In The City of God by Augustine it is written:
"From the book of Marcus Varro, entitled Of the Race of the Roman People, I cite word for word the following instance: 'There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its color, size, form, course, which never happened before nor since. Adrastus of Cyzicus, and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said that this occurred in the reign of Ogyges.'" 8
7 Brasseur, Sources de I'histoire primitive du Mexique, p. 48.
8 Bk. XXI, Chap. 8 (transl. M. Dods).
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The Fathers of the Church considered Ogyges a contemporary of Moses. Agog, mentioned in the blessing of Balaam, was the king Ogyges. The upheaval that took place in the days of Joshua and Agog, the deluge that occurred in the days of Ogyges, the metamorphosis of Venus in the days of Ogyges, the star Venus which appeared in the sky of Mexico after a protracted night and a great catastrophe—all these occurrences are related.
Augustine went on to make a curious comment on the transformation of Venus: "Certainly that phenomenon disturbed the canons of the astronomers ... so as to take upon them to affirm that this which happened to the Morning Star (Venus) never happened before nor since. But we read in the divine books that even the sun itself stood still when a holy man, Joshua the son of Nun, had begged this from God."
Augustine had no inkling that Castor, as quoted by Varro, and the Book of Jasher, as quoted in the Book of Joshua, refer to the same occurrence.
Are Hebrew sources silent on the birth of a new star in the days of Joshua? They are not. It is written in a Samaritan chronicle that during the invasion of Palestine by the Israelites under robin-bobin
Joshua, a new star was born in the east: "A star arose out of the east against which all magic is vain." 9
Chinese chronicles record that "a brilliant star appeared in the days of Yahu [Yahou]."10
The Blazing Star
Plato, citing the Egyptian priest, said that the world conflagration associated with Phaethon was caused by a shifting of bodies in the sky which move around the earth. As we have reason to assume that it was the comet Venus that, after two contacts with the earth, eventually became a planet, we shall do well to inquire: Did Phaethon turn into the Morning Star?
Phaethon, which means "the blazing star,"1 became the Morning
• Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 179.
10Legge; The Chinese Classics (Hong Kong ed., 1865), III, Pt. 1, 112, note.
1 Cf. Cicero De natura deorum (transl. H. Rackham), ii. 52.
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Star. The earliest writer who refers to the transformation of Phaethon into a planet is Hesiod.2
This transformation is related by Hyginus in his Astronomy, where he tells how Phaethon, that caused the conflagration of the world, was struck by a thunderbolt of Jupiter and was placed by the sun among the stars (planets) .3 It was the general belief that Phaethon changed into the Morning Star.4
On the island of Crete, Atymnios was the name of the unlucky driver of the sun's chariot; he was worshiped as the Evening Star, which is the same as the Morning Star.5
The birth of the Morning Star, or the transformation of a legendary person (Istehar, Phaethon, Quetzal-cohuatl) into the Morning Star was a widespread motif in the folklore of the oriental6
and occidental 7 peoples. The Tahitian tradition of the birth of the Morning Star is narrated on the Society Island in the Pacific;8 the Mangaian legend says that with the birth of a new star, the earth was battered by countless fragments.9 The Buriats, Kirghiz, and Yakuts of Siberia, and the Eskimos of North America also tell of the birth of the planet Venus.10
A blazing star disrupted the visible movement of the sun, caused a world conflagration, and became the Morning-Evening Star. This may be found not only in the legends and traditions, but also in astronomical books of the ancient peoples of both hemispheres.
The Four-Planet System
By asserting that the planet Venus was born in the first half of the second millennium, I assume also that in the third millennium only
2 Theogony, 11. 989 ff. 3 Hyginus, Astronomy, ii. 42.
* See Roscher, "Phaethon" in Roscher's Lexihon d. griech. und rom. Mythologie, Col. 2182.
8 Nonnos Dionysiaca xi. 130 f.; xii. 217; xix. 182; Solinus, Polyhistor xi.
6 Ginzberg, Legends, V, 170.
7 Brasseur, Histoire des nations civilisees du Mexique, I, 311-312.
8 Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia, I, 120. »Ibid., p. 43.
10 Holmberg, Siberian Mythology, p. 432; Alexander, North American Mythology, p. 9.
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161
four planets could have been seen, and that in astronomical charts of this early period the planet Venus cannot be found.
In an ancient Hindu table of planets, attributed to the year —3102, Venus alone among the visible planets is absent.1 The Brahmans of the early period did not know the five-planet system,2 and only in a later ("middle") period did the Brahmans speak of five planets.
Babylonian astronomy, too, had a four-planet system. In ancient prayers the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury are invoked; the planet Venus is missing; and one speaks of "the four-planet system of the ancient astronomers of Babylonia." 3 These four-planet systems and the inability of the ancient Hindus and Babylonians to see Venus in the sky, even though it is more conspicuous than the other planets, are puzzling unless Venus was not among the planets.
robin-bobin
On a later date "the planet Venus receives the appellative: The great star that joins the great stars.' The great stars are, of course, the four planets Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn . . . and Venus joins them as the fifth planet." 4
Apollonius Bhodius refers to a time "when not all the orbs were yet in the heavens." 5
One of the Planets Is a Comet
Democritus (circa —460 to circa —370), a contemporary of Plato and one of the great scholars of antiquity, is accused by the moderns of not having understood the planetary character of Venus.1 Plutarch
1 J. B. J. Delambre, Histoire de Vastronomie ancienne (1817), I, 407: "Venus alone is not found there."
2 "It is often denied that the Veda-Hindus knew of the existence of the five planets." "The striking fact that the Brahmans . . . never mention five planets." G. Thibaut, "Astronomie, Astrologie und Mathematik" in Grundriss der indo-arischen Philol. und Altertumskunde, III (1899).
3 E. F. Weidner, Handbuch der babylonischen Astronomie (1915), p. 61, writes of a star list found in Boghaz Keui in Asia Minor: "That the planet Venus is missing will not startle anybody who knows the eminent importance of the four-planet system in the Babylonian astronomy."
Weidner supposes that Venus is missing in the list of planets because "she belongs to a triad with the moon and the sun." On Ishtar in early inscriptions cf. infra, p. 175.
* Ibid., p. 83. 5 Apollonius Rhodius, The Argonautica, Bk. iv, 11. 257 ff.
1 "Democritus [says] that the fixed stars are in the highest place; after those the planets; after which the sun, Venus, and the moon, in their order." Plutarch, 162 WORLDS IN COLLISION
quotes him as speaking of Venus as if it were not one of the planets. But apparently the author of the treatises on geometry, optics, and astronomy, no longer extant, knew more about Venus than his critics think. From quotations which have survived in other authors, we know that Democritus built a theory of the creation and destruction of worlds which sounds like the modern planetesimal theory without its shortcomings. He wrote: "The worlds are unequally distributed in space; here there are more, there fewer; some are waxing, some are in their prime, some waning: coming into being in one part of the universe, ceasing in another part. The cause of their perishing is collision with one another." 2 He knew that "the planets are at unequal distances from us" and that there are more planets than we are able to discover with our eyes.3 Aristotle quoted the opinion of Democritus: "Stars have been seen when comets dissolve."4