Venus, Aphrodite, Ishtar, Inanna, Astarte, Ashtaroth, the lineage of the Great Goddess.
Before the patriarchal religions concocted moral codes, deemed the body foul and the breasts unholy we find her image in Laussel or Willendorf, some 20.000 years ago.

As myths are always seen through a lens of the cultural standards of the time, when she arrived in Greece from the East she was tamed, taking more of a passionate domestic cloth, her aggressive attributes split with the Furies and Ares.

Matching her dual nature Aphrodite has two myths of origin.
The first and most known is that of sea-born, from which she frothed out of when the seed spilt out of Uranus’ mutilated member.
In this aspect she is called Aphrodite Urania, the celestial, symbolizing a higher kind of love which pulls us towards wholeness.

The second story portrays her as a daughter of Zeus and Dione, a Titaness and Earth Goddess worshipped at Dodona, the oldest established temple and Oracle-according to Plutarch built by Deucalion and Pyrrha themselves.
As daughter of the Earth and the God of many forms, Aphrodite is known as Pandemos ‘common to all people’ referring to the more sensual side of love.

These stories are reflections of the sky.

Venus can be observed both as a morning and an evening star in alternating cycles, with a synodic cycle of 584 days. This is counted from inferior to superior conjunction, when she embraces the Sun.
The first happens when the two meet at the closest point to Earth, marking the emergence of the Morning Star – Phosphorus, while the second takes place at the farthest point from Earth, marking the emergence of the Evening Star – Hesperus.

Between these cycles, Venus goes retrograde for approximately 40 days.
This movement, happening every 18 months is a precise mechanism which adorns our sky with a pentagram shaped flower. Every 8 years, Venus repeats her pirouette 1 to 2 degrees clockwise from its previous degree, continuing around the zodiac until the pentagram repeats itself 1250 years later, when she returns to the same alignment, creating a Venusian age similar to the Precessional Age.

This cycle was known and respected to most ancient cultures. The Maya modelled their calendar over the Venus cycle, while in Sumer, the details of the infamous story of Inanna’s travel to the Underworld match Venus’ interaction with the Moon during her descent. Christian traditions have also been touched (unknowingly) by it, with the most obvious one being the Catholic Lent – when pleasure are taken away from one’s diet.

In Venus Star Rising, Arielle Guttman writes:
“Venus had multiple personalities based on the five seasonal risings over the eight-year period, and for each rising a particular face or deity would be ascribed, similar to our star signs.
One of the stories that is linked to Mayan mythology is that when Venus went into retrograde, it went into the Underworld. There it encountered the Sun, then became inflamed in the Sun’s heart, and emerged as a warrior, dripping with blood and ready for battle. The timing of this correlated to the periods when the Mayan armies prepared for battle. If there was a high degree of tension in the world during the 40 day periods, such tensions would be accentuated when Venus emerged from the underground as a Morning Star.”

Currently, Venus has reached the degree on which she will station in Aries. The road has been set, the descent is about to be made.

Though the retrograde itself only lasts about 40 days (42 this year between station to station), once it reaches the shadow period, it spends about 4 months going over the same approximately 15 degrees, going over 3 times over the same area.

What this feels like in practice is a digging up, down and deep under the surface. In the news, it’s around this time which big sex scandals come to light, or when women related issues start blowing up. It’s when Venus and her images come to the forefront.

On a personal level, this feels like a digging up of a different sort. Aphrodite shows her other face, the one which sows discord and disharmony. The unhappiness which was swept under the rug is uncovered, the complicated points of conflict in the venusian sphere are lit up. It’s the time to expose problems which need to be dealt with so that in the long run things will run smoothly.

And of course, there’s always the ghosts of lovers past. Sometimes it’s literal, sometimes it’s the less physical loves we’ve left behind. Love for painting, love for writing, things we valued at some point and left in the underworld. It is a time when we’re asked to look back, and to make choices.