http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 94 CHAPTER EIGHT THE TWO FACES OF LOVE The Aphrodite of the light Olympian-age character plays opposite her usual star in the Love Affair, Ares. Her husband, Hephaestus, earns little affection from her, and, though the story is not mentioned here, she is the mother of three children by Ares. She is one of the few ever to have expressed love for Ares, and in "The Battle of the Gods," in the Iliad, she goes to his aid in battle and is roundly smacked by the Goddess Athena. If we look into Homer for the precise astronomical referents of Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus and Athena, we are disappointed. Homer does not say that the three sky bodies - planet mars, Moon, and planet Venus are represented by them, not in the Iliad, nor the Odyssey, nor in the Love Affair. How then are we to assure ourselves that we are on the right track when we allocate among them several celestial bodies? We cannot be certain - not now, nor in ancient times, if we follow the record. Our difficult task of astral-mythical correla tion is to be made even harder by the requirement that we show that Aphrodite in the Love Affair is, if not certainly, then most likely, the Moon. However, we shall proceed to the task, taking four steps. First we inquire whether Aphrodite was tied to the Moon in Greek, Near Eastern and other sources in primeval and ancient times. Next we ask whether Aphrodite was the name of entities other than the Moon. Further, we ask whether she was possibly both the Moon and another entity. Finally, we ask whether Aphrodite stood for the Moon specifically in the Love Affair, in the song of Demodocus. A MOST ANCIENT GODDESS The Aphrodite of whom we speak is an old goddess. Always speaking in relative terms, "old" means coming into recognizable form and identity before Jupiter, Venus and mars, Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 95 probably after Uranus, and possibly early in the age of Saturn using the Greco-Roman Eastern Mediterranean theogony and names as points of reference. A quotation "On the worship of Venus-Urania throughout the East," from the work of a famous scholar, G. Rawlinson, begins our introduction of the Love Affair's goddess: [1] "She was the 'Queen of Heaven,' the Moon... she corresponded to Minerva, and in Greece to the original Aphrodite, who became at last the mere personification of beauty and voluptuousness." In the work of another scholar, Jane E. Harrison [2], we read a passage from the Danaides of Aeschylus, and we are told something of the jurisdiction of this Aphrodite - words put into her mouth by the great dramatist: Lo, there is hunger in the holy Sky To pierce the body of the Earth, and in the Earth too Hunger to meet his arms. So falls the rain From Heaven that is her lover, making moist The bosom of the Earth: and she brings forth to man The flocks he feeds, the corn that is his life. To trees no less there cometh their own hour Of marriage which the gleam of watery things Makes fruitful - Of all these the cause am I. These lines seem to convey what we would expect of a lunar goddess. We are moving far back in time. In a passing reference, Mircea Eliade writes of a "regime brought about by Aphrodite and later governed by Zeus, in which the species are fixed, there is order, balance, and hierarchy."[3] I have carried the birth of the Moon back in solar system history to an astronomical catastrophe occurring even before the Age of Saturn. We hear Theopompos quoted by Plutarch: [4] "From Kronos and Aphrodite all things take their birth." So Aphrodite is moved back to the time of Kronos. Back of Zeus, stands his father Kronos, and back of Kronos, his father, Ouranos. Hesiod (8th century?), the earliest Greek source of all, places Aphrodite with the earliest great god of the cloudy skies, Ouranos (Uranus). The motherless Aphrodite is Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 96 daughter of Ouranos, and Eros - a figure of love - seems to have been born with her, nor will this divine helper ever leave her. A little while after Hesiod wrote, Homer worked, and Homer alludes to a second Aphrodite Pandemos, daughter of Zeus by Dione, aided by Eros Pandemos. Cicero, a typical confusion emerging out of his elegant prose, has Hermes as husband of the Uranian Aphrodite who is given Hephaestus as a husband and Ares as a lover. A third Aphrodite is the sister of Hermes and daughter of Heaven and Die. Finally a fourth Aphrodite emerges as a Syric-Cypriot wife of Adonis, by the name of Astarte. We have almost nothing to say of the latter two personae. It is enough to discuss Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemos, if indeed they amount to two distinct goddesses. If the former is the Moon, there is no reason to make of the second also the Moon. Rather, this latter may even have been the planet Venus, who as the goddess Athena, was born out of Zeus' forehead, lacking association in such case with either Dione or Eros. Proclus, much later, but still authoritative, has this second later Aphrodite also born from the sea like the first [5]. The first goddess, Aphrodite Urania, was born in the throes of the destruction of Ouranos by his son Kronos (Saturn), who severed his father's genitals with a sickle of jagged flint and flung them into the sea. From the foam of these organs arose Aphrodite, a foam god, literally foam-born (aphrogenis), the "one who is generated from foam." [6] Only three words in Greek are known to carry the Aphr- root: "foam" (aphros), "recklessness," and "sexually stimulating," All are obvious associations with Aphrodite's birth and character [7]. This will become more significant when we ask why Aphrodite Urania cannot have been Athena, or Ishtar, or another goddess. TURBULENT BIRTH IN MYTHS AND REALITY The later myth might have both confusing and clarifying elements, confusing in its resemblances to the Uranian episode, clarifying in that, if it were Athena-Venus which was involved, foam-covered seas are understandable ("Beaufort 10" in navigation has the surface of the sea foaming, hence sperm) and Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 97 a turbulent setting in which Aphrodite-Moon (does Dione relate to Diana?) was destructively involved and Zeus' activity might have been construed as an attempted (and actual) ravishment of the Moon in the days of the birth of Athena seven hundred and more years before the Love Affair. The Homeric "Hymn to Athena" reproduced in chapter X chants of the foaming seas resulting from her birth. "Sea" foam, we can see, had reason to be brought in a second time on a later date. Of the name "Aphrodite" itself, a case can be made for its being of an origin earlier than the planet Venus, because of the temporal precedence of the Moon and the definite designation of Urania, an impossible name for a later deity; long before historical nations began, Ouranos was a deus otiosus. The goddess Amphitrite Thalassa ("of the Sea") shares this epithet with Typhon and his paredra, "making one being with foam-born Aphrodite," according to F. Nork [8]. Here is another indication that Aphrodite Pandemos is lateborn and accompanies the birth (and death) of Typhon. We employ the scenario of Aphrodite Urania in Chaos and Creation and Solaria Binaria to approach the reality of those days. Uranus is a giant luminescent planet that fissions in the earliest days of humanity. There occurs a separation from the electric arc or "tree of life" which humans saw reaching up the god-planet. A major fragment from the nova takes cometary form. In the severance from the tree and in the cometary form, a castration of Ouranos is perceived. When the Moon is seen to arise from the disturbed Earth, it is perceived as born out of the turbulent seas, out of the froth, and the connection is made with the genitals of Ouranos, from which foam-born Aphrodite Urania is generated and rises into the sky. The bloodiness ascribed by myth to the foaming scene would refer to the ruddy color of the turbulent elements and to the horrific analogy of the divine actions; the same color relations would occur upon the much later occasion of the mythical fall of Typhon and the birth of a new goddess. Many thousands of years separate this catastrophic primordial scenario from the fully sublimated painting by Botticelli of a tender, beautiful Aphrodite riding upon the sea-shell. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 98 In Sumerian mythology, the god of the aether, Enlil, who can be compared with Uranus, separates the interlocked Earth Mother and Father-Nammu, and then creates the Moon god, Nanna. Among the thousands of verses of the Rig Vedas of ancient India there is an allusion to the birth of the Moon, which is not among those presented in my other works but was culled by J. Ziegler during his study of the Vedas. The Moon is "the Prudent (Moon)... allied by birth to Heaven and Earth in kinship. The Gods discovered in the midst of waters beautiful Agni (the Moon) with the Sister's labor. Him, Blessed One, Seven strong Floods augmented, him white at birth and red when waxen mighty.... Then they, ancient and young, who dwell together, Seven Sounding Rivers, as one germ received him." [9] Ziegler has also identified as Moon-names of the Rig-Vedas : Pusan, Indu, Two-Mothered Sun, Pavamana, Sura, Wanderer, Red Bird, Lord, Bull, Vaisvanara, Maghavan, Brhaspati, Brahmanaspati, Kutsa, Sindhu, Sage, Shining One, Agni and Indra, and probably many more. We note how other gods are called by Moon-names or there is a confusion, as with Agni and Indra. The same duplicity may occur in the Mediterranean area. John Bentley, writing of India, supports us from his peculiar point of vantage: in the war between gods and giants, "the god dess Sri, or Lakshmi, was then born, or produced from the Sea." "The Venus Aphroditus of the Western mythologists (is) emblematic of the lunisolar year; therefore she is called the goddess of increase, abundance, etc. She is the daughter of Durga, and the Proserpine of the West; and, considered as time, she is the same as her mother. Metaphysically, she may sometimes represent the Moon." [10] Later on, we shall see that Bentley's support has its problems. He may be confusing two Aphrodites (Moon and planet Venus) and Hindu mythology, it seems, may have the same problem as the Greek. In geological terms, however, and according to a view that I present at length in the Quantavolution Series, the Moon has Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 99 recently arrived upon the sky. It was assembled electro-gravita tionally from a vast explosion of crustal material from the Earth. It began to orbit the Earth, always facing it, within the traditional era of a cultured humanity that recorded the events through legend later on. Inasmuch as a number of ancient authors declare that there existed, still intact, cultures that claimed existence prior to the Moon's appearance, there was a "Proselenian Period" before the Moon existed [11]. Among the Proselenians, doubts existed; the Moon may have come into position earlier but, owing to a thick canopy of clouds girdling the Earth, it may have merely come into evidence at a later time, and therefore the Proselenians witnessed the coming of the Moon as an emergence from behind a cloudy barrier, after it had been present in the nearby sky for some time. Around the world, the moon was more often attributed female gender for several reasons that can be touched upon only briefly here. A matriarchal system may have come into being at times and the Moon was deemed female. Or the rough coincidence of the normal menstrual period of women and the cycle of lunar phases - 28 days, 36 days and perhaps other periods as well, in various calendar ages - could have produced numerous speculations, "confirmations," institutional and ritual tags for the measure of time and religious behaviors. The Moon would thus become female because of its behavior according to the menstrual cycle? Yet, we think, could not a male Moon have commanded and ordered the menstrual cycle, according to the mythmaking mind? Only Venus, of the planets, is often female. The others and the Sun are regularly male. A number of qualities are associated with the Moon and these are also associated with the Moon and these are also associated with the female sex. The chief among these is a role in fertility. But could not the qualities have been ascribed to the Moon after they were developed in females ? Not altogether, of course, because certain qualities are found so universally among women that they would appear to have originated in a common source such as the Moon. One refers here to the function of women in spinning and weaving. Do these derive from lunar behavior? Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 100 ENCYCLOPEDISTS AND THE MOON GODDESS Robert Graves refers to "Selene the Moon, alias Aphrodite" and develops the lunar traits of Aphrodite extensively. "The Athe nians called Aphrodite Urania 'the eldest of the Fates' because she was the Nymph-Goddess, to whom the sacred King had, in ancient times, been sacrificed at the summer solstice... Aphrodite is the same wide-ruling goddess who rose from Chaos and danced on the sea, and who was worshiped in Syria and Palestine as Ishtar, or Ashtaroth [12]. She was regarded as a queen-bee. "She destroyed the sacred king, who mated with her on a mountain top, as a queen-bee destroys the drone: by tearing out his sexual organs." As Cybele, Phrygian Aphrodite of Mount Ida, she accepted "the ecstatic self-castration of her priests in memory of her lover Attis." [13] Concessions, suggests Graves, to the need to grant her masculine powers as society moved under the influence of Jovian patriarchy [14]. Thus could society employ the fantasy of bisexuality to further a political cause. The Scythians, it is asserted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (16-44) worshipped "Artimpasa (Aphrodite Urania), goddess of the Moon." The famous Encyclopedia of Pauly-Wissowa tells us that Philochorus, "resting on the oldest conceptions of nature," finds a duplicity in Aphrodite and the Moon (p. 2738). It refers to Horace speaking of dances to Aphrodite in the night under the Moon (Horace, Carm. I:45). It pitches the Lemnos myth of a marriage between Aphrodite and Hephaestus against a Theban myth of her marriage to Ares, which are then merged in the Song of Demodocus (p. 2769); the Orphic hymns stretch far back of the Homeric period of the Eighth and Seventh Centuries; the image of Aphrodite here seems lunar rather than planetary, but we realize that the same Mistress of the Heavens title is given to Astarte in Syria, who is probably more planet Venus (with Ananna) than she is the Moon. Also, as Astarte is seen by some as Aphrodite barbata (bearded), still Pauly Wissowa can find at least that the ancient authority Philochoros again calls the bearded goddess a Moon figure. Numerous writers besides Graves, among them Winthuis, Jeremias, and Rix, have stressed an original bisexuality of ancient deities. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 101 The primordial All-Mother of ancient tradition is a man woman, or a woman-man, virgin not in the physiological but in the cosmic sense.... A naive androgynous symbolism for the primeval mother, forming a part of the doctrine, is apparently shown in the oldest temples to the Virgin Mother, when the All-Mother is represented with a beard... Astarte may appear in a masculine form... sometimes with the characteristics of the masculine sex. Certain authors have even offered the hypothesis of an androgynous Ishtar [15]. There are many of such androgynous representations of Aphrodite, as in Cyprus where the goddess wears a beard, female garments, and seems unisexual. Pilgrims to Paphos there received 'gifts of a phallus and salt,' the latter standing probably for the sea-froth and semen of which the goddess was born. In Rome, like New York City, anything could be found, including this, too. The case for bearded Aphrodites representing the planet Venus occurs partly because the ankh (shown below), the crux ansata or 'cross with a handle,' is associated with both the planet and with a number of representations that must be regarded as the goddess Aphrodite. The ankh is an ambivalent symbol that denotes bisexuality, a combined phallus and vulva. The cometary references seem clear, for a comet's generally round nucleus and straight-out long tail convey in the sky a genital meaning. Insofar as the history of the planet Venus is known, and that may well be from its beginnings, the ankh has been a sacred symbol and one appropriated for the planet Aphrodite-Venus. Athena is not without bearded associations. Male, bearded ser pents were to be found on a pediment of the archaic Athenian Acropolis. These would have been representations of the dragon who was Typhon, and also a part of Athena as cometary Venus. The larger question to be dealt with later on, is whether Athena had a double, a male duplicity, a god of prominence. The Dictionnaire des Antiquités is more confident than Pauly Wissowa of the lunar identity of the goddesses Aphrodite and Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 102 Venus. It recognizes the duality of the Uranian and Jovian Aphrodites which grew close with time or may even have been originally the same. (91 fn1) We quote here two passages from the extensive article on Venus: She came from Asia where almost all of the Semitic peoples worshiped a lunar deity representation of fertility and animal fecundity. Artakatis-Derketo at Ascalon, Mylitta at Babylon, Ishtar in Assyria, and above all, Astarte among the ancients. From Cyprus and Phoenicia, the goddess moved North to the shores of the Black Sea, Northwest across the Cyclades, West to Cytherea, to Sparta, to Sicily, Carthage, Latium. Aphrodite Urania is identical to lunar Astarte of the Semites, who appeared at Carthage under the name of the Celestial Virgin. The relations of Aphrodite with the night star are further implied in the myth of Phaeton whom the goddess seized to make guardian of her temple. Phaeton is, in effect, the star of the morning and evening, whose vivid brightness naturally associated it with the Moon whose brilliant acolyte it appeared to be. This star, among other names, is also called the star of Venus, and the assimilation of the goddess to this double star contributed, at Cyprus and Pamphylia, to the idea of an androgynous Aphrodite. It is to be noted that this authority not only awards Aphrodite and Venus to the Moon, but also Ishtar and Astarte, two goddesses that a number of writers, the present author included, assign confidently to the catastrophic comet-planet Venus. Are we to win one position only in order to surrender another, perhaps more important in the total picture? For much of the best material on the history of the disasters of the mid-second millenium B.C. comes out of the histories of Ishtar and Astarte. Sophie Lunais tells us that lunar cults are more ancient than solar, that the Moon was worshiped more than the sun, that Diana came to be identified with the Moon and so, too, Artemis, and of course Hecate, Selene, and Luna, but despite all of this, "curiously the mythology of the Moon is practically nonexistent."[16] Her surprise is not surprising, considering that often myths of the Moon do not come forth labeled clearly as such, and that in the book is to be found no reference to Aphrodite ! Most of the mythology of Aphrodite is lunar Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 103 mythology. Diana and Artemis were late arrivals as Moon goddesses, she reports; certainly later than Aphrodite, we add. We could further add that, if moon mythology is not abundant in the Latin authors, it is because Aphrodite tended to monopolize it, and in art as well. Reports Graves: "The later Hellenes belittled the Great Goddess of the Mediterranean, who had long been supreme at Corinth, Sparta, Thespiae, and Athens, by placing her under male tutelage and regarding her solemn sex-orgies as adulterous indiscretions."[17] Graves continues: the Moon, to whom "the sun yields precedence" [18] in early myth has three phases - the maiden of spring, the nubile nymph of summer, and the crone of winter, to correspond to her three phases: new, full, and old. She could also be identified with Mother Earth's vegetative year, who pro duced first leaves and buds, then flowers and fruits, and then a withered barrenness. "She could later be conceived as yet another triad: the maiden of the upper air, the nymph of the earth or sea, the crone of the underworld - typified respectively by Selene, Aphrodite, and Hecate. These mystical analogues fostered the sacredness of the number three, and the Moon goddess became enlarged to nine when each of the three persons - maiden, nymph, and crone - appear in triad to demonstrate her divinity." (We note, in passing, that the council of Phaeacia numbered nine men, who measured the magic circle of the dance and whom we have also associated with a nine-day week.) Aphrodite was the nubile female, par excellence, declares Graves. She wore the Golden Girdle of the Moon, whose magic would incite concupiscence in any man. In addition, she could stand in the place of the "General Chairwoman," from time to time and from place to place, as the Great Goddess pro-tem. By the time Demodocus sang, Aphrodite was officially of the family of Olympian Gods, a daughter of Zeus, a relatively spe cialized god of desire, and the moon by inference as the dark time of trysting and loving. She is fickle, light-hearted, willful, beautiful, golden, perfumed, and anointed, with, of course, all the powers of her station in respect to humanity and an invulnerability in fact to terrible retribution from her father or Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 104 sisters and brothers. She was a seductive, but no longer active, force. Still, the universal help and harm, of which she was capable in earlier ages and even now, remained impressed upon the minds of the audience of Demodocus. Whatever happened to Aphrodite was of importance and if she might be treated good humoredly, it would be still with respect, with awe, with ceremony, and behind the protective shield of other gods, who alone could be the causes of whatever embarrassment her shameless character would permit her. THE COSMIC SPINNER The most penetrating studies of Aphrodite as the Moon Goddess come from Elmer George Suhr. He entitles one of his books Venus de Milo, The Spinner; the Link between a Famous Art Mystery and Ancient Fertility Symbols [19] A decade later he published The Spinning Aphrodite; The Evolution of the Goddess from Earliest Pre-Hellenic Symbolism through Late Classical Times [20]. The Venus de Milo, as is well-known, is a statue without arms. Suhr, reconstructing the statue anatomically and on the basis of more complete representations of Aphrodite, concluded that she was occupied at spinning yarn. A fine picture is to be found on the Berlin lekythos where beside the spinning goddess are Ares and Eros. "The moon... is in full view behind Aphrodite, where it serves as the total center for the whole composition." Suhr associated a whole complex of attributes and functions with Aphrodite: the Moon directly, the shadow of the Moon (its cone), spinning, the vortex theme in myth, the emblem of the spiral, the dew and rain, Klotho, Hecate, Medusa, the omphalos (sacred navel of the world), rainfall (the dropping of threads upon the Earth), the turning of the vault of Heaven, the forming of thunderhead on her distaff with the help of Ares, lunar calendars. She was "worshiped as the dispenser of the divine elixir running through all life, the mistress of fate and fortune, the author of all things fair and lovable." She is generally antagonistic in various manifestations to Athena. She is a long-time enemy of Athena, in the Iliad but elsewhere, too. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 105 Aphrodite, Suhr thinks, was reduced in importance during the age of Zeus, but could not be fundamentally deprived of form and function. The Moon, which heretofore had played an important part in this program (of cloud, thunder, and lightning) was also relegated to the background. But Aphrodite was too powerful to be lightly brushed aside. As a goddess of love and beauty she became a respectable member of the Olympian family, both causing the other gods much trouble and bringing them countless pleasures by trapping them in the net of desire. Since Zeus was a male, he never took over the spinning equipment as an adjunct of creation; such an attribute was below the dignity of the father of the gods and men. Aphrodite was allowed to keep this attribute and though she remained a powerful divinity, she was pushed aside in Athens, no doubt in the days of Theseus, by Athena, the bachelor girl goddess who became a favored child of Zeus. That the Moon goddess was a spinner is also to be discovered in Meso-America and Egypt. Hence if Aphrodite is connected with spinning in Greece and the Near East, then Aphrodite is to be connected with the Moon, for the Moon and spinning are generally associated. An article and photograph of the National Geographic Magazine (Dec. 1975) describe ....The Mayan moon goddess Ixchel, patroness of fertility, weaving, and medicine. Wife of the sun, she consorted with other gods, just as the moon crosses paths with the stars and planets. In this 4 3/4-inch figurine from Jaina Island, off Yucatan, the moon goddess takes a grinning rabbit for her partner. The grinning rabbit might in other place be taken to be a wolf, a mouse, a dove or another animal such as have been associated with the planet Mars-Ares in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. The Indo-Iranian texts of the Bundahis refer to a planet called "Gokihar" or "Wolf-progeny" as "special disturber of the Moon" [21] while the Slavs beheld a wolf-shaped Vukadlak that devoured the moon (or sun) [22]. Medusa is identified with Aphrodite and with Selene (moon) by Suhr, who points out that Selene was the patroness of Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 106 generation and "as a friend of Poseidon (one among other reasons) she became offensive to Athena." We bear this in mind when we see Odysseus protected by Athena and murderously pursued by Poseidon, and when we see Poseidon in the Love Affair arranging an easy exit for Aphrodite and Ares out of the vengeful hands of Hephaestus (hence Athena who, we shall see, is tied to Hephaestus and a protagonist and director of the action in the Love Affair). Suhr speaks of the countless clay cones of Mesopotamia that copy the shadow of the Moon. They rotate upon the face of the dark land, and become a type of menhir turned by human figures of stone. Nannar the moon god of Mesopotamia works hard to keep the cone rotating. The cone emblem is found on a coin of Byblos (Syria) and at the city of Paphos (Cyprus) where a large cone stood in the open court of the Temple of Aphrodite. With regard both to Aphrodite of Cyprus and Astarte of Syria there was a close association with the Moon. "Both are heiresses of the moon god of the city of Ur" with many cone figures. CONFUSION COMPOUNDED We have already given reasons for the oriental associations of lunar Aphrodite so we are not surprised but confirmed at finding her great temple at Paphos, Cyprus, constructed in the Phoenician style (or is it vice versa? No matter here, but relevant chronologies should be approached skeptically). In this temple, we have noted, stood a monolith that Tacitus, the Roman historian, described as "A rounded mass rising like a cone from a broad base to a small circumference." Some scholars think it to have been an aerolith or meteoroid that had fallen and was emplaced in honor of Aphrodite. This, indeed, it may have been. To suspect that the fallen stone may be set up in deference to a cometary Venus or would be a meteoroid associated somehow with Athena is certainly permissible. We know of a Palladium of Troy, a probable meteoritic stone, associated with Pallas Athena [23], who is herself identified with the planet Venus. Other meteoroids have been associated with other gods. In the present instance at Paphos, and following Suhr's earlier theory, we would have more reason to see in the meteoritic cone an accidental resemblance to the Shadow Cone of the Moon, and its many fabricated images Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 107 going back to the city of Ur. Aphrodite of Paphos would then be, if not exclusively lunar Aphrodite, largely or partly such. Pliny, the natural historian of Rome, writes that Venus is given the name Lucifer as another sun bringing the dawn, whereas when it shines after sunset it is named Vesper as prolonging the daylight, or as deputy of the Moon, and he credits the discovery of the twin property of planet-Venus to Pythagoras of Samos, 142 years after the founding of Rome. Others besides Pythagoras are also credited with the discovery, Parmenides and Ibycus of Rhegium among them. One implication of this remark, corroborated broadly in Plato, is that planet Venues did not occupy the same course after the incidents that we are tracing in the Love Affair. Planet Venus arrived to be deputy of the Moon following the disastrous scenario in time. At some period when the planet Venus was emplaced in its modern orbit and coming to be recognized as such, in its morning and evening manifestations, there may have been a movement in Greece to call it Hera, for Hera it was called by some. Perhaps the astronomers, more in touch with oriental thought, won out with their name, Aphrodite. Another source of confusion turns up in the pages of Robert Graves, where he distinguishes the animals of the Moon, Selene, and Aphrodite as those that `parted the hoof' in the manner of lunar crescents so that the lunar symbol occurred as two facing arcs, contrasting with the single simple disc of the sun. The sacred cow that directed Cadmus (from Ugarit, facing West) to the site of Thebes was so branded on each flank. At Denderah a red bull was sacrificed formally as Typhon. Temples there for Isis and Aphrodite were found, as well as shrines for Seth-Typhon. Cows, young bulls, bulls, red bulls: to whom does each category belong, to what gods, in what aspects? There were more sky-bovines than bovine species to assign to them. It will be a long time before the pattern is fully discovered. At Denderah, there is something of Aphrodite as the Venusian goddess implicated in the mid-second millennial events. Cloven-hoofed animals are not alone of the Moon, whatever may be the inclination of the symbol of the double Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 108 facing crescents elsewhere. Just as Lucifer is the light-bearer of the morning, but is also the Prince of Darkness, Satan, Seth the light that brought darkness, the darkness of wanderings in the wilderness, of Egypt following the Great Light? What, then, should one do with the many indications from Egypt, the Near East, and Western and Northern Europe that the Planet Venus is associated with the cow and even the young bull (as in the Revolt of the Golden Calf in Hebrew Exodus)? It would appear that we are dealing once again with mysteries of the succession and amalgamation of divinities in the course of experiencing and forgetting, mnemotechnology. Especially because of the ultimately close physical association of the Moon and Venus and the skies, the facile mirage of celestial horns, and the shapes that comets take, we can reason that Aphrodite would be party to and victim of a confusion between Moon and the Star of the Moon. Hence, Symbols of the one may develop some distinction from those of the other, but an overlapping occurs, enough to tell of the merger of gods, a merger perhaps supremely important in preventing the human mind from taking sides against itself. That is, the very confusion that sets us to arguing is the therapy enabling us to live mentally with historically opposing gods. And such is car ried into the sublimations of the arts. "There is something for everyone," "everyone" being the society seeking consensus (therefore a consistent history) and the individual seeking personal sacred integrity. A MATCH OF SOURCES The time has come, it appears, to switch perspectives, to show how it might be argued that Aphrodite is also tied to the planet Venus, thus rescuing the several goddesses of the planet Venus from capture by the Moon. Perhaps following Plutarch, St. Augustine went as far as to assign the archetype of the comet-planet Venus, Athena, to the Moon. As for Minerva (Athena), they have given her the responsibility for the arts of mankind; but they have not found her a star to be her habitation, and so they have Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 109 identified her with the upper region of the ether, or even with the Moon. We can do without this sort of help. This is as unlikely an assignment as any identification can get in mythology and I join Peter James in dismissing it. But James' adamancy on the balance of the equation remains to be dissolved. It lets him turn around and accept Augustine's comment that Aphrodite won the Judgment of Paris about which goddess should represent Venus (the golden apple), "but as usual Venus wins. For the overwhelming majority give the star to Venus." [24] Is it not once more likely that Aphrodite won the star of Venus, that is, the planet that attended the Aphrodisian Moon? The Greeks, he insists, regularly applied the name Aphrodite to the planet Venus, and addressed prayers to that body as the planet associated with her. They could not really be thinking of the Moon in all of this. If Velikovsky and de Grazia are right, then Lucian of Samosata, Ptolemy, Aristotle, Plotinus, Diordorus Siculus, Manetho, Sappho, Bion, the Emperor Julian, Nonnus, ... and ... the ancient Greeks were all wrong. My list of debatable sources here is perhaps as long and may be longer. Several of the star witnesses are contradictory and can be controverted. Augustine mentions two groups, one awarding planet Venus to the goddess Venus, another insisting also that Venus is the Moon. Other witnesses can be called: where are Hesiod, Homer, Plutarch, Cicero, Hyginus, Augustine, Proclus? And where are the modern encyclopedists? They may do no worse, or better : James of course knows them well; I have already joined him in discussing Plutarch and Augustine. But to take another example, Hesiod is the earliest source extant to refer to the transformation of Phaeton, felled by Zeus for threatening the destruction of Earth, into a star. Hesiod writes of "Phaeton, a man like the gods, whom... laughter loving Aphrodite seized and caught up and made a keeper of her shrine by night, a divine spirit" (987ff). Clearly in line with what we are saying the proto-planet Venus was said to be captured upon her fall from the skies by Moon-Aphrodite and thereafter employed as her divine priest. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 110 In a second example, I cannot understand why Sappho is forced to take sides. She sings: And may Hesperus lead thee full willingly to the place where thou shalt marvel at the silver-throned Lady of Wedlock. Here, clearly, planet-Venus is performing as the acolyte of the Moon. Nor, to take another instance, is Bion less than a Moonie. The pastoral poet addresses the Evening star, which art the Golden light of the lovely Child of The Foam, which are the holy Jewel of the blue night. Here again we are permitted to regard the Moon as lovely Child of the Foam, Aphrodite, whose acolyte is the Evening Star. I suggest that the passage and the poet are ambiguous, and would not rely upon it for support or denial in the argument. The ancient source Nonnus speaks of an astrologer who "looked especially for Ares and spied the wife robber over the sunset house along with the evening star of the Cyprian." Is the evening star "the Cyprian" or "of the Cyprian;" if "of the Cyprian" then the evening star is the planet Venus and the Cyprian is the Moon, whether present or absent. The modern source Jean Richer (Géographie Sacrée du Monde Grec) speaks of "... Cythere, whose Venus was foremost a lunar goddess." On the other hand, Cicero is often confused, too. Cicero writes that "Diana they identify as the moon...while the name Luna is derived from Lucere, 'to shine;'" and he says that Diana to the Greeks is Lucifera (the Light-Bearer) and is one of the seven planets or wanderers. Diana is generally involved with the Moon, it is agreed, and with menstruation and childbirth, hence the Greeks were making an erroneous transfer unless they carry the Moon as a wanderer and planet which in fact was often done; so Lucifera could be the Moon as well as the planet Venus of the morning. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 111 I prefer to renounce the lunar argument here, and to let go of Cicero, rather than to assert it as evidence. The best that can be said is that Lucifera is a feminine brightness that can be ascribed to the Moon as well as to its primary reference, the Morning Star. James would cease to "strenuously deny that Aphrodite had anything to do with the Moon," perhaps, if he were to realize how large a contribution his own work has made, first, to my being able to reinforce the Moon identification of Aphrodite and, secondly, to arrive at my final theory on the matter, namely that the two bodies - Moon and planet - interacted physically, became confused in history and myth in certain regards (though not in many others) and were to be found, in the end, to have played now one role and then another. I have shown that their alternation of roles occurred elsewhere; I would only insist that Aphrodite is quite capable of the lunar role I assign to her (and believe that subconsciously the Greeks assigned to her) in the Love Song of Demodocus in Book VIII of the Odyssey of Homer. Peter James proposes another theory - or sub-theory - on the issue, suggesting that a lunar Aphrodite can be totally excluded from consideration if only we imagine that warlike Athena was early granted the Morning Star (Phosphoros) while peaceful Aphrodite was given the Evening Star (Hesperos); thus both goddesses might be accounted for and the Moon excluded. No less an authority than Kugler can be called on to state James' position on the double nature of Ishtar, hence planet Venus, in his work, Sibyllinischer Sternkampf und Phaethon (1927, p. 14) he says of the Babylonian Ishtar: "Venus-morning star there represented Ishtar-Kakkabe, 'Ishtar of the Star', and is thought of as 'masculine' - in distinct contrast to Venus-evening star, the Belit-ile, 'Queen of the Gods,' the goddess of love and motherhood." In examining a rock relief of the Hittite pantheon, James discovered that the Venusian planet Shaushga held a double identity and preceded the Moon god on the one side and the Sun god on the other. She also wore wings. She must be here the planet in its morning and evening aspects [25]. This indicates a young (Velikovskian) age, not an old (Jamesian) age Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 112 of the rocks, if one believes that the planet did not settle into its morning-evening routine until the period of the Love Affair. Still, one should acknowledge that the double goddess and the Moon are distinctly different. Steven Langdon, another authority, has it that the morning star was called in Babylonia "the male Venus" and the evening star the "female Venus", with Ishtar, of course, as the word for Venus; there is "Ishtar of Agade" and "Ishtar of Anech", for morning and evening manifestations of the planet. We can go so far as to say that Athena was Venus in her cometary phase, ending in her status as the morning star during the early years of the new status of the morning star. We cannot well imagine the second because of definite statements associating Hesperos with Moon-Aphrodite. We accept, too, that Lucifer was planet-Venus and the morning-star. Such were Ishtar and Astarte, and other gods. At the same time, although the Aphrodite of the morning was not the Aphrodite of the night, the morning-planet-Aphrodite was working her way into many of the traits of the night-moon Aphrodite, so that goddesses of the morning star could ultimately possess traits genetically possessed by the Moon goddess - lovingness, peacefulness, sexuality, Queen of Heaven. S. A., Bedini, too, sees this process as occurring - that Ishtar, for instance, guaranteed contract among men together with the Moon God Sin. She was goddess of love, fertility and war. She took qualities from the Moon with her when she moved fully to occupy the morning and evening stars, Venus [26]. Also, long after and for many centuries of the present era, many Arabs worshiped the morning star as both Lucifer and Aphrodite, never mind the evening star. The scum of the salty foaming sea, held in revulsion by Egyp tians, was again two foams, the original Aphrodite-Moon foam of the seed of Ouranos, and the later Aphrodite-Typhon foam transferred from the mid-second millennium. The latter foam came about, the Egyptians thought, from the falling of Typhon (the cometary tail of proto-Venus) into the sea (after Zeus had struck him with a thunderbolt, according to the Greeks), this according to Plutarch. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 113 There are in sum numerous reasons to explain the confusion, to assign the name to the planet, and to retain it for the Moon for all the purposes that we have in mind here. HOW TO NAME A PLANET? We know that the Moon had names - Selene, Luna, Sin, etc. which an astronomer or educated layman could apply, whether in Greek or Latin; but the planet Phosphoros and Hesperos had only this double name, implying two distinct bodies, and the Greek intellectual reformers needed a name for the planet that would denote a single entity, a point that they were trying to get across to their public. They could not and would not take away Moon's name and affix it to a planet. But Aphrodite had long since left the Moon in a conscious sense though she was stubbornly, obsessively the Moon in the subconscious. The literal minds - such as Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Diodorus, Manetho, Pliny and Cicero were less (or differently) imprisoned by their subconscious: "Let the planet be called Aphrodite, after the famous goddess." Today we name a new planet Neptune or Pluto; such is astronomical tradition of naming; it can be false to history, unless saved by subconscious memory. Aphrodite was still Aphrodite in a host of connotations, memories and expectations - and she had a wandering star named for her. All the other planets had names of gods, new names, though the names had long traditions behind them - Zeus, Kronos, Ares, Hermes. Now the Romans too would call them Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and Mercury. As for the Moon, it already had names enough. But what did the Greeks call the planet before it received its new name? It is said Phosphorus-Hesperus. What was its name when, as our scheme calls for, it was raging through the heavens as a new blazing comet? Perhaps then it was called Phaeton, Typhon, Pallas, Baal, El, the Archangel, or "Daughter of Zeus," or "Athena," or perhaps "She" and then "He," or "The Thing," "It," or why not "the God." Hundred of appellations can be found for it around the globe. What did the Mycenaeans call the planet? No one yet knows. Under such conditions, it would be foolish to be hooked by a name assignment, to neglect natural and human history, and to become illogical in the face Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 114 of other types of evidence, especially when we are fairly confident that the name was deliberately imposed upon the planetary body by highly sublimated intellectuals. Does this mean that the Greeks and Romans then stopped upon applying he word, and never added their prior traits of goddess Aphrodite to the planet? No. As soon as an object is called by a name with a history, the history begins to flow onto the name. Further all that was previously attached to the object continues with it. Suppose nowadays we were to decide that the asteroidal belt, whose materials are being discovered in every greater detail, had to be called by a name, and hence called it the "Belt of Mars." Suppose that subsequently some traits of the ancient god were evidenced in the asteroidal belt and some students decided to call it "the Belt of Apollo." This does not make Apollo out of Mars, or vice versa. It brings confusion. Soon the word "belt" would be dropped, and just the names would be used. The "Mars Program" and the "Apollo Program" would be erroneously associated with the planets. After a century or so, only some priests of NASA would be able to explain the history, and, if NASA were dissolved, practically no one would know the story. And, after a sky-war in which civilizations were shocked and reduced to subsistence level, only a cultist now and then would revive the terms. Where would truth exist under such circumstances? Probably where truth exists under present circumstances concerning the ancient history of Venus and the Moon. In the case of the planet Aphrodite-Venus, some of what was Aphrodite in the collective mind attached itself to the new Aphrodite. Furthermore, some that was in Astarte, Ishtar, Isis, and a dozen other Eastern relatives, began to be transferred over to the name Aphrodite. In the end, the goddess Aphrodite changed. She was now two psychic entities, Siamese twins, in the categories of the mind. Concurrently, the gods that have lent their qualities to the new member of the planet-family, borrow her qualities of old; they take on the history and rights of the Moon. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 115 This reverse borrowing results in dubious but understandable claims that Ishtar is the Moon, Astarte is the Moon, even Athene is the Moon (Plutarch, Bedini, etc.). The confusion that must always occur in the association of great gods with natural objects and events here was compounded and intensified by the transference of Aphrodite to an actually antagonistic planet. We must reckon, too, that a new god may be given an older name in order that humans may prove to the god that "we knew all along who you were, even if it seemed not so. We did not have to await your coming to destroy us before knowing of your eternal being." ("Therefore, planet Venus, cease and desist from your threats to the Earth and Moon.") On one occasion, depending upon prior conditions such as the background of the subject, the subject's felt needs, and the information and setting provided the subject, the god who appears is a selection of one set of divine expectations. On another occasion, the god who appears may be different. In God's Fire, I explain how impossible is true monotheism, and that even Moses was in a realistic psychological sense a polytheist. The same reasoning may be applied here, where Aphrodite is now one god and now another. It is unscientific and pedantic to charge that a name is all that there is to a complex and subtle mental operation. After the name Aphrodite is given to the planet, the Greeks began revising their religious history. Planetary conjunctions of Venus and Mars were of course known. So now Lucian of Samosata could claim that it was the juncture of Aphrodite and Ares that creates the poetry of Homer, and probably means by her the planet and not the Moon. So Eratosthenes and others. But this is not a proof of what Homer meant or, regardless of what Homer meant, that Aphrodite was not the Moon in the reality behind the poem and psychically in those who heard the Song of Demodocus chanted. Especially are these reservations proper if Athena is conceded to stand for the comet Venus, whence it may be truly said that the war is between planet Venus and planet Mars, but certainly, since Aphrodite and Ares were allies, the epics of Homer could never have been plotted on the liaison or juncture of Ares and Athena. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 116 So insistent are the ancient claims of the classical age that the same planet was at a late time discovered to be not two but one, and therefore given a name, that of Aphrodite, that we must believe so and allow that in the mind of Homer and Demodocus, Aphrodite did not posses that planet, except as the Moon. Several generations had lived and died between the last Battle of the Gods and the willful emplacement of the name of Aphrodite upon the planet. By the time of Plato only vague memories stirred of the original behavior of this doubly duplicitous body and of its dramatic roles in the skies of times past. Revivals occur. Suhr writes that "the association of Aphrodite with clouds, the moon, spinning and fertility was more popular in Greece after Alexander had opened up the channels for a free exchange of ideas with the East than before, but this we may consider a revival; Aphrodite was known and worshiped, even in Athens, in very early times." There is no suggestion that Aphrodite of the Love Affair is trespassing upon the identity of Ishtar. Ishtar is goddess of the morning star and also of the evening star in the usage of a removed culture. Aphrodite of the Greeks is made to be the goddess standing behind Phosphorus and Hesperus and their duality. Meanwhile she remains goddess of the Moon. Plato mentions a Syrian law-giver as the source of the name. But after considering this surprising suggestion for some time, I think now that Plato may have been of the opinion that a Syrian lawgiver with the advice of the court astronomers gave to the planet Venus the name of Ishtar or Astarte or another such name. In following this learned and authoritative source, the Greeks applied the old name Aphrodite to the planet. Once to the Europeans, the Western hemisphere had no names - or rather, numerous names. A geographer published a map drawn by an Italian navigator, Amerigo Vespucci. It was the map of Amerigo, describing a vast land. What was the land called? Not the "country of Amerigo" but, eventually "Amerigo," Latin masculine Americus, for a feminine country becomes "America." Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 117 THE ROMAN VENUS We ought not settle the Aphrodite identity without a parallel investigation of the word "Venus." Malcolm Lowery conducted appropriate etymological research. Its root, he discovered, contained the senses of seek, desire, want, wish, and winsome, while its relative venire (to come) also relates to the same root, that includes the word "to go" in Greek. Velilovsky follows Cicero's idea that "Venus" meant "the goddess who comes to all things" and extended it to mean "newly come" to fit his theory. Lowery effectively discusses Velikovsky's speculation and limits Cicero to a possibly very old truth about the word, a truth established long before the time when the goddess would have been attached to the planet Venus. An implication here is that the goddess called Venus may earlier have been attached to a conception of a goddess like Aphrodite, even lunar, before the planet Venus was identified. Lowery may err in his innuendo that the Roman Venus was "unlike the Greek Aphrodite, whose name, meaning 'foam born,' was subsequently applied to the human activity of which she served as patron, namely love-making. born in and from sperm." If the modern, vernacular of the English-speaking world uses the word "come" to designate an orgasm, there is reason to suppose that the less sexually restrained ancient Greeks and Romans could employ the same word in their goddess of coming and thus allow to the Latin word its obvious root meaning. Lowery misunderstood his own contradiction, for he writes that "the layman may find the range of meaning here attributed to one root something of an obstacle to acceptance of this reconstruction: achievement, supposition, habit and delight are, after all, rather a distance from seeking or desiring." Rather a small distance, we should say. And, once again, we see an old goddess at work, a lunar goddess, a pre-planet-Venus goddess at work, an Aphrodite of the Love Song of Demodocus. Some etymologists say that the word "Venus" is of an unknown Italian origin but crept out of fertility and bucolic functions onto the skies, where it may have become a mistress of heaven Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 118 but ultimately became the planet Venus, when the Greeks named their planet Aphrodite. The Greeks have no letter "V". The letter "B" is used instead. The intermediate Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott offers only two words beginning with "ben." One is "benthos," poetical for "bathos," meaning the "depth of the sea." This is not too removed from the lunar role, for the Moon rules the night and the night seas, and was born from the sea. The second meaning is "Bendis" which is a name of the Thracian Artemis, found in Lucian. This is more suggestive to us. For if Aeneas and the Trojans of Northwest Anatolia brought their gods with them, Bendis may have been among them; Thrace is not far away. And if Bendis is Artemis; and Artemis, we know, is the Moon; and if Bendis is a progenitor of Venus, then Venus, too, is lunar, and there is good reason to tie her to Aphrodite as Venus. The faithful Aeneas, on this way to found settlements in Latium, that later spread to Rome, may well have founded a town in Thrace, as he did Aphrodisia in the Southeastern Peloponnesus (Gulf of Boiai) and other settlements elsewhere. This shows not only how disorganized and turbulent were the eighth-seventh century decades of Mars-Ares, but also how Aphrodite may have come to Italy, there to become identified with Venus, who thereafter came to be identified with the later Jovian Aphrodite, which came then to be connected, in the wake of Greek insistence, with planet-Venus. We note, however, that the Aphrodite of Aeneas was she of the Iliad and Odyssey, and of the Love Affair, enemy of the Athena-Venus Aphrodite goddess therefore and holding to the Moon in history and traits except that now her name superficially will be taken over almost entirely by the planet Venus. Or, as some believe, Venus may have come out of the Etruscan Pantheon, whence she may too have arrived as Bendis, for we think that the Etruscans came from Anatolia, as we shall argue later; further the island of Lemnos between Troy and Thrace contains Etruscan inscriptions, and, as we develop the argument, is significantly connected with Hephaestus, a principal character of the Love Affair. Aeneas was a son of Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 119 Venus, that is, Aphrodite, and Romulus a son of Mars. Julius Caesar claimed the same descent. If we did not believe that substantive connections may have existed between Aphrodite and the Moon, we should not be so concerned with demonstrating the linguistic associations. In our case, the allegation that Aphrodite was not thought to represent the Moon to the audience of Demodocus is tantamount to refusing much of the theory of this book. It is not the same as asking whether the Venus of Willendorf is really the planet Venus, or Aphrodite, or whatever; this is a conventional term invented for a class of small, crude prehistoric stone sculptures of obese females, and is little else than a playfully applied name, which we hope, will not throw our descendants into confusion a thousand years from now. Those going before Plato knew Aphrodite as a goddess, and probably as a lunar figure, although this latter may have become subconscious. "A new ferment was introduced by the first knowledge appearing with Plato of the oriental significance of Aphrodite as a star." [27] It would seem that the Greeks, especially the astrologers among them, were now to call Hesperus and Phosphorus the stars of Aphrodite, and were thereafter to live with two sets of symbols and references intermingling and causing confusion. There were enough similarities to permit the duplicity to endure to our day. Both were "foam-born." Further, each in her own way was "One who wanders over the foam," (Aphr-Oditi). Both were strongly female, even while male on occasion. Both were beautiful, in their own way. Often they traveled the night skies together. Whether referring to the planet or the satellite, both could be "of Aphrodite." Both might be called the "Queen of Heaven." Both had been heavily involved with Mars-Ares, and in destructive behavior with regards to Earth. Both were in the Olympian family and council of gods, one as Moon-Aphrodite, the other as Athena-Aphrodite, but who was to say or needed to say, after Hesiod's time, which heavenly body the two goddesses possessed? On the other hand, each goddess - call one of the Moon and the other of planet-Venus - owned peculiar traits that never to be reconciled or assimilated one to the other. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 120 The possibility that "foam-born" could be rationalized for the birth of the Planet-Venus-Aphrodite should not obscure the importance of this difference. Being foam-born from the Uranus incident means from the seed in the genital and blood foam, not a mere roughing of the waters that would occur with the passage of cometary-Aphrodite. Another important distinction was occupational. Athena Minerva-Ishtar-(Aphrodite) never lost her military and craftsman-like qualities. Greek and Roman warriors marched into battle led by these but not by Aphrodite. Why not Aphrodite, if she were among them? On the other hand, Aphrodite-Moon never lost her connection with the motions of the spinning complex in the domestic occupation that emulated the motions of the universe. Yet another kind of difference persisted in the realm of love. Aphrodite-Moon generally portrayed what today's vernacular would call "straight" sexuality, while Aphrodite-Ishtar-Athena would be assigned to "kinky" sex. The former was the marrying type, the latter an independent and ambiguous lover. Eros helped Aphrodite-Moon, and Suhr has placed this child-god in the closest association with her; he helps her spin and weave to attract "straight" lovers. It is possible that Eros, though as old as Moon-Aphrodite, merged with Hesperus, the Evening Star, and carries this association as well. Eros certainly resembles the later cherubs that float around the Mother of God in Roman Catholic paintings. The stimulation of fertility belongs to Ishtar-types as well as to Moon-Aphrodite, yet not so much so, and this must be a quanti tative judgement for the moment. Virginity is a technical word and should not be confounded with the idea of concupiscence. But consider that Athena-Ishtar is celebrated for her virginity and in one startling portrait is carrying her babies in a basket. "Not only was she never in woman's womb," wrote Helene Deutsch, "but she herself apparently had no womb, for when she carried children, it was in a basket." [28] Such marsupial behavior is hardly the symbol of fertility for womankind. Planetary Aphrodite is semper parata like the U.S. Marines. Granted that planet-Aphrodite or Venus was once a comet that lost its tail, then the aura of sexual "kinkiness" around Athena Ishtar-Aphrodite makes sense: bisexuality, unisexuality, Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 121 technical virginity, androgyny, vestal virgins, castration - these cluster around the cometary Aphrodite and relate to the phallicized comet that loses its male organ in a sky-conflict and becomes a special type of female. She is not sexually stimulating, at least not to a conventional male. Moon Aphrodite is more languid, less aggressive, usually "there when you need or want her." Athena and her planetary counterparts are artists appearing one moment here, the next moment gone. The materials assembled here help us to understand that the nations at some point were observers of a great change in the sky, an implantation upon the human vision: a single body of double aspect and less terror. A cometary Venus was greatly feared in the period 1500 to 700 B.C. and the Moon god had been heavily worshiped long before then. We will suppose, therefore, a competition of these two gods, female, for a long time before the disastrous natural events of the Eighth and Seventh centuries that involved Mars. By the process that might be called divine succession, the god of cometary Venus was the more terrible in this period of 700 year and took over a number of traits and much of the obeisance given previously to the Moon goddess. The Shaushga, Astarte, Annana, Anat, Minerva, Ishtaroth, Ishtar, Isis, and Aphrodite figures would have become largely proto-planet Venus in their connotations, orientation, and imagery. The Aphrodite idea would have moved from lunar to cometary, carrying a conglomerate of old and new traits. When, however, the catastrophes of the Martians age reduced and confounded the pre-existing civilizations - Mycenaean, Trojan, Near-Eastern - a readjustment of the Pantheon had to occur. New relationships had to be invented within the family structure of the gods. Mars, for one, had to be granted a larger role. Proto-planet Venus was at a new peak of activity, but was apparently tamed by the god of Mars. When the disasters subsided, the skies had to be resurveyed; a new astronomy occurred. After some decades, astronomers discovered, first, that two new bodies existed, a Morning Star and an Evening Star. The former was quickly re-identified as old cometary Venus, on a new regular and unthreatening orbit. Soon thereafter the Evening Star was declared to be the same Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 122 planet-star. Then came the fateful attachment of the old names, once ambiguous and now still ambiguous, to the planet in both of its manifestations. Goddess Aphrodite once more became strongly planet Venus, with lunar attributes. With the passage of time, Aphrodite became a more ambiguous figure, because peace had settled upon the heavens; she was once again lunar, a peaceful spinner, a sensual lover. To some, psychically, she was the planet Venus; to others she was the Moon and the planet was "of Aphrodite the Moon;" to others she was the god of night and the lunar heavenly spaces. So she was a complex "herself," the goddess, rather like the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, which, they say, was neither "holy" nor "Roman", but he could act either way on occasion. After all of this complicated research and reasoning, it is hard to recall ourselves to the present issue and to its vulgar de nouement. The question is still, "How did the Phaeacian sailors, women, courtiers, adolescents and priests imagine the heroine of Demodocus' Love Affair?" As in a modern public opinion poll, the gravest questions of world concern have to be reduced to extremely simple questions. Here our respondents (in Phaeacia, Naxos, Athens, or Syracuse of about 650 B.C. before the Scientific Revolution of Thales et al.) are to be interrogated, with (I think) the following results: "There are those who say that Aphrodite stands for the Moon (Selene)?" Do you (indicate the response closest to your opinion): agree-15%; maybe-25%, disagree- 10%; no opinion or don't know-50%. Next, of those (10%) who disagreed, the question is asked: "Who, then, does Aphrodite stand for?" Athena-3%; Hera-5%; Hesperus-32% Phosphorus-10%, No opinion or don't know - 50%. That is, I would estimate that even on the conscious level, there is a tendency to tie Aphrodite to the Moon. The high level of unconcern and ignorance as to the question would signify that the Love Affair is making no demands of ordinary people to extract subconscious materials and bring them into consciousness. Both this figure and the 25% of "maybe's" would indicate that many persons mixed up Aphrodite with the Moon, Athena, Artemis, Hera, et al. I would maintain that on Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 123 the subconscious level, the identification with the Moon would be much more common and intense. I have tried to describe earlier what the subconscious contained, and will try to express this subconscious mood in a later chapter. It does not matter that elsewhere and at other times and among other people, the name Aphrodite signifies the planet Venus. Indeed we have been pleased to contribute to an understanding of her plural personality and worship. On the basis of this chapter and of other congruencies and support found throughout our work, we conclude that for the purposes of this book and in the scene of the Love Affair Aphrodite acts the role of the Moon and is so understood by the audience. Aphrodite represents the Moon in the drama and, insofar as the drama represents a memory, then Aphrodite acts out this memory. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 124 Notes (Chapter 8: The Two Faces of Love) 1. Appendix to Herodotus, Histories, Bk III. 2. Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis, Cambridge, Eng. 1921, reprinted IIyde Park, N.Y. : University Books, 1962, p. 176. 3. Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. 77. 4. Isis and Osiris, Lxix. 5. Plat. Kraty. 1-116. 6. Hesiod, Theogony, 196. 7. Using the Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 7th ed, 1968. 8. Etym., Symbol. Mythol. Wörterbuch, 1844, reference kindly supplied by Dr. Zvi Rix. 9. J. Ziegler, The Vedas pp. 233-4 (1983, unpubl. mss) 10. A Historical Review of the Indian Astronomy Part I "The Ancient Astronomy" (1825; reprinted 1970, Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag). 11. A.M. Paterson, "Giordano Bruno's View on the Earth without a Moon," Pensée, (winter, 1973), pp. 46-7;I. Velikovsky, "Earth without a Moon," Ibid., p.26. Both writers, at least then, believed that the Moon was recently captured. The present author decided upon the Earth-fission model in the years that followed, cf. Chaos and Creation, Lately Tortured Earth, and was supported by Earl R. Milton, cf. Solaria Binaria. 12. Graves, I, 49. We disagree that Ishtar was the Moon, at least finally, for she is clearly Athena and Planed Venus, cf. Velikovsky. Further, on Aphrodite as the Moon, see the conclusion of this chapter. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 125 13. Graves, I, 71. Unity with the goddess excited anxiety over violating the incest taboo and brings on sacrifice of kings and priests. "As Goddess of Death-in-Life, Aphrodite earned many titles which seem inconsistent with her beauty and complaisance" Melaenis (black one), Scotia (dark one), Androphonos (man slaver), and Epitymbria (of the tombs). At Cyprus she would sometimes wear a beard, and was also portrayed as "bearded and having the male member, but clad in a female dress and holding a sceptre,"1 George Hill, A History of Cyprus (Cambridge: University Press, 1972), Vol. I, 79-80, citing Macrobius (Sat. III, 8) and Fragmenta Historica Graecorum (1878-85), Vol. I, p. 386. 14. Graves I, 73. When Plato (Epinomis, lines 99-101) gave the name Aphrodite to the planet that we call Venus, he said that he was using the name of "a Syrian lawgiver" and in the next statement uses the pronoun "him" in referring back to it. He could mean the "authority" or "in the name of" the Syrian. 15. Personal letter to the author from Dr. Z. Rix. 16. Sophie Lunais, Les Auteurs Latins - Recherche sur la Lune, I, Brill: Leiden, 1979,99. 17. Graves,I,p. 18.I. 18. Graves, I,p. 12. 19. New York: Exposition Press, 1958, Foreword by Rhys Carpenter. 20. New York: Helios Press, 1969. 21. Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision, Part II : 3. 22. Ibid., ch. 4. 23. See Harrison, op. cit., p. 87, who finds "Pallas" in the "Palladium." 24. Citing The City of God, VII: 15. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 8: The Two Faces of Love 126 25. Op. cit., I : 2, pp 3-4. 26. S.A. Bedini, p. 23, in Bedini, Werner von Braun, and F.L. Whipple, Moon: Man's Greatest Adventure (New York: Abrams, n.d., ca. 1970). 27. Pauly-Wissowa, p. 2772. 28. A Psychoanalytic Study of the Myth of Dionysus and Apollo, New York: Int'I U. Press, 1969. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 9: The Ruined Face 127 CHAPTER NINE THE RUINED FACE OF A CLASSIC BEAUTY In the Iliad, Aphrodite leads her wounded lover Ares off the field of battle after he is pierced by the spear of warlike Athena Venus, and in so doing is herself struck. The poets and historians of ancient times may have known more than we do of disasters among the planets, "That the Moon was attacked and scarred by the comet Venus was known to the Greeks and described graphically by Nonnus." So writes Peter James, and we quote the fine passage from this historian of late ancient times, Nonnus: "Many a time he (Typhon) took a bull at rest from his rustic plowtree and shook him with a threatening hand, bellow as he would, then shot him against the Moon like another moon, and stayed her course, then rushed hissing against the goddess, checking with the bridle her bulls' white yoke straps, while he poured out the mortal whistle of a poison spitting viper." But Titan Mene would not yield to the attack. Battling against the Giant's heads, like-horned to hers, she carved many a scar on the shining orb of her bull's horn; and Selene's radiant cattle bellowed amazed at the gaping chasm of Typhon's throat." [1] The fable bespeaks cosmic cyclones, where earthly and celestial effects are simultaneously visible and apparently connected by an uncontrolled raging dragon-god. THE INNOCENT ASTRONAUTS The Moon, as a round rock in the sky, was a manifestation of the Goddess Aphrodite. What happened to it happened to her and what happened to her, in many cases, happened to it. We turn, therefore, to geology and astrophysics and ask what, if anything, happened to the Moon in the time of Homer. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 9: The Ruined Face 128 The Moon is old, as all matter and energy may be said to be old - even infinitely old if one considers that "matter" and "energy" are convertible events and that neither can become space or non-being. That is not a point to be disputed. The question is whether the Moon, as a chemical agglomerate, pursued its present set of motions at the time of which Homer wrote. Moreover, was its chemistry the same after that time as it was before? The moon is enveloped by a crust of igneous anorthosite to the depth of 35 kilometers, "which must have resulted from melted rock of at least twice that depth." [2] Lunar rocks were discovered to have undergone heating and bubbling, probably more recently. A large part of the soil consisted of tiny glass spheres, probably resulting from the evaporation of boiled lunar rock that collapsed back upon condensation in the cold. Some trace of organic, aromatic hydrocarbons were found in lunar sample returned by the astronauts of Apollo XI. Carbide rocks were found on the lunar surface. Rocks of the moon also revealed magnetic properties, a remanent magnetism that could not have been implanted by the moon's own weak magnetic field and certainly not at any time since the rocks solidified from a molten or gaseous state. The equipment implanted on the moon by astronauts of Apollo XII returned to its monitors on earth a record of moonquakes, averaging one a day. Lunar rocks were found to be rich in argon and neon; the larger the ratio of surface to mass, that is, the smaller the rock particle, the more of these gases was contained in it, leading to the conclusion that the source of the gases was external. Some unusually radioactive "hot spots" were observed. It thus appears likely that the Moon experienced devastating events within a period of time into which the Love Affair might have fallen. Conventional theorists of lunar history have been relieved of a number of expectations, founded on the belief in a three to four billion years old object that, since then, "has been a remarkably quiet body suffering only the occasional large meteorite impact. Subsequent modification of the surface features has been mainly erosion due to the impact of small meteorites, cosmic rays, and particles from the sun. This is in great contrast with the earth's history which has been one of Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 9: The Ruined Face 129 continued volcanic and mountain-building activity up to the present day." [3] RADIOACTIVE CLOCKS Nowadays, such statements are not to be heard. It is difficult to conceive how such could even have been written in 1972 in view of the lunar quakes and the other discoveries recited two paragraphs above. But the author of the quotation, Derek York, was holding fast to what others were telling him about the general situation and was supporting his faith by work that he had been hired as a specialist to do: radioactive clockwork. He used three clocks: the uranium-lead, the rubidium-strontium, and the potassium-argon methods of determining the ages of rock samples picked up and returned to Earth by the astronauts. York offered, against Velikovsky's proposition of a recently molten lunar surface, alternative explanations based on the fact that all three tests showed the lunar surface to have been last molten 3.6 billion years ago at least. In each case, a determina tion of the amount of the first chemical element that radioac tively decayed into the second element was used to estimate age, since physicists believe that we know the rate of such transmutation and can rely on its constancy over all conceivable time spans. York therefore argued that either (a) this part of Velikovsky's thesis is wrong. (b) Velikovsky is right but the four Apollo landings and the Soviet Luna 16 landings were in areas which escaped the 'catastrophes' referred to by Velikovsky. (c) There is something seriously wrong with the radioactive clocks or our reading of them. In reply, Velikovsky cited two additional "commonsense" tests in his favor. Geologist examining the samples of Apollo XI recorded "the extremely fresh appearance of the interior of all crystalline rocks, in spite of their microfractures and high potassium-argon age." [4] Moreover, noting a widespread glazing of the lunar surface, T. Gold, writing in Science had conjectured upon "a giant solar outburst in geologically recent times" that glazed lunar surfaces less than 30,000 years ago." [5] Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 9: The Ruined Face 130 Velikovsky mentioned here yet another prediction of his, earlier in time, that gained in validity when the Apollo 15 team discov ered that the outflow of heat below the surface was almost three times greater than expected by those who believed that the moon originated gaseous and then became molten: those who thought the moon had always been thoroughly cold could make nothing of this internal heat at all. Specifically with regard to the challenge of the tests, Velikovs ky argued that lunar rocks would be argon-rich (and therefore seem very old) because they would have captured, while molten, some of the argon of the atmosphere of Mars. (In 1974, Russian reports spoke of a Martian atmosphere of argon in the 10's of percent.) [6] As for the reading of the uranium-lead test, the explorers had apparently sampled rocks not only poor in lead but in all volatile elements: bismuth, cadmium, thallium, indium, etc. He surmised, therefore, that the volatile elements had escaped their rock housings in a period of high heat and melting, such as the episode in Homer that occupies our attention. The third radioactive clock appears to be the most absurd of the three, since rubidium vaporizes and migrates from its housing with strontium even under the conditions of present day temperatures of the lunar day (+150 degrees Celsius) and the continuous bombardment of surface rocks by hydrogen ions from the solar wind. A period of electrically and gravitationally induced heating such as occurred in the Love Affair would have greatly reduced the rubidium present in the tested rocks. Velikovsky and Wright [7] are not alone in their criticism of these tests. We cannot close these brief passages without referring to the brilliant critique offered of these and other clocks by Melvin Cook in his book, Prehistory and Earth Models 1966. In brief, what York regarded as impossible was true. "There is something seriously wrong with the radioactive clocks..." [8] The one test that Velikovsky asked for was to determine the degree of thermoluminescence of lunar surface cores extracted at about three feet of depth to avoid contamination of the test by the effects of normal solar heat. The more the time that passes after a heat-up of over 150 degrees Celsius, the more lumines cence is stored and given off in a laboratory re-heating. When the tests were performed on cores gathered by Apollo XII between 4 and 13 centimeters underground, it showed Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 9: The Ruined Face 131 "anomalies resulting from disturbances "10,000 years ago." Such disturbances had to be thermal, that is, events of great heat upon the moon. Velikovsky thought that increased radioactivity may have promoted a quick-aging effect on even this test and suggests sampling from sites that are least radioactive. We return now to the problem of the remanent magnetism in the rock samples brought back from all Apollo missions. Velikovsky's theory of the Mars-Moon encounters required that such fossil magnetism be traceable in the rocks, and it was found. Robert Treat has written the history of the affair, from which we quote: Scientific deliberations grew in intensity after the third (Apollo IV), and the fourth (Apollo XV) missions testified to the bewilderment of astrophysicists. It transpired that sometime in the past the moon must have been heated in the presence of a strong magnetic field. The best guess was: 'It is a thermoremanent magnetism acquired when the specimen cooled in the presence of a magnetic field.' Other possibilities were weighted. Was the inducing field due to a close approach of the moon to the earth? "In this model the hard remanence suggests a distance of closest approach of 2 to 3 earth radii," But this is 'an uncomfortable proximity to the Roche limit....' The moon would have been broken into pieces if it ever approached the earth so closely. Another team of scientists found that the magnetization "shows a well defined curie temperature at 775 degrees Celsius": the lunar surface must have been heated above this temperature in the presence of a magnetic field and must have cooled off thereafter [9]. Surface marring, "hot spots" of radioactivity, high past heat, and encounter with another large celestial body spell devasta tion. Fresh-looking rock, high thermoluminescence levels, "hot spots" seismic movement, and below surface heat spell recency. The "recency" suggested by our interpretation of the explorations of the moon is "under 10,000 years." The world wide historical and legendary record strongly indicates about 2700 years. There is good reason, therefore, after having passed the 10,000 year barrier, to proceed without hesitation to the 2700-year point. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 9: The Ruined Face 132 THE RILLES OF MOON The recent devastation of the Moon is the subject of an analysis also by Ralph Juergens [10]. He focused especially upon its hundreds of wavy rilles, its canyons and its craters. The craters are sites of explosions. Some, like Aristarchus, are still warm. The rilles cleave the surface and often seem to feed into the craters, going up-ground to do so with whatever they might once have carried. The craters seem to have exploded after the rilles reached them, since debris obscures the ends of the rilles. Juergens examinations of the rilles shows that they cannot have been produced by water erosion; they flow uphill and have no deltas. Nor can they have been produced from the collapse of underground tubes that once carried lava; for the margins of the rilles reveal upturned strata and empty bottoms; Nor can gas explosions have created the rilles, for they are exceedingly tortuous; and they are not vented holes. Only electrical currents, declares Juergens, could produce the jagged trenches. The currents erupt, heat up the land and excavate it, and cause secondary melting in the rille valleys. They move as streamers upwards. A return stroke explodes the ground and creates a crater. What caused the rilles to erupt and the craters to burst? On the basis of his general theory of the electrical nature of the solar system, to be explained later, Juergens posits that Mars and Earth-Moon each held (and hold) massive electrical charges of negative valence. These charges, on the close approach of the bodies, repel each other. But if the bodies are approaching with great momentum, the repulsion is not sufficient to divert them entirely. The charges are driven to accommodate. By "accommodation" is meant that, if there is any possibility of a reversal of charges on one or both bodies, the negative electrons will "flee" from each other. Assuming that Mars, with an atmosphere, and a larger surface, more readily permitted its electrons to flee to regions far removed from the nearest points of contact, positive ions would congregate and set up an anode cathode relationship, that is, a situation matured for an exchange of thunderbolts. The rilles ditches erupted by a rapidly moving and charge-accumulating current. Craters are the spots where the exchange of opposite charges, attracted for discharge, occurred, usually at prominences of the two bodies. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 9: The Ruined Face 133 A map of the major rilles of the moon shows a concentration of them in the general area of the great crater, Aristarchus. Emana tions of radon-222, whose parent element is radium-226, were detected from Aristarchus. The rays are several times more in tense there than in areas farther removed, indicating a local source. Radium 226 isotopes decay rapidly. In 1620 years, half the element is transmutated; that is, it has a half-life of 1620 years. "If the radium were produced by an electric discharge to the Aristarchus site some 2700 years ago, more than 25% of it would still be there, emitting radon -222." [11] Lightning strokes of 100 billion volts can constitute a high-energy projectile capable of creating heavy elements such as radium 226. It should also be pointed out that visible light, as well as heat, has been observed from time to time, from Aristarchus and other sources. Again, a sign of recency. Glass found that glass ejecta along the banks of the Hadley Rille and procured by the astronauts of the Apollo 15 and 17 expeditions exhibited significant peculiarities in comparison with other moon glasses. Tests on one sample showed that cooling rates of 1000 F/sec. were necessary to form the glass. The researchers considered the possibility that volcanic eruption might have caused the glass to form, but the cooling rate was too fast. So they conjectured meteoritic impacts. However, for meteorites, the glasses are too uniform and are not splashed or shattered. Furthermore, meteorites would not line themselves up along a rille valley, if such is the case here. Juergens conclusion is acceptable [12]. The glass is a product of an electrical current that melts instantaneously, explodes simultaneously, and withdraws its heat immediately along the meandering course of the rille before streaming upwards from the ground at the end of the rille. The surprises that the Moon holds for scientists are not ended. Because of the nonexistence or prior extirpation of life forms that would have ingested radioactive carbon, there appear to be no possibilities of applying Carbon 14 tests to Moon material. Still, the electrical mechanical behavior of the Moon and Moon space are coming to be better understood. The Moon's several spherical asymmetries deserve pondering. Unmanned Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 9: The Ruined Face 134 excavating apparatus may bring back more material for analysis. Moreover, ancient records and myths are still largely unanalyzed. The "beauty of raiment" with which the Graces "clothe her body" and the "refulgent ointment" with which they anointed the Moon, once her love affair with Mars was ended, may refer to a shift to a position nearer Earth; the month of 29.5 days replaced a longer month [13]. Greater brilliance indicates that the change was in orbital radius, rather than in orbital speed. It is also possible that the lines of Homer may be a reference to a chain of colorful low mountains whose origin has baffled astrophysicists. Juergens has suggested that, if the theory of electrical discharges is credible, the explanation of these anomalous protruberances may lay in a simple and surprising theory of cosmic welding [14]. They are Martian material electrically heated and exploded, which fastened electrically upon the surface of the Moon. To the wishful eyes of men, women, and children of the eighth and seventh century, Aphrodite emerged more beautiful than ever from her escapade with Mars. Perhaps it grew less lovely thereafter, for Plutarch was speaking of its craggy appearance seven centuries later [15]. The astronauts and geophysicists of today have to report the disillusioning fact that the face of the classical beauty was ruined. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 9: The Ruined Face 135 Notes (Chapter 9: The Ruined Face of a Classic Beauty) 1. Dionysiaca, I, 213-23, trans. W.M.D. Rouse (Loeb Library). 2. Neil P. Ruzie, "The case for Returning to the Moon," Industrial Research (July, 1973), pp. 48-54, p.51. 3. Derek York, "Lunar Rocks and Velikovsky's Claims," II Pensée no. 2(May 1972), p.18. 4. "When Was The Lunar Surface Last Molten," II Pensée, no. 2,(May 1972), p.19. 5. Ibid. 6. James B. Pollack, "Mars," 233 Scientific American (Sept. 1975), p.110. 7. Also in Pensée (May 1972), loc. cit. 8. Ibid., p.21 9. "Magnetic Remanence of Lunar Rocks: A Candid Look at Scientific Misbehavior," II Pensée, no.2 (May, 1972),p.21-2. 10. "Electrical Discharges and the Transmutation of Elements," IV Pensée 3, (1974), pp. 45-6; "Of the Moon and Mars, Part I," IV Pensee 4 (1974), pp. 21-30. 11. Juergens, "Electrical Discharges...," op. cit., pp. 45-6. 12. "Of The Moon..," op. cit., pp. 27-8. 13. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, pp.342-4. 14. In a communication to the author, October 1973. 15. "The Face of the Moon." Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 136 CHAPTER TEN HE WHO SHINES BY DAY Not satisfied with setting up the production of the Love Affair, Athena, the virtuoso of Olympia, must play a leading role in it. Will it be masculine? Athena has been known to play such roles. Actually, she ends the Odyssey playing the male role of Mentor, Counselor of State. By now we know that gods can readily become transvestites. Hercules, for all his impressive masculinity, dresses and behaves like a woman when he lives in the court of Omphale, Queen of Libya. More strikingly there is the beautiful Aphrodite who sports a beard as the so-called Cyprian Aphrodite. A major role is intended. In the Love Affair, there is only one such role for her that is logical: that is Hephaestus. Athena, the goddess of the Planet Venus is Hephaestus, also the planet Venus. No one appears to have said so, but the evidence is strong to that effect. Velikovsky and the scholars associated with him have presented evidence that Pallas Athene was the god of the planet Venus, that the planet appeared in the sky sometime before 1500 B.C., that she behaved as a comet, traveled on an eccentric orbit that brought her perilously close to Earth, and that around 1500 B.C. and on several other occasions caused tremendous destruction here. The foundations or refounding of the city of Athens may be of this date [1], just as those of Rome were concurrent with the raging appearance in the skies of the planet-god Mars 700 years later. References from a number of cultures lead one to believe that, as the Greek theogony put it, Athena sprang from Zeus fully-armed with a shout. Athena sprang quickly from the immortal head and stood before Zeus who holds the aegis, shaking a sharp spear: great Olympus began to reel horribly at the might of the bright-eyed goddess, and earth round about cried fearfully, and the sea was moved and tossed with dark waves, while Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 137 foam burst forth suddenly; the bright Son of Hyperion stopped his swift-footed horses a long while, until the maiden Pallas Athene had stripped the heavenly armor from her immortal shoulders [2]. Hephaestus, some said, had to split Jove's aching head with an ax to help him give birth. THE EPITHETS OF VENUS Velikovsky, James and others offer numerous connections between Planet Venus and Pallas Athena through analogies of birth, traits and deeds. They further offer persuasive cross identifications of Athena and Planet-Venus with the corresponding divinities of the same planet from other cultures, among them the Hebrew, Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, Mexican, and American Indian. Graves, for example, lays out in detail the material on Pallas, whose primary myth-ensemble is as foster-sister to Athena. Pallas means simply "youth" or "maiden." Athena and Pallas were raised on the shores of Lake Triton in Africa. While playing at armed combat Athena accidentally killed Pallas. In grief, she placed the name Pallas before her own. The incident is symbolic of the world tragedy of that time. An immense Saharan lake, called Triton by the ancients, suddenly disappeared, leaving a great desert and some marshes, with the dry beds of rivers and streams. A flourishing civilization subsided with the lake, a civilization that perhaps dominated the Mediterranean and surely represented a pre-Hellenic, matriarchal culture, whose women wore the same garments and aegis of Athena, even down through many centuries following the catastrophe. The destruction provoked and wrought by Planet Venus probably encompassed in North Africa not only the Egypt of the Exodus but the recently explored Saharan "Libyan" culture. And if, as Velikovsky argues convincingly, Phaeton, which plunged somewhere along the longitude of the Red Sea, was a part of Comet-Venus, Planet-to-be, then Pallas was the earthly destructive force of comet Venus in North Central Africa. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 138 Stecchini, from his studies of the architectural measurements of the Parthenon, the crowning temple of the Virgin Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, offers a confirmation. The Temple was erected in the glorious late period of empire. The Athenians, subconsciously true to remote history, set their Pallas Athena pediment facing directly and accurately towards the marshes of present-day Tunisia, and portrayed on the pediment the birth of Pallas Athena [3]. In the manner of legend, an alternative myth is offered. "Some Hellenes say that Athena had a father named Pallas, a winged goatish giant, who later attempted to outrage her, and whose name she added to her own after stripping him of skin to make the aegis, and of his wings for her own shoulders...." [4]. Hardly a "maiden" and hardly a maidenly reprisal. Perhaps, as Graves suggests, the myth came from an ancient story of one of Athena's many combats. But, more interested in what force can have carried this underground myth, we would suggest that this "fake Pallas" is a diabolic representation of Zeus; the physical contacts of Athena with the Father of Gods are numerous. And humans, as already argued, have ways of getting back at the gods who caused them so much fear and suffering. "Pallas" may also designate Athena as a comet before it lost its appendage. Visually and astronomically, it should be recalled that everyone speaks of the "tail" of a comet, whereas this "tail" sometimes moves in directions parallel to the "head" and "coma." The ancients often were excited by the image of the comet "tail" as a phallus. Hence Athena would be phallus Athena before Pallas was destroyed and she became a proto planet without a penis. In Sanskrit, palas means Phallus. The altars of Athena were called Palladia, as at Troy. The dropping of the "ph" () sound takes away the sexual "fire." One would proceed farther. The "goatish giant" who attempted to outrage her has additional dimensions. He may stand for Hephaestus who, in another legend, attempted to rape Athena at his smithy and was repulsed. So that Athena's killing of this monster corresponds to the professed Hellenic triumph over the powerful proto-mediterranean religious culture. The mythic mind can support this idea along with the contradictory Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 139 apotheosis of Athena as the ideal castrating female of psychoanalytic theory. Hephaestus has a resemblance to the Etruscan smith-god and death-demon, Tuchulcha, who dispatches people with a giant hammer. Tuchulcha is assisted by a winged demon with snakes [5], So that the composite suggests a god-monster like Typhon, a devastating winged dragon who, like Seth and Lucifer is sent crashing into the underground, there to fulfill his destiny. The Love Affair lends support to the quadrilateral relationship: Hephaestus/Tuchulcha: Greeks/Etruscans. There one hears Demodocus singing that the cherished home-island of Hephaestus was Lemnos. Also, he has Ares speaking disrespectfully of Hephaestus having left to join his barbarous speaking Sintians of Lemnos. (By "barbarous" is probably meant non-Greek.) Now recently some inscriptions found on Lemnos have been identified as Etruscan [6], even though they are not yet deciphered. Etruscan has been connected also with Hittite and Minoan (Linear A) by Barry Fell [7]. New information has appeared, too, placing Etruscan relatives in the area at the same time as the Love Affair. These people of Lake Van are not only culturally close but close in blood types to the Etruscans [8]. The Etruscans feared and were obsessed by this Hephaestus-Tuchulcha. They offered human sacrifices frequently: the planet Venus, says Nicolo Rilli, was a favored object of such bloody supplications [9]. It will be a long time before the identities of the gods of one and all cultures are clarified. The sublimation of God requires a smokescreen of confusion and the allocation of ambivalence. If a god has been given too much of good, a balancing evil is allocated, and vice versa. The interplay of names and epithets is part of this process, but more unconsciously, the neural equivalents must function. Basically such is the meaning of the practically universal theological belief: "God cannot exist without the Devil." Athena was a "glorious goddess, bright-eyed, inventive, unbending of heart, pure virgin, savior of cities." [10] She was brilliantly beautiful, a great warrior; she enjoyed the confidence of Zeus to an extent unequaled by any other god. In the Iliad (iv, 74), she sweeps down upon the Trojan plain like "a Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 140 shooting star," trailing fire. She was furthermore the most creative god, mother of invention, teacher of the arts and sciences. It is bizarre that we should find her the female counterpart of Hephaestus. But that she was, of course, an evil destroyer as well, emerges from many an earlier description. She was, in the Greek mind, a desexualized good-bad mother. Many deeds ascribed to her directly and indirectly would make lame and slow Hephaestus appear quite harmless and capable of exciting laughter of a grim sort. She in fact, as a planet, broke up the Jovian order of the universe and kept it in confusion until the eighth century, when Zeus, through Homer's and Hesiod's work, deserved to the full his reputation as the law-giver. At least so far as Greek myth was concerned, and we cannot go farther here. CONGENITALITY AND HOMOLOGY Athena's birth from Zeus is expressly related to the birth of Hephaestus. A quarrel between Zeus and Hera had been mentioned in what preceded the fragment (of Chrysippus), and in consequence of this quarrel, Hera gave birth to Hephaestus without Zeus' aid, and Zeus lay with Metis and swallowed her. But she conceived Athena, and Zeus gave birth through his head. That Hephaestus' birth was a complement to Athena's, and connected with a quarrel between Zeus and Hera, is also implied in (Hesiod's) Theogony (924-9), but the logical order of events has been destroyed. So writes West in his Commentary on Hesiod's Theogony (pp. 401-3). We need not agree that Metis was the mother of Athena, because Athena is not only called parthenos (virgin) but also parthenogenous (the offspring of a single sex). West (with others) suspects that the quarrel may have arisen over the capacities of the sexes. Hera and Zeus disagreed concerning whether man or woman achieved more pleasure in sexual intercourse. Teiresias, called to arbitrate, declared that the pleasure is woman's in the ratio of ten to one. Hera, a poor loser, blinded Teiresias and Zeus gave him the gift of prophesy as a consolation. Then each defied the other and gave birth parthenogenously. Hera to Hephaestus, Zeus to Athena. In a Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 141 striking parallel, Hera also bore parthenogenously the monster Typhon, who was also sent crashing to Earth by Zeus [11]. Plato has Critias (109 b-d) declaring that Hephaestus and Athena are of the same father. They are of the same nature. "In the days of old the Gods shared out the earth among themselves... Hephaestus and Athena, for instance, being brother and sister... obtained this our land as their joint portion... They raised its aboriginal population to the status of a great nation." It was protocatastrophic Attica, much larger in extent, before the disasters that ended an epoch. When Poseidon (god of deluges and waters and chief god of Atalanta, the Moon) struggled to possess Attica, he had to contend with both Hephaestus and Athena. We find in Robert Graves' The Greek Myths these words: Hephaestus and Athene shared temples at Athens, and his name, if it does not stand for hemerophaistos, 'he who shines by day' (i.e. the sun), is perhaps a masculine for he apaista (shortened in Stesichorus: Fragment 97 to aista), 'the goddess who removes from sight,' namely Athene, the original inventor of all mechanical arts [12]. Graves, like most authors upon whom we depend, did not ascribe real celestial behavior to the gods and demigods, planetary or otherwise. When a celestial reference is forced upon Athena, the Sun or Moon or other bodies are called upon. This has resulted in the Sun, workaday Helios, being elevated to a divine status such as he never achieved in the minds of the ancients. If the minds of scholars had not been embraced by uniformitarian principles, that is, the ideology of science of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they might have asked, as for instance in this case, why "shining by day" should be the exclusive prerogative of Helios or, at least, why bother to name a god by this trait which is so ordinary and expected? Every ordinary thing shines by day as well. A nearby cometary body, meteorite, or planet, especially if it is incandescent, as was Athena (Hephaestus), will shine like the sun, and supplement the brilliance of the day to a painful degree until clouds intervene, mercifully in some cases, destructively in others if they shower down red waters, brimstone, ashes, and Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 142 noxious gases. She and he have a habit of disappearing. They blind humans; and they cover up deeds. Both are great dissemblers. As for the alternative base of his name, we can rephrase what was just said: His name again would be a name of Athena, for the action implied is the beclouding of the human vision. Who might shine brilliantly and also block vision - contrasting behaviors? A cometary intruder in the skies is one answer, and there are not very good alternative answers, especially when the details of both behaviors are collected. An enormous volcano will shine brilliantly in the daytime as it erupts, and afterward darken the vision of humans. But one volcano does not inspire a whole people in communication over thousands of miles to create a major god. Hephaestus is, for that matter, god of volcanoes and fire, but this is not his sole or even major life activity. Graves reports (I, 51-2) that Hephaestus seems to have been the title of the sacred king as solar demi-god. We have alluded to the former; for "solar" we insist upon "Venusian," because the sacred kings of the ancient Mediterranean flourished concurrently with Cretan and Minoan civilizations and were both well-remembered and hated as an institution by the misogynist Hellenes, for whom kings were not to be periodically set up the sacrificed by queens. Hephaestus ruled with Athena over the realm of arts and crafts. Sing, clear-voiced muse, of Hephaestus famed for inventions. With bright-eyed Athene he taught men glorious crafts throughout the world, - men who before used to dwell in caves in the mountains like wild beasts [13]. "Athena was frequently linked with Hephaestus, as in the simile in which a comparison is drawn with a goldsmith, 'a skillful man whom Hephaestus and Pallas Athena taught all kinds of craft (techne).'" [14] Hephaestus was the Smith-god [15], suggests Graves, to be found in many distinct cultures. We understand that Hephaestus is a technical genius, like Athena. He is more circumscribed; he is a Master Electrician, a fabricator of thunderbolts. Often he is portrayed as lame; Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 143 sometimes the smiths were lames, says Graves to prevent their wandering far from their proprietary city. This is all very well. We recognize the need for towns to retain their smiths, even as we recognize [16] that the smith was one of the few "strangers" to be invariably welcomed in their wanderings, along with poets. However, one must acknowledge that just as there are sacred kings who are put to death annually, there may be "sacred smiths" who have to be lamed in order that they behave like the god whose skills they possess. "Smith-god" surrogates, like "sacred kings," were also anciently killed in sacrifice, every 20 years, says Graves, to correspond with a solar-lunar calendar conjunction; we are entitled to question whether it may be a Venus-Moon conjunction, the 20 years being a playback of time of modern calendar reckoning, but we find no grounds presently to challenge the periodicity and its source. Which leads us to the general problem of the lameness of Hephaestus, the god and the Planet. There is more than one legend of the source of his disability. One legend would have it that Hera chose a monster to conceive of Hephaestus and, naturally, the offspring was ugly and deformed. So she cast it from heaven. A second is that Hephaestus defended his mother, Hera, for leading a revolt against Zeus and Zeus cast him from Mount Olympus to Earth, crippling him. Here we find Hephaestus as the monster, Typhon, that part of Athena the planet that was struck by a thunderbolt of Zeus while it was wreaking destruction upon Earth, and crashed, some say near the Red Sea, others say upon what is now the Sahara, burning and drying up the area and pushing the waters of the Great Lake Triton into the ocean. To pursue the parallel, instead of the monster Typhon, it was Hephaestus who came crashing down and, presumably, he picked himself up, physically the worse for the experience, and rejoined the Olympian party of gods when the father of the gods graced him with his pardon. Vase paintings show Hephaestus mounted upon a mule (symbol of sexual barrenness), plodding Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 144 back up to Heaven, escorted by Bacchus (Dionysus), satyrs, and bacchantes. Both descents of Hephaestus-Athena from the skies precede Homeric times by 700 years. Krates of Pergamon explains that Zeus was determining the measure of the universe by means of "two torches moving with the same speed:" the Sun from east to west, and Hephaestus from Olympus to Lemnos. Hephaestus struck Earth as the sun was setting. The measure of a new age of the world was taken [17]. Graves points out the Hephaestus has affinities with Prometheus [18], Talos, Daedalus, Icarus, and Minos [19]. Graves further illuminates the emerging picture in giving us further details of the birth of Athena Tritongeneia. "As Zeus walked by Lake Triton [the great Saharan Lake that disappeared]", say the priestesses of Athene, "he was seized by a headache and he howled until all heaven echoed. Hermes ran up, divined the cause, and persuaded Hephaestus (or possibly Prometheus) to take a wedge and beetle and make a breach in Zeus' skull, from which Athene sprang, fully armed, with a mighty shout." [20] So Hephaestus was involved in Athena's birth. Hephaestus has enough reason to be lamed. However, a marvel of myth, like creative works in general, is that several levels of meaning can be simultaneously conveyed, both consciously and unconsciously. If Athena is a virgin, and ushered in legions of virgins in many parts of the world (as Peter Tompkins relates in The Virgin and the Eunuch, citing the Vestal Virgins of Rome, among others), not to mention their contraries, the sacred har lots of the temples, then how would Hephaestus portray the analogous quality? By being a eunuch, a castrato, one would reply. But a god, not, in any event, a Homeric Hellenic god, could not suffer this indignity unless, like Ouranos, he was Deus Otiosus, that is, permanently removed from the scene. The lameness, we are bound to suggest, was a genital lameness. To match Athena, Hephaestus had to be unsexed. The crippled feet would represent this to the unconscious. Psychoanalysts find such to be the case in their analyses of dreams. We note again how Hephaestus in pictured riding a mule, a barren animal, on his way back to heaven after his fall. Also, the Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 145 Roman Hephaestus is Vulcan; Vulcan is represented by several Roman authors in the form of a phallus in the hearthfire [21], an image that joins together Hephaestus fire, and the comet's severed phallus-tail. Slater stresses not so much the idea of Hephaestus' lameness as a symbolic castration but "what might be called his 'interpersonal' self-castration. By this I mean his withdrawal from the lists of sexual and marital rivalry, his role of clown in a sense, his resignation from manhood." [22] Consistently, he is rejected both by Zeus and Hera, for he was also cast into the sea by his mother, Hera. Now again, one may ask about the marriage of Hephaestus and his famous marriage bed, that four-posted imitation of the four pillared sky he was wont to occupy with Aphrodite in the Love Affair. It was on the instigation of Zeus, once, perhaps as a bad practical joke, that Hephaestus when Athena arrived to be fitted for a fine suit of armor, made the amorous advances upon her, which she repulsed. Apart from marking a further association of these two parthenogenous gods, mulishly incapable of offspring, the tale stresses Hephaestus' unluckiness in love. Aphrodite is his "better half," fully sexed, unlike Athena; he wants her (the Moon) but also rejects her, for he cannot cope with her. Aphrodite has not been known to copulate with him recently, although in a dim past there was a marriage and contacts resem bling sexual relations. But now, in the Love Affair, the bed is cold. Aphrodite's children come from others, including especially Ares. Hephaestus may be the indignant husband, but he is impotent in sexual affairs and it is perhaps because of this empty show of dignity that the gods Apollo and Hermes laugh. Hephaestus' advances upon Athena were strangely fruitful, says another account. As he gazed at Athena, he ejaculated and his seed fell upon Gaia, "the Earth," from whom Erichthonios (Auriga) was born. Athena succored the infant when Gaia rejected him. He was half-man and half-serpent; later on he became King of Athens and instituted her worship [23]. Once more we find interconnected Athena-Hephaestus - sexual incapacities, the serpent Typhon, destruction visited upon Gaia, and the Athens connection. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 146 Dr. Z. Rix of Jerusalem, a medical doctor and mythologist, writes me on January 26, 1975, that : "Hephaestus is the primordial father whom Freud recognized again and again in his patients' dreams. He is cometary Venus who struck by Jupiter's lightning fell from heaven. Many mythological narratives recount the event of Lucifer's, Phaeton's, and Typhon's (the Egyptian devil's) fall. It is comprehensible that the onlookers wished that the forbidding figure should lose its tail - conceived as male attribute - with which it threatened to annihilate the whole population of the earth." Again, Dr. Rix calls my attention to the deity, Nephthys (in Egypt, Nebti), who is wife and sister of Typhon. She is the seashores: Typhon is the sea, according to the ancient Egyptians. This same Nephthys is pictured in various Egyptian sources [24] together with Isis (the Egyptian Athena), lifting the sun-ship at dawn. Surely this is additional evidence of the connection Athena-Hephaestus, corresponding to Nephthys Typhon. Herodotus mentions that there were numerous temples to Hephaestus in Egypt. At the same time, such is the overlapping that readily occurs in the memory of the gods as the ages pass, that foam-born Aphrodite later is said to be created, not by Uranus, as we assert, but by the seed of the drowned Typhon that becomes the salt-foam of the sea. Now one may perceive how some confusion between Athena-Aphrodite-Urania and Aphrodite Planet Venus arose: the former sprang out of the sea earlier from the fallen member of Uranus; the latter arose later from the seed of the fallen Python. Probably the new myth was grafted upon the old. On still another level of suggestibility is the profile that the hobbling smith in the sky would provide. It is easy to see in many artifacts the shapes that celestial bodies like meteors and comets take. Nevertheless it may be of some value to mention that a comet in a typical apparition is an angel with wings and flowing gown, a head with horns, a helmeted head (Athena), a long-haired one (coma means hair in Greek), a phallus with testes, and even a head with two massive arms - "Hephaestus of the two strong arms," Murray translates the phrase, and then, Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 147 curiously, notes that other scholars translate the phrase as "Hephaestus of the lame legs." We wonder at the possible original sight of the mighty-armed bronze-smith trailing his feeble legs like the tail of the comet, and at the etymology that could cause such an alternative construction. In connection with the language of the Love Affair, to be treated below, additional symbolic issues will be discussed. Finally there is the sentence: "The slow catches the swift; even as now Hephaestus, slow though he is, has outstripped Ares for all that he is the swiftest of the gods who hold Olympus. Lame though he is, he has caught him by craft." Once more the synchronization of reality into a plausible plot seems incredible. To take part in the cosmic drama, as it probably occurred, Hephaestus (as Planet-Venus) would make his planetary approaches at a great distance and behind Moon and Mars, which would put him actually a half-million miles distant from the pair with a gravitational-electrical effect sufficient to repel the Earth's magnetic envelope and cause their liberation. Under the circumstances, Hephaestus would move with apparent slowness, as would, mirabile dictu, be in accord with his crippled condition. So it was then, that Pallas Athena, Hephaestus the strong-armed Smith, and the planet Venus are locked in unconscious identity in the human mind as indissolubly and unbreakably as Ares and Aphrodite were by the invisible net. ATHENA'S LAST BATTLES Velikovsky summarizes the late history of the protoplanet that became Venus in the following words : Venus, which collided with the earth in the fifteenth century before the present era, collided with Mars in the eighth century. At that time Venus was moving at a lower elliptical velocity than when it first encountered the earth; but Mars, being only about one-eighth the mass of Venus, was no match for her. It was therefore a notable achievement that Mars, though thrown out of the ring, nevertheless was instrumental in bringing Venus from an elliptical to a nearly circular orbit. Looked at from the Earth, Venus was removed from a path that ran high to the zenith and over the zenith to its present path in which it Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 148 never retreats from the sun more than 48 degrees, thus becoming a morning or an evening star that precedes the rising sun or follows the setting sun. The awe of the world for many centuries, Venus has become a tame planet [25]. The planet now called Venus, identified with the goddess Athena (and later with Aphrodite ) in Greece, Minerva in Rome, Tistrya in Iran, Ishtar in Babylon, Baal and Lucifer Mazzaroth in Judea, Hathor in Egypt, and Quetzalcohuatl in Toltec Mexico, was to become only the morning and evening star, an ever-pleasant sight, if, at the sight, people could rid themselves of its historical connotations. The planet circle nearer to the horizon, and, because it did not approach Earth closely again, was smaller in apparent size. Isaiah proclaimed (14:12-13): How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, Son of the Morning ! How art thou cast down to the ground Who did weaken the nations! Still human sacrifices were offered to Venus, the planet, when she approached closest to Earth on her famed journey. Still she was the greatest goddess of Athens and the fountain of some of the world's greatest literature. Still, in the sixth century, Jews evading the Babylonian captivity and settling in Egypt rued their abandonment of Venus-Baal for the abstract single God. At the same time, the Greeks were circulating a legend of Cadmus who had killed a dragon, a son of Hephaistos, no less, and the devilish lame Hephaestus had laid upon Cadmus and his descendents, including Oedipus, a curse; thus was the sin of castration punished in hereditary succession [26], and the sin of Oedipus foredoomed. And walk down any street where astrologers tell fortunes or pick up any book on astrology, and see that the deeds and spirit of Venus are still part of human nature, speaking now literally, and not even of the unconscious role she plays in our religious rites and our forms of thought and behavior. But in those days when it was visible to mankind that "the star Venus pursued Mars and inflamed him with an ardent passion," as the geographer-astrologist Erastosthenes wrote in the third century, B. C., (thinking probably of the planet as the Aphrodite of the Love Affair, in the confusion which we addressed earlier) Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 149 what happened to Venus is marked upon her today. From the encounters with Mars, of the eighth and seventh centuries, we seek positive evidence, and that is difficult to find. Velikovsky has been proven correct in several of his judgements respecting her seven-hundred-year reign of terror. It is now known, as Velikovsky claimed before-hand, that Venus is a hot planet, whose surface attains 9250 Kelvin without explanation except by a recent origin (from Zeus) and/or a recent heating-up [27]. Although only more simple compounds have until now been found, her fifteen miles of dense clouds may contain some of the chemicals that could have mixed with the Earth's upper Atmosphere under electrical discharges to make and precipitate the ambrosia and manna that tradition says preserved various early peoples wandering in desolation and darkness [28]. We know an ever-enlarging fraction of what the surface of the earth and archaeology can tell us about the catastrophic events of her pre-Martian period. We are aware of, and shall soon understand better, how the horror of her visitations affected the human mind. But precisely because of her erratic, destructive, and self destructive, earlier history, it is difficult, more difficult than in the case of Mars, say, to pinpoint her presence by the scars left upon her by the Love Affair. Let us look again to the song of Demodocus and see whether Hephaestus-Venus signals any possible effects of its role. Velikovsky has gathered historical, legendary, and geographical evidence to the effect that the shortened tail of the cometary proto-planet was effectively destroyed in the Mars encounters. Hephaestus trails his legs; that may be indicative of the tail. He also manufactures his gossamer trap in a shower of sparks and lays it about the trysting place of Mars and Moon. These actions may signify the shedding of cometary material in great quantities, producing meteoric effects of high visibility and destructiveness. Some of the voluminous debris here portrayed as sparks off the anvil and netting for the trap may be what supplied Mars with the troop of "terrible ones" that stories from Greece, Palestine, India and elsewhere described, a host of terrifying images in the sky and real storms of missiles and gases. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 150 As a result of the Martian encounters, several gods of planet Venus became lesser gods, the Fallen Lucifer and the Etruscan Tuchulcha, an underworld god. In the Love Affair, Hephaestus does not win his case: he has been the victim of the crime of cuckoldry. He has discovered the culprits. He has captured them and turned them over to the police and to the great judge. Yet, instead of retribution and triumph, he receives indifferent admiration for his technical skill, a jest from a policeman that he would commit the same crime if he could, jeering laughter, a bail that may or may not be paid, and a bail-jumping by the criminal. The great judge does not even put in an appearance. Indeed, how Lucifer is fallen ! Does Hephaestus change his ways? Does the orbit of Venus change from the elliptical to the circular to some degree, in the course of the Love Affair? This is difficult to say. He is wont to visit the barbarous-speaking Sintians of Lemnos. He starts back to see them, but doubles back again to view the lovers caught in his trap. This may signify an axial tilt of Earth. (See Chap. XIII.) Does Hephaestus ever return to Lemnos, as the others return to their familiar places? Probably not. Like many an old warrior, the time has come to write his memoirs and live off his past deeds. Still heated up but without a tail, the planet is braked as it has been for some time by its own viscous surface, but more speedily. Then it is struck and forced into an inner orbit by the combined energy of Earth and Mars. Thus it may have achieved the circular orbit it has maintained since the regularization of Venusian movements. Records, newly ascribed to the eighth century in Babylon, appear to show that by the seventh century Venus was approaching a circular orbit and, by the sixth century, it is definitely revolving on a near perfect movement [29]. Not only was there an orbital change in this period, but also a rotational deceleration of the earth was experienced. Velikovsky shows that the day grew longer, at one point, and then shorter. Also, the Moon changed its orbital speed. Also an axial tilt was experienced. Can these possibly be accounted for from a small treasury of poetic lines? Hardly. As the next chapters will show, many motions can and probably do change at the same time. We may solve some of the problems in the future, but at this time, we can only point to Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 151 two indications of such change. The Sun, Helios, appears to have behaved erratically. Patroni, we recall, thought that the Sun had to send a messenger to inform Hephaestus of events in his brazen palace. This might literally indicate a tilting of the earth's axis momentarily, and twice, as a matter of fact. During such tilts the Sun and Venus, as seen from the Earth, would apparently come closer together and then resume their distances. However, electrical solar flares of great magnitude might have stretched out from Helios to give the same impression, as Kugler surmised. The second indicator of changed position in the story would be the freezing of the action at its climax. Hephaestus roars his anger to the skies. (Was this when, in the Battle of Troy, Athena "uttered her loud cry. And over against her spouted Ares, dread as a dark whirlwind, calling with shrill tones to the Trojans"?) The gods stand with him at the threshold. Ares and Aphrodite are paralyzed in their trap. The Sun may be gone. There is a definite and portentous pause here. It could be the climactic conjunction of the four bodies: Earth, Mars, Moon, and Venus. It could be a moment when "the sun stood still," or more likely, when the night lengthened and the day refused to come. But what a night ! The sky would have been more lighted up and colorful than ever by ordinary solar day. Finally, Planet-Venus may be searched for some signs of surface and atmospheric damage that might be attributed to the Love Affair. It is easy to say, and undeniable, that since Venus suffered such an experience also with Earth, Moon and Mars, then it would have to exhibit the same effects as they did, given, of course, the differences in its composition. An already hot planet would be heated up more, but other effects could cool it. More of its atmosphere would be dissipated to a larger planet and some gained from a smaller planet that possessed any, but this would depend, too, upon the composition, atomic weight, electrical discharges and pressures exerted. More recently, an important set of observations of the surface of Venus was made by the use of radar [30]. In August of 1973, American astrophysicists announced that they had penetrated the hot dense clouds by radio waves, which were then able to probe features of the unknown surface. They discovered the equatorial region to be marked by craters of large diameter, Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 152 dozens and hundreds of miles wide. But these gave shallow soundings. A crater of one hundred miles diameter appeared to have basin whose depth was only a quarter of a mile. We should expect a depth of several miles. If Venus were incandescent in 1500 B.C., it will have been cooling up to the present. Originally, any exchanges of material that might have occurred in its encounters with Earth and Moon would have been promptly concealed by the sinking and melting of the foreign bodies. Over time, the temperature of the molten surface would have reduced to that of today. It is conceivable that by 776 B.C. the surface temperature might have solidified to a point that would register the imprint of a large body falling upon it through its dense cloud formations. Of course, the foreign body would itself become heated, but if it were large enough it might not disintegrate before striking home. If the craters had been formed by electrical explosions, again the soft terrain would have shortly reduced their depth. Shallow craters would, then, be explainable either by explosions alone or by an exploding body, and would tend to support the theory of Venus' cometary history, and the theory of its exchanges with Mars, Earth and Moon of the eighth and seventh centuries. In 1975, Soviet scientists landed an apparatus upon Venus, named Venera. Venera endured the hostile environment long enough to register brisk winds and to photograph, in a surprising amount of natural light, a shambles of sharp rocks. The rocks were described as seemingly "new." They are probably new. Whether the area in which they were found was struck by planetary debris or by electrical discharges, a splattering of foreign and indigenous rock would have occurred in and around the craters. The great heat, the heavy winds, and the high atmospheric pressure (90 times that of Earth) would very shortly have metamorphosed any terrain of sharp rocks. Volcanism, of course, would not throw off sharp rocks, but lava and Tephra. Therefore, Venus may now exhibit the scars of very recent events. Such were the effects of Athena's last battles. As if to commemorate the occasion, planet-Venus resonates periodically with the Earth. On April 23, 1966, P. Goldreich Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 153 and S. J. Peale reported to the American Geophysical Union the surprising discovery that every time Venus passes between the Sun and the Earth it turns the same face towards Earth. T. J. Gordon, rocket scientist and author, wrote, "This type of resonant motion resists outside disturbances; once locked, the motion tends to remain locked. When did the Earth capture Venus' rotation?" [31] Might it not have been on or about 687 B.C.? Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 154 APPENDIX TO CHAPTER TEN LOGIC OF IDENTIFYING RELATIONS SUCH AS "HEPHAESTUS IS ATHENA" We are pursuing a set of identifications in this book. We say Hephaestus stands for Athena, for instance, and Athena is also the planet Venus, and the goddess of the Greeks. She is also Hathor, Ishtar, Lucifer, and Minerva. Some aspects of a lunar deity have also affected her identity. To a remarkable degree the validity of this book depends upon such identifications. In this chapter, for example, everything said which favors the identification of Hephaestus with Athena-planet Venus ipso facto supports a separate Aphrodisian identity for the Moon. We must be careful of the word "is," short of writing a volume of philosophy on the question. For "is" can never mean some absolutely simple "is." It has to mean something that never quite "is" no matter how close two things are to being the same. One scholar who appreciates this process in which mythologists commonly engage is Philip E. Slater. In his book on The Story of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family (1958), we read: "To demand an exclusive interpretation is equivalent to insisting that a Spanish peasant, a tropical flower, the Hudson River, an oyster, and the fountains of the Villa d'Este are identical because they contain H2O. It tells too much and therefore tells us too little of what we need to know precisely... A myth draws material from events in the history of a group, but orders it according to the desires and stresses common to those participating in the culture of that group." An extreme example can be offered. Suppose we say A is H, or A is P. We intend by these two statements that: A and H refer to one and the same thing; A and O refer to one and the same thing; and H and O are the same. Even so they differ - these A and H and O - by the fact that they are named differently, and, however complete their shared identity, they are called by a different name. And every name has some connotation, some affect-load in the sensing organism. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 155 Now let us proceed to the other extreme, and declare: A is quite non-B. We will, no sooner than we are told this, tend to affirm an identity of A and B, namely that the two are associated in the same sentence, capable of undergoing the same logical analysis, have qualities that are comparable, and further that he who says so has some ulterior motive which joins them in his mind. From these examples we are led to various surmises, pertinent to the Love Affair. One is linguistic. One symbol can excite stimuli by being related logically and empirically to a predicate. It must be also related illogically, through sheer conditioning by "irrelevancies." We can imagine this seemingly foolish conversation: 1st speaker: "See the planet." All: "Yes." 1st speaker: "It is Athena." 2nd speaker: "It is Lucifer." 1st and 2nd speakers: "Athena is Lucifer." 3rd speaker: "I sacrifice when the planet arises. You must sacri fice too." 4th speaker: "I sacrifice only to the god Hephaestus who helps me make sturdy plows." 3rd speaker: "My planet represents the invention of the plow." 1st speaker : "Athena invented the plow." 1st, 3rd, 4th speakers: "All hail to the plow, the planet and the gods Hephaestus and Athena. Preserve our way of life." 2nd speaker: "Lucifer is cast down by God." All others: "Lucifer is cast down but restored to heaven by his father, Zeus. If you don't believe it, we shall hate you." 2nd speaker: "Lucifer is not Athena or Hephaestus. Lucifer is the devil cast down." All others: "Go to the Devil! Hail the gods of Olympus!' Let us proceed with speakers (1, 3, 4) whom we recognize now as a group of the Olympian Culture. We find in them: "H is A" meaning a. H is identical with A b. H is related to A c. H represents A Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 156 d. H symbolizes A e. H & A share similar relations to L in each case with respect to: 1) Speakers 1, 3, 4 for certain subjective functions, but 2) H and A are separate for other functions serving speakers 1, 3, 4. That is, Athena is Hephaestus and vice versa when and insofar as they share similar qualities (traits and behavior) in the minds of any person or group. Athena is Hephaestus when the effects of Hephaestus and Athena produced on any person or group are similar. Athena is Hephaestus when their names are used interchangeably. Athena is Hephaestus when their names are not used interchangeably, because to avoid the interchange permits the fulfillment of and resolution of a cognitive dissonance. That is, where what must be said about the one psychically precludes that the same be said about the other. For understanding both natural and social relations, all forms of "is" must be taken into account. When a Q-behavior of A produces changes in X that H also produces, then A is HQ and H is AQ. When a speaker affirms (or denies in such a manner as to affirm) that A and H are the same, in respect to Q, this is evidence also that AQ is HQ. When the behavior of a body X activates A and H with similar effects AQ(X) and HQ(X), then A and H are also given an identity. When similar X effects are observed upon A, H, L, S...n, then we can say that A has psychological and organic existence in the group (A, H, L, S...n). To say that A "is" or has existence apart from (XQAG) and (YQAG), we resort to a second group (abc...n) and observe whether (XQVg) and (YGVg) are observable. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 157 If yes, then this is a confirmation. If (XQVg) and (YQVg) are different than (XQVG) and (YQVG) then we must investigate whether the two sets of effects are reconcilable according to the logic of each group, G and g. That is, discover whether Q is the same, despite the different logics of G and g. This is essentially what we do when we inquire whether the planet Venus know to modern observation (G) is the same as the planet Venus known to the ancients (g). Carl Sagan is only reciting a phenomenon well-known to ethnologists when he says: "legends and myths, handed down by illiterate people from generation to generation, are in general of great historical value." From the remnants of what has been handed down, we are here trying to discover a history in which "who is who?" and "Who is what?" are central questions. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 158 Notes (Chapter 10: He Who Shines by Day) 1. Stecchini, op. cit., p. 145. The destruction of Thera Santorini about 1100 B.C. would have overwhelmed the Attic shores, even if it bad occurred as a solitary catastrophe (Cf. S. Marinatos, whose writings on the subject began on Minoan Crete, XIII Antiquity (1939), p. 425); Velikovsky interprets the myth of Solon concerning Atlantis as occurring around 1500 B.C. (W in C, pp. 146-8). Plato refers to Athens after Atlantis as a remnant civilization, peopled by illiterate survivors. I believe that Solon's Atlantis was sunk about 4000 B.C., but that Plato, not knowing of the disasters of 1500 B.C., telescoped the two catastrophes in his mind, and made them more ethnocentrically Athenian. 2. "Hymn to Athena" XXVIII. 3. Telephone communication of October, 1973. 4. Graves, I, ch. 9, p. 45. 5. See Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, II, frontispiece. 6. Patroni, op. cit., p.244, fn. 3; Cambridge Ancient History, Vol.II (1973). 7. Occasional Publ., Epigraphic Society, Vol. 4, no. 77 (Sept. 1977), Harvard University. 8. G.A. Wainwright, "The Teresh, the Etruscans, and Asia Minor," IX Anatolian Studies. 9. Conversation with the author, 1966. Cf. his Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino (Firenze: Tipografia Giuntina, 1964), where the Etruscan obsessions with lightning, flood, and fire are treated. 10. Homeric "Hymn to Athena," no. xxviii. 11. Slater, op. cit., 130; see Apollodorus i, 3, 5; Homeric Hymns to Apollo; Hesiod, Theogony 924-5. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 159 12. Vol. I, p.87; 23:1; cf. I, 393. 13. Homeric Hymns, no. XX, in the Loeb edition of Hesiod. The "men" referred to are possibly the catastrophized victims of this same pair 700 years earlier. 14. Finley, p. 83, citing Odyssey, 6, 232-4. 15. The Greek Myths, I, 51-2. 16. Cf. Finley. 17. Giorgio di Santillana and Hertha von Dechand, Hamlet's Mill (Boston: Gambit, inc., 1969), pp. 273-4; cf. 73-4. This book contains on page 272 a design from ancient China showing twin deities, male and female, dragon footed, surrounded by constellations and carrying a plumb bob, square, and compass, reproduced in Chaos and Creation and Solaria Binaria. 18. Graves, The Greek Myths, I, 149. 19. Ibid., 1, 315-6, 172. 20. Ibid., p.46. 21. Ovid, Fasti VI, 627; Pliny, 36.70; Ling, I, 39; Plutarch, Lives, Rom., 2; Pauly-Wissowa, Realenzyklopädie article on Tullius, Ocrisia, Tarchetius; Frazer, Golden Bough; II, 198; O. Gruppe, Griech-Mythologie (1906), p.1311. (Citations kindly supplied by the late Dr. Z. Rix, Jerusalem.) 22. Op. cit., 130. 23. Ibid., p.264; Graves, I, 25b, c, d, 1, 2. Erichthonios means "wool-strife-earth" or, possibly, "from the land of heather," but the heather-country meaning may picture the former meaning. 24. Cf. Pauly-Wissowa, "Nephthys," Vol 53, p. 100. 25. W in C, p. 259. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 10: He Who Shines by Day 160 26. Anton Ehrenzweig, "The Origin of the Scientific and Heroic Urge," 30 International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1949), 115. 27. See Eric Crew, "Thermal Equations of Venus," 3 Society Interdisc. Stud. Workshop 4 (Ap. 1981) 1-4. 28. See The Lately Tortured Earth and God's Fire surveying recent research on these matters. 29. Lynn Rose, "Babylonian Observations of Venus," III Pensee no. I (Winter, 1973), pp. 18-22; C.J. Ransom and L.H. Hoffee, "The Orbits of Venus," " Ibid., 22-25. 30. E. Driscoll, Science News, 4 August 1973, p.72; Andrew and Louise Young, "Venus," Scientific American, 233 (Sept. 1975), pp. 70, 78. 31. Ideas in Conflict (New York, 1966), p. 37. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 161 CHAPTER ELEVEN THE BLASTED CAREER OF THE MIGHTY SWORDSMAN A Homeric hymn addressed Ares: "who whirl your fiery sphere among the planets in their sevenfold courses through the aether wherein your blazing steeds ever bear your above the third firmament of heaven." [1] Ares had many names and epithets in and among the peoples of the world. He is Mars of the Romans, Nergal of the Babylonians, Gokihar (and Indra) of the Hindus, Odin of the Teutons, Huitzilopochtili of the Aztecs, and the Archangel Gabriel of the Jews. In Babylonia, writes P.F. Gossmann, he is Nergal, and also Era, Irra, and Death [2]. Odin had over fifty names and epithets. This Gokihar of the Hindus was "born of the wolf," was a "special disturber of the Moon," and became involved in yuddha, which in ancient Hindu astronomy meant a clash of planets in conjunction [3]. THE QUALITIES OF ARES Ares, scholars typically assert, was the simplest character among the Olympian gods. Ares means in Greek "male warrior." Eris, "strife," is his sister. He is bloodthirsty, ruthless, warlike, fleet, ruddy, and, of course, well-muscled. He is drunken, quarrelsome, impetuous, and a favorite lover of Aphrodite; he had a number of children by her and other women. "Rushing Stars" often appear to the vision as swords Ares seemed especially prone to the sword. Velikovsky expounds the theme of the sword in the international background of Ares. He quotes a hymn to Nergal: Shine of horror, god Nergal, prince of battle, Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 162 Thy face is glare, thy mouth is fire, Raging Flame-god, god Nergal. Thou art Anguish and Terror, Great Sword-god Lord who wanderest in the night, Horrible, raging Flame-god... Whose storming is a storm flood [4]. Of the Scythians, Solinus wrote: "The god of this people is Mars; instead of images they worship swords." [5]. Herodotus tells that they sacrificed human beings and poured their blood upon the sacred sword. The Romans, sons of Mars, perfected their sword, a short, straight, double-edged steel weapon with an obtuse-angled point. Their drill, their fighting formations, and their tactics were based upon the sword in the hand of the legionnaire. The male-chauvinist Greeks and Romans made Mars out to be a handsome athletic lover. He both vanquished and loved Aphrodite-Venus. The sword is a phallic symbol by an easy stretch of the imagination: a "dashing young blade" and "a swordsman" are used in vernacular epithets today of the sexually eager pursuers of women. Homer, pro-Athena, grants her the victory over Ares in his epics, but around the world, Mars is victor more than vanquished because planet Athena never threatened Earth again after the age of Mars. Ares was called "Alloprosallos" because he fought indiscriminately, without principle, "on one side or the other." We have pointed to Odysseus in his wanderings as the representative of Athena in her planetary behavior over the centuries. It would be well to investigate Hercules as the representative of Ares, performing an analogous set of tasks. Although his exploits find him sometimes assisted by Athena and in opposition to Ares, he is said to be Mars himself by Eratosthenes and Varro, the ancient commentators. Hercules, son of Zeus, wanders and is directed over much of the world. He destroys Pylos; he captures Troy in a preview of the Trojan War. At times he goes mad, explicitly so. His stories often do parallel the probably older Babylonian Gilgamish, but his Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 163 exploits are sometimes transferred to the western regions where the Greeks have gone in large numbers. Indeed Hercules is engaged in measuring the new dimensions of the world. Hercules spawns the Heraclids who are identifiable with the Dorian invaders (reinvaders) of post-Mycenaean Greek places in the period following the planetary disasters visited upon earth in the eighth and seventh centuries. More than Odysseus, Hercules is one of our crazed heroes of the catastrophic generation, just as his godhead is a cause of the catastrophes. Gods, like people, have different reputations depending upon whom you ask about them. Priests, poets, and people - all have a say. Gods have a good side and a bad side. In the case of Aphrodite - sheer beauty and concupiscence may pass for good in the later Greek lexicon, whereas sheer irresponsibility denominates evil. In the case of Ares, physical beauty combine with swift force on the good side; ruthless destructiveness highlights the bad. The terrible presence of Mars attended the birth of Rome and warranted him a longer and more fateful career than the Greeks could afford him. The Judeans, striving for monotheism, incorporated the visitations of Mars variously - now as a divine intervention of the Lord (and the archangels) against the army of Sennacherib, blasting it to death, then again as a divine retri bution for a collective "immorality" that the population and its rulers appeared to exhibit prior to each natural or human dis aster visited upon them [6]. Good and bad traits of a god are, hence, a combination of what happened alike to a set of cultures, what happened differently to them, and whether in either event what happened chanced to be good or bad in its contemporary historical circumstances [7]. Also, the fear of offending a god brought about the coinage of multiple names and related gods, so that good and bad epithets might be buried in obscure and "innocent" references. THE FATAL WOUND Let us examine more closely the present and possible prior condition of the "blood-stained stormer of walls" as the Iliad called Ares. The state of Mars today is known not only by Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 164 means of transcribed legends, but by telescopes and space explorations. Ancient history, myth, and theology have advised what to expect in general. They suggest that Mars underwent severe electrical encounters and some exchanges of material involving Venus, Moon and Earth. Its satellites entered the picture as the Steeds of Mars, the Maruts, etc., terrifying "animals" or "angels" indeed, if we heed the ancient accounts. J. Ziegler, a physicist interpreting the Hindu Vedas, finds the "Maruts" to be electrical phenomena, or at least short-circuits and resistors for cosmic electricity [8]. The two satellites of Mars are rough rocks of small size. Today they are called Phobos (fear) and Deimos (rout), names given to the steeds of Mars by the ancients. There is some likelihood that, although they are invisible now, the ancients may have recognized them [9]. Legend has it that they are the sons of Aphrodite . Hence we must raise the possibility that they were engendered in the Love Affair, the lovers' last encounters. Just as some mascons of the Moon may have been welded upon it by interplanetary thunderbolts, the sons of Aphrodite and Mars may have been exploded from the Moon and carried off by their father. They were part of a frightful bombardment of debris and ball-lightning which Earth suffered in the days of the Vedas and the Hebrew Prophets [10]. Velikovsky wrote in 1950 that an atmosphere, now residual, existed on Mars and that organic carbons may characterize the polar caps. Soviet sources now report that a considerable proportion of the thin Martian atmosphere is of argon. Recent photographs indicate that the polar caps, which advance and retreat seasonally, are composed of solid carbon dioxide with possibly some ice beneath [11]. In Solaria Binaria, Milton and I speculate that all planets have had experience with life forms. That the surface of Mars was devastated beyond recognition and beyond any remaining possibility of "higher" forms of life is consistent with the legendary damage done to the warrior god, and also with the legend concerning the removal of Venus from an orbit that threatened Earth. As was remarked in Chapter Six, a heavy contamination of the carbon constant was noted to have occurred in the 8th century Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 165 B.C. This might result from several causes, granted the near presence of Mars in the sky. Electrical and geological distur bances on Earth and material and atmospheric exchanges among Earth, Moon and mars are suggested. Electrical charges can assemble and disassemble molecules of many different types. As a smaller planet, Mars was much larger than Moon and might devastate it, but be equally devastated in turn by Earth. In the heavens, even more than among men, the larger force strips the smaller. The present features of Mars are becoming known and even give hints of what it might have lost 3200 years ago. First its geosphere. The mariner IX flight (1972) that provided year long observations by camera in orbit provide evidence that, in Velikovsky's words (1950), "Mars has been subjected to stress, heating and bubbling activity in recent times." [12]. Also that hot spots of presumed radioactivity would be found as evidences of electrical exchanges [13]. The cracks of Mars, concentrated upon one face and along the equator, appeared quite fresh to the readers of its photographs. Little erosion has occurred. It was as if, some said, a highly vigorous water system had carved itself onto Mars' face and then all the water had been instantly removed. How fresh is "fresh"? No one will speak up, unless one has a prior theory (the Velikovsky position). The uniformitarians are hesitant. "One week?" "Impossible, we would have photographed it." "One century?" "No, we would have observed something going on through our telescopes." "One-two-three thousand years?" "Events of this magnitude even then would have caused apparitions that are neither recorded nor geologically possible if not observed." "Apparitions were observed in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. respecting Mars." "That is astronomically impossible." "Well, how fresh is fresh, then, do tell?" "Fresh is millions of years. It has to be." "What happened then?" Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 166 "We don't know, but we know that you cannot know either." As Eugene Rabinowitch, physicist and editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists once wrote, historical evidence is "inevitably tentative and often controversial matter." [14] "I see.. Unlike historical geology." The "erosion," "vulcanism," or devastation of Mars is most impressive, by earthly standards. Its major feature consists of a canyon running along the equator for nearly 2200 miles in a sinuous line that brings the "crack" to 3300 miles. The canyon, called Coprates, is over 300 miles wide near its center, and about 4 miles deep. Proceeding beyond the canyon and various associated faults with the same general orientation, one encounters "volcanoes" of massive diameters and great heights relative to earthly experience. Nix Olympica, previously believed to be a crater, appears now to have a base that is 300 miles wide and a 100-mile peak. The Island of Hawaii, the world's largest volcano, can be easily lost in it, along with Fujiyama, Vesuvius, and Etna. The response of the scientific establishment to the evidence produced by its own work may have been predicted but is continually frustrating. It is not only that conventional hypotheses are advanced, but that they are exclusively employed. For example, an article by Bruce C. Murray in the Scientific American of January 1973 is possessed of full documentation from the flight of Mariner IX and illuminated by all the graphic tools that imagination and skillful hypothetical speculation might demand. The article describes the enormous canyons and craters, and a number of features of the battered Martian hemisphere. But faced with the facts, the same author reverts to conventional theory. He accepts the eternal, unchanging order of the heavens. He resorts to internal heat and vulcanism. He wonders at the sudden burst of activity that must have erupted upon an earth-like atmosphere and that produced canyons, craters, and liquid flows in dozens of meandering rifts by a single event. Then a sudden freeze, et voilà, the present surface of Mars. The author says he cannot believe this could happen but he is forced to believe in miracle. The "waters" that Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 167 "produced" the vast canyon and rift system are nowhere to be found, nor is there evidence that they existed. Further, the "waters" would have existed solely in one region of the Martian surface. The claim is made that Mars has no magnetic field, yet the enormous dust storms that howl over the planet go unexplained, too. The cameras of Mariner IX circled the planet for weeks before the dust settled enough to photograph the surface. Now would not cavities miles deep and many miles across, and craters that would contain cosily the great cities of Earth offer a settling place for this dust? How does this dust pick itself up and fly about the planet? And, if it is once up, and accelerated in a vacuous atmosphere, whatever brings it down? It would seem reasonable to assume that the Martian "atmosphere" is capable of regular electrical phenomena such as produce clouds, winds and tides on Earth even if the constituent material is so humble as to be called "dust." In fact, as Ralph Juergens has mentioned, airborne dust is an ideal medium in which to "brew" electrical discharges [15]. Nor, for that matter, is Murray perturbed by the fact that the carbon dioxide caps photographed at the poles of Mars are a couple of hundreds of kilometers off center. Here, again, is evidence of a tilting of the axis of the planet. The obvious hypothesis is that Mars was intruded upon externally in recent times; and suffered an axial tilt. The polar caps have not had time to reassemble around the true geographic poles. Furthermore "Mariner 9's pictures also disclosed a most peculiar terrain in the south polar area... It covers much of the south polar region up to about 70 degrees south latitude. The laminated terrain is composed of very thick layers, alternately light and dark, whose gently sloping faces exhibit a certain amount of texture, or relief." [16] These "plates" are perhaps half a kilometer thick and up to 200 kilometers across, with slopes that face outward. They exist only in the polar regions. They have few impact craters. To our eyes the feature appears as a frosting to a turning cake applied erratically by a baker between filing orders, each layer flowing out and hardening before the next diminished batch was poured over the center. In the wintertime of mars, the error Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 168 is partially concealed by a coating of carbon dioxide. These laminated plates may well reflect a series of meltings of the Martian surface, produced concurrently with a series of axial tilts. If in the six or seven near passes of Mars with Earth, the Earth's axis tilted twice (or, for that matter, not at all), the pos sibility of more numerous changes in the Martian axis of rotation would be greater. However, there is also to be considered, given the thermal melt ing of the surface, the possibility that a period of axial wobbling from a single blow would produce the "start-stop" effect observable on the poured-out area. The thermal melting itself might have been produced by the rush of electrons to the poles of Mars, when, with a negatively charged surface, Mars approached other like-charged bodies, especially Moon, equatorially; there the electrons would pour out into space inciting discharges upon encounter with the positive ions that had been contained from them hitherto by a neutral belt. Whereupon we return to the main features of the devastation of "fiery, bridling" Mars: the canyons and crater system. None of the hundreds of Mariner-watchers who have spoken up under establishment sponsorship by the time these words are written have dared to mention an external force. Much more is at stake for the human mind than a scientific theory; Holy Dreamtime is threatened if a disorderly cosmos is recalled. Only a few non establishment scientists, almost exclusively sympathizers with the ideas of Velikovsky, were quick to recognize how relevant were the materials of Mariner 9 to the theory of an erratic cosmos. Allan Kelly has described what may have happened to create the gigantic canyon of Coprates. He had written, with Frank Dachille, a seminal book on comets and geology in 1953, and has lately come to regard close-encounter as important as collision in the carving of planetary surface [17]. An "Intruder (much more massive than Mars) was traveling in the same direction as Mars and in nearly the same direction as the Martian rotation about its axis. This nearly parallel movement of the two bodies provided a relatively long period of time in which the gravitational force could act... As the two bodies approached each other, the gravitational power of the Intruder suddenly came to a focus [we would say "arrived at a sufficient Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 169 intensity"] on the surface of Mars, ripping off the crust in a swirling motion beginning at the eastern end of the canyon called Coprates." Mars was zipped open. The sinuous "unzipping" we would imagine to be the effect of erratic jos tling between Mars and the Intruder. From the wound crustal material exploded and lava flowed. Possibly the satellites of Mars, with their rough shapes, blew out at this time along with a stream of material that was not recaptured. The metaphor of the unzippering of Mars reminds one of the battle of the gods in the Iliad, when Pallas Athena charged Ares and cast her spear "mightily against his nethermost belly," upon which "the brazen Ares bellowed loud as nine thousand or ten thousand warriors cry in battle, when they join in the strife of the Wargod." And Homer adds, marvelously, "Even as a black darkness appears from the clouds when after heat a blustering wind arises, even thus... did brazen Ares appear as he made his way among the clouds towards the sky." As for the "volcanoes" of Mars, Kelly argues, these number twenty and all except one are found along the same straight line, but at some distance from the unzippered canyon. These Kelly explains as being created by related, gravitationally induced, explosions produced as the Intruder pulled away from Mars. In the Iliad (Books XX and XXI) we find additional details of the fighting between Athena and Ares. Athena screams great war cries (one thinks of Wagner's Valkyrie). Ares comes "spouting" against her, shrieking to his Trojans, and leaps at her with his spear, driving it into her tasseled aegis. She gives ground, but smites him on the neck with a huge rock that "loosed his limbs," or, as we say, "shook him from head to foot." When Aphrodite tried to help him off the battlefield, she too was struck by the hand of Athena and her heart melted. Planet Athena-Venus was probably the Intruder that devastated Mars. The Earth, while doing damage also, was too remote to have produced the Coprates complex. Yet it may be incorrect to believe that the Coprates complex was a product of gravitational explosion alone. Electrical forces were assisting. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 170 True, the point of minimal distance and weakest material strength between two bodies would be the first disrupted area. But to overcome the resistant gravitation of these two points inwards upon their parent body is not all that is needed to cause material dislocation. At the protruding points, the chemical bonding of the material would have to be overcome. That is, a rock is self-contained hardly at all by its center of gravity, but is held together by the chemical ties among its molecules. Otherwise mountains would flow down to the sea like water. The Coprates complex exhibits the important qualities of the rilles of the Moon, which the electrical theory of Juergens appears to explain. The zig-zag eruptions (also explainable as "wobbling"), the sharp cleavages in the waterless environment, pointy canyon bottoms, "river" valleys that stop in the middle of nowhere instead of by the banks of a sea, and rilles that do not approach "volcanic" mountains close enough to "drain" them of liquid are reasons to diagnose the "blood-stained stormer of walls" as a victim of electrical as well as of gravitational disruption. Therefore, probably both Moon and Mars were affected during the Love Affair by electrical discharges building on gravitational pulls. These were sufficient to soften and break the chemical bonds of many places on both spheres. Such, at least, is the terminology I am using in this book. Elsewhere, most prominently in Solaria Binaria, I join with Earl R. Milton in an exclusively electrical formulation of interactions between large bodies. We find that the concept of gravitation is no longer needed, in accounting for the transactions. From all over the world, a small collection of peculiar meteorit ic stones has been collected over the past hundred and fifty years, half of which were originally seen to fall from the sky, none of them anywhere near active volcanos. Lately, examinations have been made of the rocks by new techniques, and they have been deemed to have originated from Mars. A high content of mineral maskelynite along with crystals of augite, indicates that they were originally igneous feldspar and later were converted by an explosion or impact that did not melt them. Their chemical composition is "unlike that of any known Moon rock," reports S. P. Maran [18]. The clouds of Venus would prevent such material from escaping. The rocks are Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 171 young with respect to the time of impact (assigned 180 m/y), and they could not be part of the asteroid belt because the asteroids are supposed to be much older and a large one would have to explode more recently producing a great many more small rocks of the same age than have been observed. Io, the explosive Jupiter satellite, is dismissed because it appears to have much more sulphur in its constitution than these so-called SNC meteorites. "The tests reveal that the meteorite's content of neon, argon, krypton, and xenon, and especially the relative amounts of two isotopes of argon and two isotopes of xenon, have an uncanny resemblance to the relative abundances of these gases as measured in the Martian atmosphere by the Viking Landers." There is an equally good match with the chemical composition of Martian soils. "Mars would accordingly appear to be the parent body of the SNC meteorites," writes Maran, "but how did they get from there to here? Alternative theories are, first, collision, but the heat of such would have melted the rocks when they separated from the parent body, or, second, a glancing encounter with an obliquely approaching body that pulled off rock fragments in its vapor stream without melting them." This problem is not serious, it seems to the present author. Furthermore, to these two mechanical theories may be added electrical effects: lightning strokes can pull up material from the ground without melting it; so can tornadoes which are closely related to lightning phenomena; I discuss such matters in The Lately Tortured Earth. As expected, the dates given to these episodes by the investiga tors are uniformly far older than the mere 2700 years of which we speak in Moon and Mars. Still, within their very old framework, the SNC meteorites "represent notable exceptions," to all other extraterrestrial ages, 1.3 b/y instead of 4.5 b/y. Also, the shock waves that produced the maskelynite are dated only .180 b/y. In the grossly short-time perspective of the Quantavolution Series, the .180 b/y figure would be 2700 y and the 1.3 b/y figure would be between .5 and 1 m/y. As to whether the Earth or Venus was the wounder of Mars, Venus seems the more likely, astrophysically as well as historically. The evidences of change and destruction on Earth, although great, are less than those of its earlier encounters with Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 172 Venus. Furthermore its motions changed less than did those of Mars and Venus. Tentatively Venus-Hephaestus is designated as the assailant. More will be said on this subject later on, in pondering "How the Gods Fly." For now, it is proposed that the main encounter devastated Mars - that it was caused by Venus, that an enormously long venting fissure and holes opened up, and that it was recent. Too, the blow was forceful enough to change any and/or every motion that characterized Mars beforehand. Furthermore, the Martian surface and atmosphere may have been quite different before this particular incident, as before the series of incidents with Venus, Moon, and Earth that Mars experienced. It probably vented poisonous carbon dioxide clouds through the Earth's atmosphere, in association with electrical discharges, resulting in occasional episodes of mass asphyxiation such as I have cited in The Lately Tortured Earth. It may also have lost a considerable atmosphere, a soil (that precious few feet upon which all terrestrial life depends) and a hydrosphere (on which all marine life depends). Apart from signs and remnants of these features, the planet Mars has been reduced to a naked force, resembling what the Greeks thought of Ares as a god, a narrow-minded compulsively destructive force whose solitary spark of sensitivity was reflected in the perverse love that Aphrodite bore for him. But virtue triumphed: "Behold on wrong Swift vengeance waits... ...and the god of arms Must pay the penalty for lawless charms." Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 173 Notes (Chapter 11: The Blasted Career of the Mighty Swordsman) 1. Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. H.G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, Loeb edition, 1950), p. 433. 2. Das Era-Epos (Wurzburg, 1956). 3. W in C, p. 256. 4. W in C, p. 261. 5. Ibid., p. 263. 6. W in C, Part II, Chapter 1. 7. See the author's The Divine Succession (1983). 8. Manuscript kindly lent to the author for reading, 1982. 9. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 279-80. 10. Ibid. 11. Bruce C. Murray, "Mars from Mariner 9," The Scientific American, January, 1973, p.60. 12. Worlds in Collision, 36-5, 367-8. 13. Ibid., 368. 14. Actually in a letter to the author, June 23, 1964. 15. Letter to the author, Oct. 27, 1973. 16. Bruce Murray, p. 60. 17. The early work was Target: Earth (1953); the present account is based upon an unpublished paper kindly furnished the author by Mr. Kelly. Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 11: The Mighty Swordsman 174 18. "Rocks from Mars," Sky Reporter, 36-9, 38. Click here to view the next section of the document.