Venus
Venus is the brightest of the five visible planets and, after the Sun and Moon, the third-brightest object in the sky. Like Mercury it never strays far from the Sun, but its elongation limit is much wider, up to about 47 degrees, so it can stand high above the horizon well after sunset or well before sunrise, which Mercury cannot. Its sidereal period is about 225 days and its synodic period, one evening apparition to the next, is about 584 days, the longest of any planet. It turns retrograde roughly every 584 days, for about six weeks each time. Its wide elongation is what lets it appear as a brilliant morning or evening object well clear of twilight, in a heliacal window that, like Mercury’s narrower one, depends on latitude and the ecliptic’s angle to the horizon 1. None of this astronomy is in dispute; what has been made of the planet’s two apparitions is this entry’s central subject.
The names
Greek astronomy used two separate names for the two apparitions before it settled on one name for the planet: Phosphoros, “the Light-Bringer” (also Eosphoros, “the Dawn-Bringer”), for the morning appearance, and Hesperos, “the Evening Star,” for the evening one 2. The pattern in which a Greek descriptive epithet preceded the eventual god-name runs across all five visible planets 2; Venus is the case in which it produced two names, because for a time the two apparitions were treated as two separate objects. The recognition that the morning star and the evening star are a single body, and the consequent collapse of two names into one, is among the clearest cases on record of an astronomical finding changing what a thing is called. The god-name that eventually attached to the planet is Aphrodite.
In Akkadian the planet’s usual name is Dilbat, associated with the goddess Ishtar, whose portfolio covers both love and war 2. The Latin name, Venus, survives directly in the Romance weekday names, vendredi, viernes, venerdì; the English name, Friday, instead preserves Frigg, the Germanic figure mapped onto the same weekday.
Gap in the evidence
The meaning of the Akkadian name Dilbat is not established in the sources available to this site. No source cited here proposes a gloss, and the name is used as a proper name without a translation.
A further claim in circulation holds that Venus and Ishtar carried a double gender in Mesopotamian sources: female as the evening star, and male and bearded as the morning star, tied to a specific tablet of the omen series Enūma Anu Enlil. If correct, this would be a striking and important detail, but this site’s source pool does not include a study that states it directly, so it is recorded here as unconfirmed.
Dignities
| Domicile | Taurus, Libra |
|---|---|
| Detriment | Scorpio, Aries |
| Exaltation | Pisces, at 27 degrees |
| Fall | Virgo, at 27 degrees |
| Triplicity | Earth (by day); Water (by day) |
| Bounds held (Egyptian) | Aries 6-12Taurus 0-8Gemini 12-17Cancer 7-13Leo 6-11Virgo 7-17Libra 21-28Scorpio 7-11Sagittarius 12-17Capricorn 14-22Aquarius 7-13Pisces 0-12 |
Venus takes Taurus and Libra by domicile, and is exalted in Pisces at the same degree at which it falls in Virgo Virgo: a sign’s fall is generated as the same degree of the sign opposite its exaltation, so the Virgo fall is a structural consequence of the Pisces exaltation. The full apparatus is set out in Essential Dignity.
Sect
Venus is a nocturnal planet, and its sect is fixed: benefic of its own sect in a chart of the night, and benefic contrary to sect in a chart of the day 3. That is unlike Mercury, whose sect changes with the individual chart Mercury. The general mechanics of sect are set out in Sect.
Tradition
Held byClaudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos bk. I ch. 4, Alexandria, c. 150 CE
Ptolemy pairs Venus with Jupiter in his physical scheme, temperate in nature but acting in the opposite direction: “Venus has the same powers and tempered nature as Jupiter, but acts in the opposite way; for she warms moderately because of her nearness to the sun, but chiefly humidifies, like the moon, because of the amount of her own light and because she appropriates the exhalations from the moist atmosphere surrounding the earth” 4 bk. I ch. 4. As with the other six planets, the qualities set out here are the premise Ptolemy’s later account of Venus’s significations proceeds from.
Tradition
Held byWilliam Lilly, Christian Astrology bk. I, London, London, 1647
Lilly’s Venus, like each of his other six planets, is organised as a working template: nature, colours, trades, parts of the body, diseases, places, and the kinds of person the planet is taken to signify, built for judging a client’s specific question 5 bk. I.
References
- Claudius Ptolemy, trans. F. E. Robbins. Tetrabiblos. Loeb Classical Library 435. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940 (composed c. 150 CE). bk. I ch. 4. find a copy (catalogue search) recordprimary source
The standard English reference and the chapter-numbering scheme this site adopts and names. Non-Robbins reprints number the chapters differently, so every locus here is given as Robbins numbering.
- Nicholas Campion. A History of Western Astrology, Volume I: The Ancient and Classical Worlds: Continuum, 2009. ISBN 9781441127372 recordscholarly
The standard single narrative survey. Volume I first appeared as The Dawn of Astrology, Hambledon Continuum, 2008. The subtitle is "The Ancient and Classical Worlds", not "The Ancient World"; the shortened form is widely miscited.
- Chris Brennan. Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune: Amor Fati Publications, 2017. ISBN 9780998588902 recordscholarly
A practitioner-scholar synthesis: comprehensive and well referenced, but not peer-reviewed philology. This site cites it with that characterisation.
- William Lilly. Christian Astrology. London, 1647 (composed 1647). bk. I. https://archive.org/details/b30338724 recordprimary source
Second edition 1659. Where a figure differs between the two printings this site says which printing it is quoting.
- Bradley E. Schaefer. Astronomy and the Limits of Vision. Vistas in Astronomy, 1993, 311-361. doi:10.1016/0083-6656(93)90113-X recordpeer reviewed
Volume 36. The standard visibility and atmospheric-extinction model for heliacal phenomena; a geometric altitude test alone will not predict first or last visibility of a star.