©Copyright 2004 by Dr. Strange. All Rights Reserved
Back last year, as I was doing research on a very different subject, or so I thought, I came across an account of an expedition to Africa in 1882 to scientifically record the rare Venus transit of the sun. The head of that expedition was the famous astronomer, Antoine D’Abbadie, soon to become the President of the Royal Academy of France and perhaps the person responsible for the mysterious Hendaye Cross, so we might suppose that accurately tracking and timing the event was of the utmost importance, and not just to the scientific community. It was curious that someone connected to a mysterious monument, one that marked the time period of 1992 through 2012 as the season of catastrophe, should also be involved with an astronomical event that points to the same time period.
Every 122 or so years, (the pattern is somewhat more complex, as we will see later) the orbit of the planet Venus falls such that twice, eight years apart, Venus passes between our viewpoint on earth and the face of the sun. Precisely observing this event in 1882 allowed the astronomers to accurately forecast the next such pair of transits, in the summers of 2004 and 2012. And the first of those events, something that will be completely unique to those alive at just this moment, is happening on June 8th, 2004, less than three weeks away as this is published. The second transit will be in the summer of 2012, roughly six months away from the end date of the Mayan calendar and the helical alignment of galactic center. This once in a lifetime event, synchronizing with so many other cosmic alignments and portents, gives us a kind of certainty concerning the singular significance of our time.
That sense of certainty also comes from mythology, the ancient “mysteries” encoded by the ancients into the patterns of the night sky, even if in our indoor, light polluted culture we rarely see the sky. But the mystery remains, and its force can be felt, even if only as a shift in our collective unconscious. This shift can be seen by spending a few hours reading one’s way through 2012 oriented websites such as Geoff Stray’s excellent http://www.diagnosis2012.co.uk or Willard van de Bogart’s http://www.earthportals.com/ and many others of lesser quality. Events in the sky evoke the movement of deeper psychic forces and even apocalyptic symbolism without our conscious understanding and we struggle to place new metaphors on ancient cycles of cosmic synchronization, new meaning on the long wave patterns of astronomic events.
The upcoming Venus transit has attracted its share of such projections and cosmic wish fulfillment. Mayan theorist Carl Johan Calleman has proclaimed it Global Oneness Day and Hindu avatar Sri Kalki Bhagavan has announced that the Iron Age ends with the first transit and the Golden Age begins with the second. Perhaps it will see the return of Quetzalcoatl as some have predicted, or perhaps the emergence of the hidden dharma paradise of Shamballa, as the Black Hat sect of Nyngma-pa Buddhism in Bhutan believes. The only fact of which we can be certain is that understanding the pattern of these transits, and the pattern of Venus’ movements as seen from earth, does in fact reveal the “key” to the greater mysteries of time and transformation.
To see this mysterious key, we have to first understand how the orbits of Venus and Earth relate. Here’s the best explanation I could find(From http://ds.dial.pipex.com/eclipse99page/trans.htm):
“To start to understand what is going imagine a circular race-track and two runners, Eartha and Vera. Eartha can do a lap of the track in one minute. Vera is quite a bit faster, and also has the advantage of the inside track, and she can do a lap in just under 37 seconds. The question is, if they start off together how long is it before Vera catches up with Eartha so they are together again?
“To work out the answer it is convenient if the runners’ speeds are in a whole number ratio, so let us assume Vera can lap the track in 8/13 minutes (36.92 seconds). That means Vera is going 13/8 times faster than Eartha so Vera is catching Eartha up at 5/8 laps per minute (13/8 minus 1). Vera will therefore catch up Eartha after 8/5 minutes, ie 1.6 minutes or 1 minute 36 seconds. Check it out and you will see that in 1.6 minutes Eartha has gone round the track once plus 3/5 of the track while Vera has gone round the track twice and 3/5 of the track, so they meet up.
“Translate runners into planets and minutes into years and the picture is close to that for Earth and Venus. It is not quite as simple as that because the tracks are a bit elliptical rather than circular and the runners do not go at quite a constant speed. Also Venus orbits the Sun just a bit faster than 8 thirteenths of a year, more like 7.997. As we shall see this is a small but crucial difference.”
From this, we can conclude that the time between the points, known as inferior conjunctions, where the sun, Venus and the earth coincide is close to 1.6 years and that once every eight years this returns to its origin point. Notice if you will that this is a close approximation of phi, 1.618 the irrational number ratio that defines a harmony between mean and extreme. In math, this is described by the Fibonacci series, 0,1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…, in which dividing each succeeding number by its preceding number produces a closer approximation of phi, 3/2 = 1.5, 5/3 = 1.666, 8/5 = 1.625 and so on. These number combinations, 8/13, 5/8 and 3/5, are also components of Venus’ race with the earth and the sun. And within the eight-year cycle there are five inferior conjunctions, each 3/5 of the way through the zodiac from the last.
This creates mankind’s oldest complex symbol, the pentagram or, in its simplest form, the five rayed Nuit star of ancient Egypt. The best way to see this is to draw a circle and label the twelve months of the year. Start with June and labeled that for the inferior conjunction of 1996. Move on to January and 1998, and then to August 1999, then March 2001, and finally late October 2002 to complete the pentagram. The pattern starts over in June of 2004 and then continues in the same way. Because of the overlap in the speed of Venus, each inferior conjunction is slightly earlier than the one before.
Notice also that not only does the conjunctions of Venus, the earth and the sun create a pentagram pattern, that pattern is also the same as the unfolding pattern known in esoteric studies as the invoking pattern of the pentagram. It is as if this complex dance of planets and alignments are performing a vast eight-year long invoking ritual of the pentagram. Over time these cycles of planetary invoking pentagram culminate in a pentagram that begins and ends with a transit of Venus across the sun.
But, if every 1.6 years or so, Venus, the sun and the earth coincide in their orbits, why don’t we have transits every time? We would, except that the plane of their orbits are slightly out of phase, with Venus’ being 3.4 degrees off from Earth’s. This gives us a larger pattern of five transits in 395 years, with a 23.5-year gap, and four transits falling precisely in 243 years. This number, 243/395, also gives us a close approximation of phi and is a curious repeating pattern with two transits in December, eight years apart, then a 121 and a half years, then two June transits, again eight years apart, then a wait of 105 and a half years and the pattern repeats again. (121.5 + 8 + 105.5 + 8 = 243)
Therefore, the Venus transit pattern creates an even larger phi related pattern out of the smaller phi cycles of Venus’ inferior conjunctions. And it is this pattern that points to the larger mysteries of both mythology and cosmology.
The key of course is the pentagram itself, or more specifically the curious consistency in the alignment of the spirit or beginning point of the invoking pentagram made from Venus’ transit conjunctions. This is a point that I have never seen commented on, which is not surprising as it is part of one of the greatest uncommented upon mysteries of cosmology.
The ecliptic plane, the apparent path of the sun’s motion through the sky, crosses the galactic plane only in the direction of the center of the galaxy and its edge, or towards Scorpio/Sagittarius and Taurus/Gemini. The ecliptic is tilted at 60 degrees from the galactic plane, but there is no good reason why these planes should intersect only along the radial axis of the galaxy, unless there is some flow of energy along that axis to create such an organization. One of the few thinkers who considered the question, Wilhelm Reich in “Cosmic Superimposition,” visualized the solar system as a fishing float wobbling in the stream of “orgone” energy coming from the center of the galaxy, as a way to explain the alignment.
Most mainstream astro-physicists and cosmologists avoid the problem, and this blindness can also be seen in descriptions of the Venus transits. No one seems to notice, or dare to comment on, the fact that precise alignments of the orbit of the earth and Venus with the sun, producing a transit, only occurs on this same radial axis of the galaxy.
But this is in fact the key to the mystery, the clue that ties it all together. A pentagram that starts with a center of the galaxy aligned transit, those that fall in December, have a different quality than those pentagram cycles that begin with a June, or edge of the galaxy, alignment. Over the longer phi cycle of 243/395, these “qualities” go through a phi squared, or 2.6, rotation of galactic alignments. This complex interaction with the wave action of the radial flow along the galactic plane creates, as the Maya derived from similar considerations, a roughly 400-year bubble of evolutionary time.
Within that time bubble, two opposing “qualities” are symbolized by the mythology of the night sky at the transit points. If we think of a transit as the spirit or beginning invocation point of our pentagram of time, then the mythological symbolism of that portion of the sky could be considered as the spiritual source of that temporal pentagram. We can see these astro-mythological sources easier if we think of the dawn sky just prior to the Venus transit.
In 1882, the last December transit, the sun was in Scorpio, very near the center of the galaxy. But soon thereafter, a new 13th sign of the zodiac was officially promoted, Ophiuchus, the Serpent Holder, and curiously enough this new zodiacal constellation was the actual location of the Venus transit. What had been for millennia the angry conflict of scorpion and archer, a mythology signifying the dangerous and wrathful secrets associated with the galactic center, had been transformed by astronomy into a new symbol of an astro-shaman, the one who holds the secret of time and the red serpent of DNA. This shift ushered in the new paradigm that created the destructive energies of the last century.
But as that energy reached its peak in the 1882 transit, the current was shifting towards its opposite. The upcoming transit next month is the beginning of the edge of the galaxy alignment transit pentagram, and with it, a new “quality,” a new paradigm of time and its accompanying mythological expressions is coalescing into consciousness.
Let us imagine that we are standing outside at around 5:00 am EDT on the morning of June 8th, 2004, looking northeast toward the first faint flush of dawn. Standing high in the sky above the growing light is the constellation Perseus, the prototype of the hero. Above him are the evil mother/queen of Cassiopaea and the chained maiden of Andromeda. As the sun rises, with the Venus transit in progress from this vantage point, the invoking cycle of the eight-year long pentagram ritual begins to bring these archetypes, these myths, into our collective consciousness.
If we think of the galactic center aligned pentagram as absorbing the in-coming energy from galactic center, then we might think of this pentagram as projecting it outward. This diastolic pumping action, absorption/transformation/projection/transformation, might just be the organizing energetic on which all life depends. Biology and fluid dynamics would both agree with that basic proposal, so it seems somewhat natural to see the same process in astro-physics and archetypal conscious.
The mystery then is how to work with these vast cycles, the literal in-breath and out-breath of the galaxy. Can we think of time, with all that it signifies about consciousness, as a “quality” that changes as it moves through phi ratio space/time structures? Once we can understand the pattern, then it should be possible to go with the flow of the energy, rather than struggle against it.
If we can do that, then maybe this Venus transit will signal the beginning of a new Golden Age.