The coma of Venus changed its form with the position of the planet. When the planet Venus approaches the earth now, it is only partly illuminated, a portion of the disc being in shadow; it has phases like the moon. At this time, being closer to the earth, it is most brilliant.
10 Midrash Rabba, Numeri 21. 245a: "Noga shezivo mavhik me'sof haolam ad sofo." Cf.
"Mazal" and "Noga" in J. Levy, Worterbuch iiber die Talmudim und Midrashim (2nd ed., 1924).
11 W. C. Rufus and Hsing-chih tien, The Soochow Astronomical Chart (1945).
12 D. D. Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria (1926-1927), II, Sec. 829.
13 Breasted, Records of Egypt, III, Sec. 117.
14 Brasseur, Sources de Vhistoire primitive du Mexique, p. 48, note.
18 H. Winckler, Himmels- und Weltenbild der Babylonier (1901), p. 43.
i« Pliny, Natural History, ii. 23.
1T "The Peruvians call the planet Venus by the name Chaska, the wavy-haired."
H. Kunike, "Sternmythologie auf ethnologischer Grundlage" in Welt und Mensch, IX-X. E. Nordenskiold, The Secret of the Peruvian Quipus (1925), pp. 533 ff.
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When Venus had a coma, the horns of its crescent must have been extended by the illuminated portions of the coma. It thus had two long appendages and looked like a bull's head.
%. Sanchoniathon says that Astarte (Venus) had a bull's head.18 The planet was even called Ashteroth-Karnaim, or Astarte of the Horns, a name given to a city in Canaan in honor of this deity.19 The golden calf worshiped by Aaron and the people at the foot of Sinai was the image of the star. Rabbinical authorities say that "the devotion of Israel to this worship of the bull is in part explained by the circumstance that, while passing through the Red Sea, they beheld the celestial Throne, and most distinctly of the four creatures about the Throne, they saw the ox."20
The likeness of a calf was placed by Jeroboam in Dan, the great temple of the Northern Kingdom.21
Tistrya of the Zend-Avesta, the star that attacks the planets, "the bright and glorious Tistrya mingles his shape with light moving in the shape of a golden-horned bull." 22
robin-bobin
•vThe Egyptians similarly pictured the planet and worshiped it in the effigy of a bull.23 The cult of a bull sprang up also in Mycenaean Greece. A golden cow head with a star on its brow was found in Mycenae, on the Greek mainland.24
The people of faraway Samoa, primitive tribes that depend on oral tradition as they have no art of writing, repeat to this day: "The planet Venus became wild and horns grew out of her head."
25
Examples and references could be multiplied ad libitum.
The astronomical texts of the Babylonians describe the horns of the planet Venus. Sometimes one of the two horns became more prominent. Because the astronomical works of antiquity have so much to say about the horns of Venus, modern scholars have asked them-18 Cf. L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923-1941), I, Chap. X.
19 Genesis 14 : 5. See also I Maccabee v. 26, 43, and II Maccabee xii. 21-26; G. Rawlinson, The History of Herodotus (1858), II, 543.
20 Ginzberg, Legends, III, 123. 211 Kings 12 : 28.
™The Zend-Avesta (transl. James Darmesteter, 1883), Pt. II, p. 93.
23 Cf. E. Otto, Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Stierkulte in Agypten (1938).
2* H. Schliemann, Mycenae (1870), p. 217.
25 Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia, I, 128.
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selves whether the Babylonians could have seen the phases of Venus, which cannot now be distinguished with the naked eye; 26 Galileo saw them for the first time in modern history when he used his telescope.
The long horns of Venus could have been seen without the aid of a telescopic lens. The horns were the illuminated portions of the coma of Venus, which stretched toward the earth. These horns could also have extended toward the sun as Venus approached the solar orb, since comets were repeatedly observed with projections in the direction of the sun, while the tails of the comets are regularly directed away from the sun.
When Venus approached close to one of the planets, its horns grew longer: this is the phenomenon the astrologers of Babylon observed and described when Venus neared Mars.27
26 "It is well known that not a few passages in the cuneiform texts on astrology speak of the right or the left horn of Venus. It was deduced that the phases of Venus were observed already by the Babylonians and that Galileo, in the sixteenth century, was not the first to see them."
Schaumberger, "Die Homer der Venus" in Kugler, Stemkunde, 3rd Supp., pp. 302 ff.
27 Ibid.
CHAPTER 9
Pallas Athene
IN EVERY COUNTRY of the ancient world we can trace cosmo-logical myths of the birth of the planet Venus. If we look for the god or goddess who represents the planet Venus, we must inquire which among the gods or goddesses did not exist from the beginning, but was born into the family. The mythologies of all peoples concern themselves with the birth only of Venus, not with that of Jupiter, Mars, or Saturn. Jupiter is described as heir to Saturn, but his birth is not a mythological subject. Horus of the Egyptians and Vishnu, born of Shiva, of the Hindus, were such newborn deities. Horus battled in the sky with the monster-serpent Seth; so did Vishnu. In Greece the goddess who suddenly appeared in the sky was Pallas Athene. She sprang from the head of Zeus-Jupiter. In another legend she was the daughter of a monster, Pallas-Typhon, who attacked her and whom she battled and killed.
The slaying of the monster by a planet-god is the way in which the peoples perceived the convulsion of the pillar of smoke when the earth and the comet Venus disturbed each other in their orbits, and the head of the comet and its tail leaped against each other in violent electrical discharges.
robin-bobin
The birth of the planet Athene is sung in the Homeric hymn dedicated to her, "the glorious goddess, virgin, Tritogeneia." When she was born, the vault of the sky—the great Olympus—
"began to reel horribly," "earth round about cried fearfully," "the sea was moved and tossed with dark waves, while foam burst forth suddenly," and
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the sun stopped for "a long while." x The Greek text speaks of "purple waves"2 and of "the sea
[that] rises up like a wall," and the sun stopping in its course.3
Aristocles said that Zeus hid the unborn Athene in a cloud and then split it open with lightning,4
which is the mythological way to describe the appearance of a celestial body from the pillar of cloud.
Athene, or Latin Minerva, is called Tritogeneia (or Tritonia) after the lake Triton.5 This lake disappeared in a catastrophe in Africa when it broke into the ocean, leaving the desert of Sahara behind it, a catastrophe connected with the birth of Athene.
Diodorus,6 referring to undisclosed older authorities, says that Lake Triton in Africa
"disappeared from sight in the course of an earthquake, when those parts of it which lay toward the ocean were torn asunder." This account implies that a great lake or marsh in Africa, separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a mountainous barrier, disappeared when the barrier was broken or lowered in a catastrophe. Ovid says that Libya became a desert in consequence of Phaethon's conflagration.
In the Iliad it is said that Pallas Athene "darted down to earth a gleaming star" with sparks springing from it; it darted as a star "sent by Jupiter to be a portent for seamen or for a wide host of warriors, a gleaming star." 7 Athene's counterpart in the Assyro-Babylonian pantheon is Astarte (Ishtar) who shatters mountains, "bright torch of heaven" at whose appearance "heaven and earth quake," who causes darkness and appears in a hurricane.8 Like Astarte (Ash-teroth-Karnaim), Athene was pictured with horns. "Athena, daughter of Zeus . . . upon her head she set the helmet with two horns,"