Cy Twombly “Venus 1975”

March 21- April 14, 2021

Something awe-inspiring is happening in the spring sky: our goddess Venus is transforming. She has been bathed and beatified in the unguents of Pisces, and is now gaining in speed. As she travels with the Sun, she begins to overtake him, purified by his rays and fortified now with solar purpose and will. In due time, she will emerge from under the beams in the western sky, ripened, in all the glory of her full-moon phase. What happens to our love goddess when she enters the war god’s home as Evening Star? She becomes the Lion Lady, the all-powerful Queen of Heaven—Inanna-Ishtar. 

Thousands of years before she became Venus-Aphrodite, her devotees in ancient Mesopotamia were singing praises to her beauty and quaking in the presence of her wrath. Inanna was the supreme goddess of fertility and war, an enforcer of justice and protector of the land. She took many lovers, and either imbued them with power or devoured them outright. When wronged, she demanded blood. In the words of one hymn to Inanna, she was “mighty, respected and exalted,” blessing us with her “holy thighs.” Consider this imagery from the same prayer as one depiction of our Venus in Aries: When at evening, the radiant star, the Venus star, the great light which fills the holy heavens, the lady of the evening, ascends above like a warrior, the people in all the lands lift their gaze to her. Her celestial drama of disappearance and reappearance was observed closely and with great reverence, as a mystery of nature, and as a significant omen for human life below. 

Astrologer Michael Meyer (whose writing on the Venus cycle I highly recommend) describes the Evening Star phase (which lasts until December this year) as a time for the defining of social values and our creative contribution to society; a time for developing our Venusian vision and goals; and for integrating the experience gained during the Morning Star phase to give meaning, direction and purpose to our existence. He cites Dane Rudhyar as saying that the Evening Star Venus in the spring zodiacal signs is “that which gives substance to the Martian impulse and outward initiative…an instinctual power of fertility.” Over the next weeks, let us lift up our gaze, and our hearts, to Inanna. And when we look to the area of life, and the areas of our charts, that are host to this transit, we will hopefully feel our Venusian values and purpose being cleansed and honed in the heart of the Aries Sun, until our goddess reaches her home in Taurus, and our vision—what we are here to birth, and with whom—will become clear. 

Sources: 

https://khaldea.com/planets/venus_type.shtml

https://arthistoryproject.com/timeline/the-ancient-world/mesopotamia/the-fertility-ritual-of-inana-and-iddin-dagan/