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THE HISTORY OF A PLANET
No star, among the countless myriads that twinkle over the sidereal fields of the night sky, shines so dazzlingly as the planet Venus—not even Sirius-Sothis, the dog-star, beloved by Isis. Venus is the queen among our planets, the crown jewel of our solar system. She is the inspirer of the poet, the guardian and companion of the lonely shepherd, the lovely morning and the evening star. For,
although their secrets are still untold and unrevealed to the majority of men, including astronomers. They are “a beauty and a mystery,” verily. But “where there is a mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also be evil,” says Byron. Evil, therefore, was detected by 15evilly-disposed human fancy, even in those bright luminous eyes peeping at our wicked world through the veil of ether. Thus there came to exist slandered stars and planets as well as slandered men and women. Too often are the reputation and fortune of one man or party sacrificed for the benefit of another man or party. As on earth below, so in the heavens above, and Venus, the sister planet of our Earth,[1] was sacrificed to the ambition of our little globe to show the latter the “chosen” planet of the Lord. She became the scapegoat, the Azaziel of the starry dome, for the sins of the Earth, or rather for those of a certain class in the human family—the clergy—who slandered the bright orb, in order to prove what their ambition suggested to them as the best means to reach power, and exercise it unswervingly over the superstitious and ignorant masses.
This took place during the middle ages. And now the sin lies back at the door of Christians and their scientific inspirers, though the error was successfully raised to the lofty position of a religious dogma, as many other fictions and inventions have been.
Indeed, the whole sidereal world, planets and their regents—the ancient gods of poetical paganism—the sun, the moon, the elements, and the entire host of incalculable worlds—those at least which happened to be known to the Church Fathers—shared in the same fate. They have all been slandered, all bedevilled by the insatiable desire of proving one little system of theology—built on and constructed out of old pagan materials—the only right and holy one, and all those which preceded or followed it utterly wrong. Sun and stars, the very air itself, we are asked to believe, became pure and 16“redeemed” from original sin and the Satanic element of heathenism, only after the year I A.D. Scholastics and scholiasts, the spirit of whom “spurned laborious investigation and slow induction,” had shown, to the satisfaction of infallible Church, the whole Kosmos in the power of Satan—a poor compliment to God—before the year of the Nativity; and Christians had to believe or be condemned. Never have subtle sophistry and casuistry shown themselves so plainly in their true light, however, as in the questions of the ex-Satanism and later redemption of various heavenly bodies. Poor beautiful Venus got worsted in that war of so-called divine proofs to a greater degree than any of her sidereal colleagues. While the history of the other six planets, and their gradual transformation from Greco-Aryan gods into Semitic devils, and finally into “divine attributes of the seven eyes of the Lord,” is known but to the educated, that of Venus-Lucifer has become a household story among even the most illiterate in Roman Catholic countries.
This story shall now be told for the benefit of those who may have neglected their astral mythology.
Venus, characterized by Pythagoras as the sol alter, a second Sun, on account of her magnificent radiance—equalled by none other—was the first to draw the attention of ancient Theogonists. Before it began to be called Venus, it was known in pre-Hesiodic theogony as Eosphoros (or Phosphoros) and Hesperos, the children of the dawn and twilight. In Hesiod, moreover, the planet is decomposed into two divine beings, two brothers—Eosphoros (the Lucifer of the Latins) the morning, and Hesperos, the evening star. They are the children of Astraios and Eos, the starry heaven and the dawn, as also of Kephalos and Eos (Theog., 378-82; Hyginus, Poeticôn Astronomicôn, II, xlii).[2] Preller, quoted by Decharme, shows Phaëton 17identical with Phosphoros or Lucifer (Griechische Mythologie, I, 365).[3] And on the authority of Hesiod he also makes Phaëton the son of the latter two divinities—Kephalos and Eos.
Now Phaëton or Phosphoros, the “luminous morning orb,” is carried away in his early youth by Aphrodite (Venus) who makes of him the night guardian of her sanctuary (Theog., 986-991). He is the “beautiful morning star” (Vide St. John’s Revelation, xxii, 16) loved for its radiant light by the Goddess of the Dawn, Aurora, who, while gradually eclipsing the light of her beloved, thus seeming to carry off the star, makes it reappear on the evening horizon where it watches the gates of heaven. In early morning, Phosphoros “issuing from the waters of the Ocean, raises in heaven his sacred head to announce the approach of divine light.” (Iliad, XXIII, 226; Odyssey, XIII, 93-94; Virgil, Aeneid, VIII, 589; Decharme, Mythologie de la Grèce Antique, p. 247.) He holds a torch in his hand and flies through space as he precedes the car of Aurora. In the evening he becomes Hesperos, “the most splendid of the stars that shine on the celestial vault” (Iliad, XXII, 317-18). He is the father of the Hesperides, the guardians of the golden apples together with the Dragon; the beautiful genius of the flowing golden curls, sung and glorified in all the ancient epithalami (the bridal songs of the early Christians as of the pagan Greeks); he, who at the fall of the night, leads 18the nuptial cortège and delivers the bride into the arms of the bridegroom. (Decharme, op. cit., p. 248.)
So far, there seems to be no possible rapprochement, no analogy to be discovered between the poetical personification of a star, a purely astronomical myth, and the Satanism of Christian theology. True, the close connection between the planet as Hesperos, the evening star, and the Greek Garden of Eden with its Dragon and the golden apples may, with a certain stretch of imagination, suggest some painful comparisons with the third chapter of Genesis. But this is insufficient to justify the building of a theological wall of defence against paganism made up of slander and misrepresentations.
But of all the Greek euhemerisations, Lucifer-Eosphoros is, perhaps, the most complicated. The planet has become with the Latins, Venus, or Aphrodite-Anadyomene, the foam-born Goddess, the “Divine Mother,” and one with the Phoenician Astarte, or the Jewish Astaroth. They were all called “The Morning Star,” and the Virgins of the Sea, or Mar (whence Mary), the Great Deep, titles now given by the Roman Church to their Virgin Mary. They were all connected with the moon and the crescent, with the Dragon and the planet Venus, as the mother of Christ has been made connected with all these attributes. If the Phoenician mariners carried, fixed on the prow of their ships, the image of the goddess Astarte (or Aphrodite, Venus Erycina) and looked upon the evening and the morning star as their guiding star, “the eye of their Goddess mother,” so do the Roman Catholic sailors the same to this day. They fix a Madonna on the prows of their vessels, and the blessed Virgin Mary is called the “ Virgin of the Sea.” The accepted patroness of Christian sailors, their star, “Stella Del Mar,” etc., she stands on the crescent moon. Like the old pagan Goddesses, she is the “Queen of Heaven,” and the “Morning Star” just as they were.
Whether this can explain anything, is left to the reader’s sagacity. Meanwhile, Lucifer-Venus has nought to do with darkness, and everything with light. When called Lucifer, it is the “light-bringer,” the first radiant beam 19which destroys the lethal darkness of night. When named Venus, the planet-star becomes the symbol of dawn, the chaste Aurora. Professor Max Müller rightly conjectures that Aphrodite, born of the sea, is a personification of the Dawn of the Day, and the most lovely of all the sights in Nature (Lectures on the Science of Language),[4] for, before her naturalisation by the Greeks, Aphrodite was Nature personified, the life and light of the Pagan world, as proven in the beautiful invocation to Venus by Lucretius, quoted by Decharme. She is divine Nature in her entirety, Aditi-Prakriti before she becomes Lakshmi. She is that Nature before whose majestic and fair face, “the winds fly away, the quieted sky pours torrents of light, and the sea-waves smile” (Lucretius).[5] When referred to as the Syrian goddess Astarte, the Astaroth of Hieropolis, the radiant planet was personified as a majestic woman, holding in one out-stretched hand a torch, in the other, a crooked staff in the form of a cross. (Vide Lucian’s De Dea Syria, and Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, lib. III, cap. xxiii.)[6] Finally, the planet is represented astronomically, as a globe poised above the cross—a symbol no devil would like to associate with—while the planet Earth is a globe with a cross over it.
20 But then, these crosses are not the symbols of Christianity, but the Egyptian crux ansata, the attribute of Isis (who is Venus, and Aphrodite, Nature, also) or ♀ the planet; the fact that the Earth has the crux ansata reversed , having a great occult significance upon which there is no necessity of entering at present.
Now what says the Church and how does it explain the “ dreadful association”? The Church believes in the devil, of course, and could not afford to lose him. “The Devil is one of the chief pillars of the Faith” confesses unblushingly an advocate of the Ecclesia Militans.*
All the Alexandrian Gnostics speak to us of the fall of the Aeons and their Pleroma, and all attribute that fall to the desire to know,
writes another volunteer in the same army, slandering the Gnostics as usual and identifying the desire to know or occultism, magic, with Satanism.† And then, forthwith, he quotes from Schlegel’s Philosophie de l’Histoire to show that the seven rectors (planets) of Pymander, 21
commissioned by God to contain the phenomenal world in their seven circles, lost in love with their own beauty,‡ came to admire themselves with such intensity that owing to this proud self-adulation they finally fell.§
Footnotes
- ↑ “Venus is a second Earth,” says Reynaud, in Terre et Ciel (p. 74), “so much so that were there any communication possible between the two planets, their inhabitants might take their respective earths for the two hemispheres of the same world. . . . They seem on the sky, like two sisters. Similar in conformation, these two worlds are also similar in the character assigned to them in the Universe.”
[Quoted in de Mirville, Des Esprits, etc., Vol. IV, p. 164.—Comp.] - ↑ [Caius Julius Hyginus—also Hygenus, Yginus and Iginus—was a celebrated grammarian, said by Suetonius to have been a native of Spain, and to have been brought to Rome after its capture by Caesar. He was a freedman of Augustus and was placed by him at the head of the Palatine Library. He was on intimate terms with Ovid and other literary men of the day. There are numerous references to his various works in Pliny, Gellius, Macrobius and others, evidencing that he was held in great respect; most of his works have perished. We have, however, two pieces in prose, nearly entire, which bear the name of Hyginus, but which, on account of their inferior language, may have been put together by someone else. These are: Fabularum liber, containing mythological legends and the genealogy of divinities; and Poeticôn Astronomicôn in four books, treating of the asterisms, the definition of astronomical terms, the constellations and the mythological legends attached to them. The best editions of both works are those in the Mythographi Latini of Muncker, Amsterdam, 1681, and in the Myth. Lat., of van Staveren, Lugd. Bat. and Amst., 1742.—Compiler.]
- ↑ [2 vols. Leipzig: Weidman, 1854; in the 2nd ed., of 1860-61, the passage can be found in Vol. II, p. 335.—Compiler.]
- ↑ [II, pp. 408-09, in 6th ed., London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1871.]
- ↑ [This passage is from Lucretius’ De rerum natura, lib. I, 6-9, the Latin text of which is as follows:
te, dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubila caeli
adventumque tuum, tibi suavis daedala tellus
summittit flores, tibi rident aequora ponti
placatumque nitet diffuso lumine caelum.
This may be rendered in English somewhat as follows: “From thee, o goddess, from thee the winds flee away, the clouds of heaven from thee and thy coming; for thee the wonder-working earth puts forth sweet flowers; for thee the vast stretches of the ocean laugh, and heaven, grown peaceful, pours torrents of light.”—Compiler.]
- ↑ [This short essay, attributed to Lucian by some scholars, contains no such description of Astarte, and the passage from Cicero has a mere mention of this goddess. There may be some error in the references given.—Compiler.]