, after around (584 × 5 =) 2,920 days, the number of signs of the Zodiac it has traversed is now (7.2 × 5 =) 36, and the number of degrees (216° × 5 =) 1,080°. Viewed from the Earth, Venus has completed 5 plus (1,080° ÷ 360° =) 3, i.e. 8 revolutions with respect to the Zodiac. In the meantime, however, the Earth has also completed 5 revolutions around the sun. At this point, Venus has completed a total of (8 + 5 =) 13 revolutions with respect to the fixed stars.
These same figures should be multiplied by three to correspond to the 24 solar years that make up the Numan cycle.
- 5.
If this is indeed so, Venus pentagrams on early seventh century Etruscan kraters (see Figs. 9.10 and 9.11) precede by one or two hundred years the attribution to Pythagoras (ca. 580/70-480 BCE) or Parmenides (515-after 450 BCE) of the knowledge that “Hesperus and Lucifer are one and the same” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, 9.23).
- 6.
For more on Venus/Hesperus, protector of weddings, and Venus/Mater Matuta/Lucifer, protector of conception, see Chaps. 10 and 11.
On Mater Matuta, protector of Furius Camillus, see Dumézil 1981, passim, though in any event this author considers Matuta to be the Goddess of Dawn; with regard to the identification of Matuta with Lucifer/Venus at dawn, see Chap. 10 and, at more length, Magini 1996, pp. 34−46, and in particolar Appendix 1, Furius Camillus, the protégé of Matuta, pp. 101–104.
For American Indians, Venus/Lucifer also looked kindly on warriors; the Sioux nicknamed General Custer the “son of the morning star”.
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Magini, L. (2015). The Motion of Venus. In: Stars, Myths and Rituals in Etruscan Rome. Space and Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07266-1_9
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