The morning twilight sky holds many secrets. Who arises habitually an hour before sunrise to see the first ring of light race around the horizon, and to witness a heliacal rising in the rosy glow of dawn? To my knowledge, only I. What joy I yearn to share when Melbourne strings together several successive clear mornings!

The Last Crescent Moon and half of planetary conjunctions are some of the morning’s delights, but I am on about something else today: a morning apparition of Venus.

Venus enjoys an exalted position in astrology, but few people understand how that came to be. It is beautiful, certainly, and perhaps that is enough to associate it with goddesses, however, its influence on human minds and hearts began 5,000 years ago, when stargazers first realized the regularities of its appearances. Their first impulse was to worship it gratefully as the quintessence of harmony.

In many cultures people did not see the morning and evening apparitions of Venus as of the same ‘star’, and it has two identities in astrology to this day: the ideal of creative perfection, and the ideal of competitive independence. The welding of those two identities into an integrated whole is the present custom, but I believe in keeping them separate.

A long time ago it was noticed that an obvious pattern existed in the movements of these two entities which unified them but kept them unique, like two sides of an equation, and perhaps two aspects of dependently arising selflessness.

Not only does Venus return to the same spot at the same time every eight years, shy a couple of degrees, but its second four years mirror its first, alternately dusk and dawn.

In other words, if they’re not identical twins, they must be one and the same, and how could they be, in a world without harmony and reliable design?

Thank God I calibrated my software to conform with appearances before the heavens disappeared.

I believe.