Hermes 3: Universal Festival Calendar, Mythic Prelude Supplement for May, 2004

MAY, 2004

Mythic Prelude Supplement:

Venus Passages, and Suggested Reading

The Venus Passages described briefly here, from the 16th through the 19th centuries, may help us see more clearly the coming Venus Passages of June 8, 2004 and June 6, 2012. The first is speculative, based on an estimate of when Venus Passages should have occurred, as the first Venus Passage observation by telescope was in 1639.

The Venus Passages of 1518 and 1526 enclose an era of immense opening, change, radical discovery and transformation. Magellan sails round the world in 1518, as Carl Johan Calleman notes. In the same year, the ideas that Luther had bowled at the Church of Rome in 1517 now speed out to the rest of Germany, and soon to Switzerland, Scotland and France. In 1521 the German Peasants' Revolt fails to budge one empire, while Cortez' conquests in Mexico topple another. Copernicus begins his observations and calculations between these two Venus Passages, and publishes his results in De Revolutionibus in 1530.

The Venus Passages of 1631 and 1639 are immediately meaningful to students of modern history, as the 1630's are, like the 1520's a time of violent political cataclysm and imperial power shift, coinciding with an opening of the frontiers of knowledge, and impetus to new discovery. The Thirty Years' War in Europe enters its second and most decisive phase as the Swedish warrior king Gustavus Adolphus pioneers a protestant army powerful and brilliantly organized enough to defeat the militaries of Catholic Europe. Massive currents are moving in China, where the Ching are getting ready to break the Wall (1644), topple the Ming and take the realm for the next 281 years.

In 1632 the famous trial of Galileo forces the hero scientist into silence, as he is forbidden to publish and is confined under house arrest until his death in 1642. But in the 1630's Galileo's students play one of the great intellectual action-adventure stories of modern times, as they secretly copy his work and carry it to Heidelberg, Geneva, Leyden, London and other centers of learning, where it will be held secret until it is ready to hit the fan, and when it does, the unchecked rise of science is a matter of time. Descartes speeds it up by inventing Analytic Geometry in 1637.

Some of the finest Venus achievements in history grace this period. Rembrandt paints Belshazzar's Feast in 1635, Frans Hals finishes Malle Babbe (1635) and The Meagre Company (1637), and Shah Jahan has started the Taj Mahal, to be completed in 1653.

The Venus Passages of 1761 - 1769 are widely cited because they are the most conspicuous examples of why the Maya associated Venus with Quetzalcoatl, the Bringer of Light. The French and German Enlightenment, Voltaire and the philosophes, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, come now, and with them new political and social ideas that will have profound results on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1763 the Seven Years' War ends the French dream of controlling North America. What is less evident at the time is that having just grabbed North America, the British will soon have to give much of it away, as they enact in 1764 the hated Stamp Act that will stoke anger until the Boston Massacre of 1770, and ensuing events.

The Venus elements of the 1760's are defined by the sensuous court of Louis XV and the elegance of the rococo in building, painting and the era's most brilliant art form, costume. In 1761 Haydn has his Saturn return at 29, and Mozart at 5 is jumping into the lap of the future Queen Marie Antoinette. In 1769 Mozart is 13, and Beethoven's parents are working on him until he is born in 1770.

The Venus Passages of 1874 and 1882 seem anomalous at first, and a departure from the patterns that seem to emerge from the three Venus Passages we have looked at so far. In these eight years of the Pax Britannica there are no falling empires or mass upheavals -- except for labor unrest that is just beginning, and will grow more intense toward 1900. But this seemingly placid era effectively revolutionizes technology in the developed world, as the United States, Japan and Russia all begin to build the same modern industries that had been the preserve of western Europe.

New inventions and medical discoveries abound, including Pasteur's seminal work in Germ Theory that leads Robert Koch to isolate the TB bacterium (1882) and cholera (1883). In 1877 Edison introduces the phonograph, and Edward Muybridge takes the famous series of rapid time-sequence photographs of Leland Stanford's horse -- to settle a bet about whether a horse ever has all four of his hooves off the ground when he runs -- and thereby pioneers the principle of motion pictures. All that is needed now is a reliable light source, and Edison does it two years later when he perfects the incandescent light bulb. Once again, Venus Passages coincide with, or somehow bring about, major breakthroughs in the human experience of light.

The arts reflect it again, as the Impressionist movement begins. Monet, Manet, Cezanne, Degas and Renoir are all in their prime, creating a new way of perception in evanescent gradations of light. In Germany, Richard Wagner's theater in Bayreuth is the state of the art in the integration of light and sound.

The Venus Passages of 2004 and 2012 will likely play true to form. We shall likely see a technological flowering extraordinary even by the standard of the last 30 years, and it is evident enough that we are at the most important transition in light entertainment and communications in more than a century, as the inevitable 3D moving picture replaces the old 2D movies we have had until now. This theatre of light, this holographic light show, when it comes, will be the essential transformative technology of the Aquarian Age.