If only the desecration of the Divine Feminine had happened just last week … or even a mere few generations ago; it would have been much more recoverable then. However, it’s going to be a long, slow process towards its reconstitution because its ruination is rooted in the ignorance of Dark Ages thinking about the importance of women and their connection to the Moon for fertility.
In studying the oldest of the Mesopotamian myths available to us, those of the Sumerians and then the Egyptians, we can see that Italian artist Sandro Botticelli’s beautiful goddess of Aphrodite arising from the frothing waves on a giant pink scallop shell is actually not Venus. It was only renamed The Birth of Venus 600 years after it was first painted. But the original mythic sources from which Aphrodite was born show us that she is actually the Moon.
The lunar origins of Aphrodite
In the Sumerian myths, we find the sky god Anu, and Inanna (later Ishtar) who was the daughter of the Moon, named Sin. Inanna was known as the goddess of love and war. However, the Macedonians of Alexander the Great, upon invading and conquering Babylon in 331 BCE, stole the star stories (or myths) of the Babylonians (who’d inherited them from the Sumerians) and carried them off, so to speak, lock, stock and barrel, without understanding them.
So in that way, when the classical Greeks came to retell these stories in their own idioms, it was clear that they had vandalised and fragmented the journey of the original mythological hero so much so that his path around the zodiac constellations was no longer recognisable. In addition, they had also divided the Sumerian and Babylonians’ goddess of love and war into Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Ares, the god of war.
Later on, the Romans took the Greek pair of Aphrodite and Ares and called them Venus and Mars. Thus – wittingly or unwittingly, and over time – the inner steel and the monthly, cyclical, tidal influences were removed, in the weave of the consensual consciousness, from the mythic material of the Divine Feminine.
Well, why does it matter, you might be thinking? It is because, as I explain in my books, without the Moon in her correct place in our thinking, we cannot understand the Marriage of the Sun and the Moon, which is vital to the Mystery teachings that contain the wisdom about the alchemical fertility of this planet.
Fen Lander, who some of you may know as a British discoverer of landscape zodiacs, has written similarly about the original lunar derivation of Aphrodite as he finds her as Isis in the myths of the Egyptians, who were close to the Sumerians and Babylonians in their thinking. And he has given me permission to share his thoughts as follows:
Fenlander on why Aphrodite is not Venus
I suppose the best place to start this is with the mythology of Aphrodite’s birth. It was, according to the ancient Greeks, during the “Titanomachy” or the “War of the Titans,” that Cronus (Saturn) castrated his father, the “Sky God” Uranus [the Sumerian Anu], who’d been eating his own ugly children.
In translation, Uranus had many satellites or Moons (his children) which had crashed to the surface of Uranus during some unknown cosmic disturbance. This catastrophe seems to have been one of the causes of Uranus’ “tipping-over” on his side. According to Wal Thornhill, David Talbot, John Cook and many other scientists and science writers, Saturn was a “brown-dwarf” star at this time, a brown dwarf which went Supernova.
In the understanding of the “Thunderbolts Project” proponents, this (and all such cosmic phenomena) was an electrical event, a massive discharge of electricity, an exchange of charge between Uranus and Saturn in which Uranus, the lower voltage of the two, was obliged to eject a huge quantity of mass, an electrified molten mass, and believe it or believe it not, this phenomenal scene in the heavens was witnessed by proto-humans! The newly ejected mass of fiery matter was universally described in ancient texts as a “great-comet” which in Greek mythology became the goddess Aphrodite.
In the Greek myths, Aphrodite was born from the castrated genitals of Uranus when the blood and seed fell upon the sea. Botticelli’s Aphrodite depicts the goddess posed within a clam shell. The very famous Botticelli painting was painted in the 13th century, but was not entitled (as it is now) “The Birth of Venus.” As far as this erstwhile writer understands it, Botticelli called it “The Birth of Aphrodite.” This presumptive “Venus” attribution was not attached to the painting for 600 years, in the 19th century, by a bunch of crusty-old “art-experts” who, apparently, could read symbols. Me too … Except I’m not quite as crusty.
The old nobs’ who re-titled the piece, were art experts, not astrotheologists. They came-up with the attribution “Venus” based on the other characters hovering round about her. But again, as far as I can tell, Aphrodite was nothing but the Hellene’s version of the goddess Isis. Isis is and always has been regarded as the “mother goddess,” sacred to or associated with the Moon.
According to the ancient Egyptians, Isis (the Moon) was sister and wife to Osiris (Saturn).
It is an astrotheological certainty that the Egyptian god Osiris is/was the Greek god Cronus- according to Greek myths, Uranus (Anu/Janus) was father to Cronus. Therefore, if Aphrodite was born of Uranus’ severed genitalia (making her sibling of Osiris/Cronus/Saturn), and Osiris’ wife/sister was Isis (the Moon) then the idea that Aphrodite is/was planet Venus, is erroneous.
It may be that your’s sincerely has done nothing but further confuse the matter. In the hope it might help, here’s a picture of a statuette (one of countless identically-named others) this one is in the Met museum and gallery in the U.S. It’s called the goddess Isis-Aphrodite. Does that clear up the fog? If Isis is the Moon goddess, then so is Aphrodite. In this one statuette the answer to the origin of the Moon is concealed, isn’t it? The Moon was born as a direct result of the war of the gods, born of the electrical interaction between the ancient sky god, Uranus and the ancient sun-god Saturn.
Addendum from Fen Lander
Separating the astrological and astronomical wheat from the chaff in ancient myths is a work in progress that will probably last us for generations.
To that end, I’ve just received the following from Fen Lander.
” I’ve recently come to understand that the [Sumerian] Sin was misidentified as the Moon due to the crescent. It seems that in fact Sin was an ancient reference to Saturn, now identified with the sickle form – the sickle and the crescent were the same symbol.
“I think it may have been Alexander’s lot who first made this confusing (but understandable) mis-identification: Crescents = Moon in our era, but in former aeons the crescent identified Saturn. As Sin (Saturn) was a player in the Moon’s birth from the castration of father Uranus, then of course, the relationship between Sin and the Moon was misunderstood.
“Saturn and the Moon are siblings – a generation older than Ishtar/Athena/Kali. Thus Sin giving birth to Innana/Ishtar is actually Saturn giving birth to Venus, not the Moon giving birth. There is still a great deal of disentangling to be done.”
You can contact Fen Lander on his blog here.
Shaman of Avalon 
I haven’t read Jean Markale but am familiar with that hypothesis. The similarity of name and form is explained by the primordial carpet of myths, which you will come on to, eventually … and no skipping ahead! 😉
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You’re tempting me to skip ahead. 🙂 That’s a weakness of mine.
In my mind, I’ve had to renegotiate how I define a Greek several times. What I’ve come to is that Alexander tried to create a unified identity where there was none, which had disastrous consequences for the denizens of the Thousand Islands who by nature, were not interchangeable parts. I’ve always had what you’d call a love/hate relationship with Greek mythology. But I never cared for the Alexandrian Empire because it strikes me that Empires can only end one way, no matter how attractive or virile they might seem.
Have you perchance ever read Jean Markale before? He deals a dite with Anu and how this becomes Anna, Dana, Don and so many other things as the name changed over time and space. Names, being powerful things, survive in strange places. To our refined “modern” “senses.” The Great Goddess of his is the last book I read before starting yours. I found it to be refreshingly unrestrained- typically I find in the New Age adjacent fields there is a narrow gauge of perception that I don’t have much love for.
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Yes, I agree. The Greek and Roman “soul” was stolen from the Babylonians by Alexander the Great. This is an extract from Chapter 13.
“The word ‘anu’ is so old it is found in the most ancient Sanskrit texts, as well as the artefacts and writings of all the peoples that conquered that most fought-over of fertile lands between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, beginning with the Sumerians from around 3100 BCE, then the Akkadians from 2334 BCE, the Sumerians again from 2150 BCE, the Old Babylonians from 1830 BCE, the Kassites from 1530 BCE, the Middle Babylonians from 1125 BCE, the Assyrians from 727 BCE, the Chaldeans from 612 BCE, the Persians from 539 BCE and the Macedonian Greeks from 331 BCE.
“However, much of what the Babylonians wrote about the stars had been copied from the earlier Sumerians, and pretty well everything the Chaldeans knew was copied from the Babylonians – and that is before you even get to the Macedonian Greek vandals of Alexander the Great who, after conquering Babylon in 331 BCE, not only stole all the star lore but cut their zodiac and their goddess Ishtar in half in the process.”
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Only just begun I’m afraid, 26 pages in. I look forward to learning about the Scythians. I’ve also got it on my docket to learn about the Babylonian or Mesopotamian systems because they form a large bildungslöcke on my part.
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Thank you, my Sunday is going pretty well so far but then I’ve only just fallen out of bed! I know you’ve ordered Stories in the Stars, but maybe haven’t received it, or started reading it yet? That’s why I wrote a whole book on the subject, of 90,000 words. It takes that many to answer your comment above, and other comments like them. We have to go back to the Scythians and start from there … then we can start making sense of the Greek and Roman soul, and that of the Celts and the Jews too! It’s just a question of zooming out a bit. Let me know how you get on with it. Wishing you a great day!
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My understanding of Astrology is at best, pitiful. But there’s been a part of me that’s hated the (I think) reductionist methodology of equivocating X with Y. Oh, Venus and Aphrodite are one, they say. I can see their being correspondences- but the Greek and Roman had different souls I think, and the moods and attitudes of the Goddess reflects that. That’s what my gut tells me. My gut also tells me the Pantheons are hypostatic representations of a diadic creative cosmological union. The old Goddess/God one-two-punch.
I’m intrigued by Sin being comparable to Saturn. The last book I read went a distance towards convincing me that Yahweh of Sinai might be an aspect of Sin. And if this fairs out than I think it follows with the Gnostic interpretation occasionally encountered which has it that Yahweh is a demiurge and maybe that wisdom dispensing serpentine Lucifer wasn’t a bad sort after all. Anywho, that’s enough yah-yah from me. Hopefully you’re having a pleasant Sunday.
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