The pentagram of Venus
On 3 October, Venus will begin to look as though it is going backwards. It is not. And the figure it draws every eight years was already being watched three and a half thousand years ago.
Anything in a violet panel we computed from DE421 ephemeris data. You can check it.
Anything on a gold rule was said by people, at a particular time. We say who, and when.
What Venus is doing right now
GEOCENTRIC LONGITUDES, TROPICAL ZODIACAs this is being written, Venus is moving forward normally at less than a degree a day. Mercury is going twice as fast. Both will stop within the next eight weeks.
The positions are computed exactly the way your own birth chart is computed inside the app. The sign of the speed is the whole difference: negative means retrograde.
What retrograde means, literally
GEOMETRY, NOT METAPHORVenus never changes direction. It moves around the Sun the same way round, always, without exception and without slowing.
What changes is where we are standing.
Venus is an inner planet, closer to the Sun than we are, so it moves faster. Roughly every nineteen months it overtakes us on the inside, passing between us and the Sun. In the weeks around that passage, an observer standing on Earth sees it slide backwards against the fixed stars, in exactly the way a train you are overtaking seems briefly to move backwards.
Retrograde motion is therefore a fact about our viewing angle, and because it is geometry it can be computed to the minute.
Notice that the two stations fall in different signs. Venus stops inside Scorpio, retreats back across the boundary, and sets off again inside Libra.
And a coincidence worth noting
TWO STATIONS, EIGHT HOURSMercury will do the same thing, a little later and inside the same sign. What is interesting is where the two journeys end.
The two planets that move closer to the Sun than we do resume their forward motion within the same twenty-four hours. No mechanism requires this: the two synodic cycles are independent. This year they simply fall that way.
The figure of the eight years
FIVE STATIONS, ONE RETURNIf instead of one retrograde period you look at the next five, which is the next eight years, the places where Venus stops are not scattered. Each one falls about a hundred and forty-four degrees behind the last, which is exactly two fifths of the circle. Five such steps close the figure.
| Date | Position | Longitude | Synodic period (days) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 Oct 2026 | Scorpio 8°29′ | 218.491° | · |
| 10 May 2028 | Gemini 19°41′ | 79.687° | 585.66 |
| 16 Dec 2029 | Capricorn 24°02′ | 294.028° | 585.03 |
| 20 Jul 2031 | Leo 26°26′ | 146.427° | 580.72 |
| 27 Feb 2033 | Aries 8°32′ | 8.531° | 587.94 |
| 30 Sep 2034 | Scorpio 6°08′ | 216.129° | 580.16 |
Mean synodic period of the five: 583.90 days. The figure the textbooks give is 583.92. Notice, though, that the individual periods differ from one another by as much as 7.78 days, which the mean hides completely.
The sixth station, in September 2034, does not fall on the first. It falls 2.362 degrees short of it, after 7.9934 years.
So the figure closes, but not exactly. It rotates, very slowly. That is why a rule of eight years works for a few generations and then begins to drift, and why the ancient tables needed correcting every so often.
One clarification for anyone who has seen this figure elsewhere. It is usually drawn from the inferior conjunctions, the moments when Venus passes exactly between us and the Sun. Here it is drawn from the stations, which are a different point on the same cycle. The figure comes out the same, turned slightly.
The sky never changed this cycle. All that changed is what we did with it.
Who saw it first, and what they made of it
THE INTERPRETATION, AND ITS HISTORYFrom here down we are not measuring. We are telling a story, with names and dates.
One of the oldest surviving records of planetary observation concerns Venus. It is the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, which records for twenty-one years its disappearances from the sky and its reappearances, the visible ends of the same five-hundred-and-eighty-four-day cycle we measured above. The text goes back to the reign of Ammisaduqa, 1646 to 1626 BC, and reaches us in seventh-century BC copies from the library at Nineveh, as tablet 63 of the omen series Enuma Anu Enlil.
Each entry carries an omen with it: if Venus vanished on such a day, then such a thing will happen in the land. This is not astrology in the modern sense, it is not about individuals. It is state forecasting, and above all it is a record: somebody looked every night and wrote it down.
Two and a half thousand years later, William Lilly publishes Christian Astrology, the fullest manual of the English tradition. In its table of dignities and debilities, on page 115, a retrograde planet scores minus five.
That runs against everything said today. For Lilly and for the whole tradition behind him, retrograde motion was not an invitation to reflect. It was a weakness. The planet was impaired, unable to do its work properly.
The modern reading, a period of review and inward work, is much younger than most people assume. It arrives with astrology's turn towards psychology, and its landmark is The Astrology of Personality by Dane Rudhyar, published in New York in 1936, which re-reads the whole system in the language of Jung's psychology. The weakness becomes introversion. The defect becomes a function.
And the popular version, the retrograde Mercury that ruins appointments and loses luggage, is younger still. It belongs to the mass magazines of the late twentieth century, and after that to the internet.
Three entirely different readings, then, of exactly the same phenomenon. The omen for the state, the weakness of the planet, the invitation to review. And underneath all three, unmoved, the 583.90 days.
None of them is worthless for having a date on it. But they have authors, and it is worth knowing which one you are listening to. Presenting a reading from 1936 as timeless wisdom does not honour it, it strips it of its history.
How these numbers were arrived at
METHOD, AND ITS CHECKNot one figure in this piece was typed by a person. All of them were computed from NASA's DE421 ephemeris data, by the same machinery that computes your birth chart inside the app.
The exact hour of a station takes a care that is not obvious. "Is it retrograde today" and "when exactly does it turn" are not the same question and are not answered by the same tool: a speed measured forwards over an interval of one day reaches zero about half a day before the real station.
The hours here were found with a centred difference and successive bisection, down to the minute.
And because a number nobody has checked should not be printed, every station was located a second time with Swiss Ephemeris, an entirely independent implementation that carries an analytic speed.
The disagreement is larger for Mercury, and the reason is not an error: a centred difference approximates a curve, and the curvature grows the faster a planet's speed is changing. Mercury changes speed faster than any other body. A few minutes inside twenty days of retrograde motion change nothing, but we would rather print it than leave it out.
Sources
SO YOU CAN CHECK THEM YOURSELF- Positions and dates: JPL DE421. Cross-checked against Swiss Ephemeris 2.10.03.
- Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa: Enuma Anu Enlil, tablet 63. Twenty-one years of observations from the reign of Ammisaduqa (1646 to 1626 BC), in seventh-century BC copies from Nineveh, in the British Museum.
- William Lilly, Christian Astrology, London 1647, p. 115, table of dignities and debilities.
- Dane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Personality: A Reformulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, Lucis Publishing, New York 1936.
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