Background on Venus as Crowley Saw Her
"The next of the planets is Venus. In her, for the first time, we come into contact with a part of our nature which is none the less quintessential because it has hitherto been masked by our pre-occupation with more active qualities. Venus resembles Jupiter, but on a lower scale, standing to him very much as Mars does to Saturn. She is close akin in nature to the Sun, and she may be considered an externalisation of his influence towards beauty and harmony. Venus is Isis, the Great Mother; Venus is Nature herself; Venus is the sum of all possibilities.
The Niyama corresponding to Venus is one of the most important, and one of the most difficult of attainment. I said the sum of all possibilities, and I will ask you to go back in your minds to what I said before about the definition of the Great Work itself, the aim of the Yogi to consummate the marriage of all that he is with all that he is not, and ultimately to realise, insofar as the marriage is consummated, that what he is and what he is not are identical. Therefore we cannot pick and choose in our Yoga. It is written in the 'Book of the Law', Chapter 1, verse 22, 'Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing and any other thing, for thereby there cometh hurt.'Venus represents the ecstatic acceptance of all possible experience, and the transcendental assumption of all particular experience into the one experience.
Oh yes, by the way, don't forget this. In a lesser sense Venus represents tact. Many of the problems that confront the Yogi are impracticable to intellectual manipulation. They yield to graciousness."
"We put the mind of the spectator in tune with the pure idea of austerity and melancholy which we call Saturn, or the idea of force and fire which we call Mars, or with the idea of nature and love which we call Venus, and so for the others. If he becomes identified with this one idea the union is one of ecstatic bliss, and its only imperfection is due to the fact that the idea in question, whatever it may be, is only partial. Ecstasy is therefore progressive. Gradually the adept unites himself with holier and higher ideas until he becomes one with the Universe. To him there is no more Death; time and space are annihilated; nothing is, save the intense rapture that knows no change for ever."
"The EMPRESS is ruled by the planet Venus, the goddess of love and beauty (Greek Aphrodite). The EMPRESS is a harvest of all that has been planted: The creative energy of the EMPRESS satisfies the FOOL'S venturing, as the balance of the MAGICIAN'S masculine energy and the PRIESTESS' feminine energy combine to create the child/harvest of the EMPRESS.he Venus symbol is enclosed in a heart on the Waite-Rider image. The crowned EMPRESS sits before a background of lush vegetation and a gently curving river. The Venus symbol decorates her heart-shaped shield. In the Crowley deck, the enthroned EMPRESS is shown with the fertility symbols of the crescent moon and a swan with cygnets. The Hebrew letter on the bottom of the EMPRESS card is daleth, meaning door."
Lots of material here: sort through for what you need.
"In fashioning a Venus ritual, select weapons, incenses, and so on with Venus in mind. The dove, for example, is sacred to her, as is the sparrow. If fruit is to be offered to the goddess or consumed by the celebrant, let it be her sacred fig or peach or apple. Her precious stone is the emerald; if you cannot afford one for your altar, buy a turquoise instead. Her weapon is the Girdle, since whosoever wears the girdle of Aphrodite becomes the object of universal love and desire. Burn sandalwood incense in her honour and anoint the body with oil of myrtle. "
Joan Cole's site is truly amazing. There's a huge lot of stuff there unrelated to Venus, but very interesting about the Tarot. I exerpted a number of Tarot images of Venus/The Empress here.
"Love. Beauty. Happiness. Pleasure. Success. Fruitfulness. Good fortune. Graciousness. Elegance. Gentleness. Ill-dignified: Dissipation. Debauchery. Idleness. Sensuality."
"Either he himself, or one of his learned friends, probably explained to the painter what was known of the way the ancients had represented Venus rising from the sea. To these scholars the story of her birth was the symbol of mystery through which the divine message of beauty came into the world. One can imagine that the painter set to work reverently to represent this myth in a worthy manner. The action of the picture is quickly understood. Venus has emerged from the sea on a shell which is driven to the shore by flying wind-gods amidst a shower of roses. As she is about to step on to the land, one of the Hours or Nymphs receives her with a purple cloak."
This is an analysis of Swinburne's poems in relationship to the medieval concept of Courtly Love. Hertha, the poem originally recited in Crowley's Venus Rite, is one of the poems analysed."However, no matter how clearly Swinburne's political poems rely upon the precedents set by these two poets, the way in which he perceives passion, especially in its relationship to political philosophy, is more closely aligned to courtly patterns than to Romantic ones, especially in its tragic qualities. Like the troubadours, Swinburne defines passion as a source of suffering, not of Blakean joy or of Shelleyan spiritual redemption. In this he was more like Keats; but in Keats's work we find no systematic relationship between politics and passion, as we do in Blake and Shelley on the one hand, and Swinburne and the troubadours on the other. Swinburne's republicanism originates with the desire for total freedom, a release from the material sufferings of life, which for him are analogous to the sufferings of unrequitable passion. Achieving freedom from a cruel or unattainable lady (the archetype in troubadour poetry) requires precisely what achieving freedom from cruel tyrants necessitates: self-immolation. "
"For Swinburne, as for courtly writers, the beloved woman is often a destructive force, and love possesses the power "to free the soul from the constraints of the world" as well as "the pains of the world." Indeed, Swinburne's personae who are ennobled in dying for causes they exalt -- whether erotic or political -- are ultimately freed from the bonds of discontinuous existence and demonstrate the fundamental interconnection of those causes, which they transcend through synthesis after death with organic and metaphysical nature, Swinburne's unitary life-force, Hertha."
"Pantheism is the view that everything in Nature is alive, and that all living is Divine. In that context, then, the simplest explanation of Divinity is as "an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together" (Star Wars: "The Force"). Thus a pantheistic theology of Immanent Divinity ("Thou Art God/dess") contrasts sharply with the theology of Transcendent Divinity ("God is Out There") presented by most of "The World's Great Religions." Unlike the God worshiped by Christians, Moslems and Jews, the Goddess is not an all-powerful, indestructible, non-physical being who created the world and exists apart from it. Though Mother Nature is Life on the universal scale, Gaia, the Earth Mother is the very soul of this living planet, and she lives or dies as all life on this planet lives or dies. . .
Mother, not maker; born, and not made.
Though her children forsake her, allured or afraid,
Praying prayers to the God of their fashion,
She stirs not for all who have prayed.O my children, too dutiful towards Gods not of me,
Was not I enough beautiful? Was it hard to be free?
For, behold, I am with you, am in you, and of you -
Look forth now and see! [exerpt from Hertha]
"So far we have considered evolutionism as it appeared among antiDarwinian biologists; for, as we have seen, Wallace's neo-Paleyism was the outcome of carefully articulated reservations about natural selection, and Spencer's Lamarckism a product of inductive reasoning. Neither had properly to confront the difficulties of holding to an optimistic evolutional metaphysic in the very teeth of Darwinism. Yet others did just this, insisting that they were both optimistic about evolution and true Darwinians to boot. The contradictions which are apparently inherent in such an extravagant claim have been too much for a number of those who have studied the use of Darwinian concepts by important late-Victorian poets. Their discomfiture arises from the fact that, say, Swinburne's 'Hertha' and Hardy's 'The Mother Mourns' both owe their inspiration in a pivotal way to one and the same biological theory -- at least, their creators thought so. Puzzlement and disbelief, however, are not unreasonable critical reactions to readings of Darwinism so diametrically opposed that they could inspire simultaneously the ebullience and the gloom of, respectively, Swinburne and Hardy. The question at once presents itself whether any account of nature rooted in empirical observation could really permit this range of interpretation and retain its integrity. Is it not much more likely that, quite simply, we have here an inaccurate, a bad, reading of Darwin? That either Swinburne or Hardy read him inattentively? Morse Peckham has argued unequivocally that 'Hertha' is the consequence ofa misunderstanding of the Origin. For the biologic world that Darwin revealed, if you do not read him with the assumptions of metaphysical evolutionism as instruments for understanding the book, is a world totally lacking in the organized and teleological process characteristic of evolutionary metaphysics.16The nub of Peckham's careful argument is that Darwinism may not legitimately be viewed as potentially generating an open-ended series of cultural responses. Whatever Swinburne himself may have believed he was about, he did not discover anywhere in the Origin the conceptual universe of Songs before Sunrise. The two are just incommensurable: Swinburne's pantheistic, inspirational verse may be 'Darwinistic' but it cannot possibly be called 'Darwinian'. It is not an authentic response to the Darwinian revolution at all."
'[266] The immediate temptation here is to deny outright the reality of all "facts" except the one mystic Fact. There is also an aesthetic delight in such wholesale destruction through the possession of an inner secret. So we get a mystical formula for describing this one Reality in terms of everything else which it is not (or, with the opposite twist, which it really is), as Emerson in his poem "Brahma," Swinburne in "Hertha," or Dionysius the Areopagite as follows: "The cause of all things is neither soul nor intellect; nor has it imagination, opinion, or reason, or intelligence; nor is it reason or intelligence; nor is it spoken or thought. It is neither number, nor order, nor magnitude, nor littleness, nor equality, nor inequality, nor similarity, nor dissimilarity. It neither stands, nor moves, nor rests.... It is neither essence, nor eternity, nor time. Even intellectual contact does not belong to it. It is neither science nor truth. It is not even royalty or wisdom; not one; not unity; not divinity or goodness; nor even spirit as we know it," etc. In the momentum of these negatives this sort of mystic may even end by naming his reality itself "Nothing." '
Between 1800 and 1940 Venus (or Aphrodite) retains her numerical supremacy in appearances, with Diana (or Artemis) still coming second. Juno, however, almost vanishes, and so does Minerva after 1830. The third place is now taken by Proserpine, as goddess of the changing seasons, and fourth by Ceres or Demeter, lady of the harvest. A reading of the texts listed discloses a much more striking alteration. Venus now appears not merely as patroness of love but in relation to natural surroundings. Diana, no longer primarily a symbol of chastity or hunting, stands for the moon, the greenwood and wild animals. Furthermore, when a goddess is made the major figure in a poem, instead of the subject of a comparison or reference, the supremacy of Venus is overturned. In these cases, by the 1810s the divine feminine is personified either as the moon (apostrophized with particular religiosity by Keats) or the spirit of the green earth (for whom Shelley makes an equivalent, especially in 'Song of Proserpine'). In the latter capacity she often sheds any classical label altogether, becoming simply 'Mother Earth' or 'Mother Nature'.These new emphases remain absolutely constant through the remainder of 19th-century English literature. They are reproduced in the parallel world of opera libretti, where we see them in the most famous opera of the century to treat of Druids, Vincenze Bellini's Norma (1831). here the librettist, Felice Romani, broke with the tradition of Druids as sun-worshippers to make the heroine, standing in a sacred wood, pray to a moon goddess. It only remained for Swinburne to take the final stage of development in 1867 when he apostrophized the goddess of nature under the German name of Hertha. This poem knocked God out of the structure altogether, by making her the single mighty deity who created and maintains the universe. It would be interesting and easy to show how the same themes remain stable long into 20th-century English letters, and to provide parallel examples from the Continent.
"Earnestly I asked the Gods why love is rare,
for even when we banish Strife, dispel
the fearful force that separates, yet still
the distance is maintained, and Love does not
rush in to fill the vacuum. Thus throughout
the night I burned the sacred incense, poured
libations, pleaded for an answer... "
(Note: This site has some of this poem in greek on it. Fun to listen to!)
Far-shining Aphrodite, hear our prayer!
Thou Laughter-loving Lady, Paphian,
Well-girded, Golden, Sea-born, Cyprian,
Companion, Tender-hearted, or howe'er
It pleaseth Thee to be addressed, attend,
We ask, our words of praise, and send
Thy Grace, because Thou art the source of all
That's charming, graceful, all that doth enthrall
In word or deed, in action, figure, face.
For Thine is the allure that doth enlace
Our hearts as one, for as the charmed is bound,
So also is the charmer quickly found
Surrendering, with yearning undisguised,
The compromiser gladly compromised!
But irresistible is even this,
Seducer falling to seduction; bliss
Repaid is twofold bliss, drawing tight
The bonds about them both, in shared delight.
Here Aphrodite is represented, unlike the Capitoline Aphrodite and Medici
Venus who are portrayed in a position of self-consciousness and modesty;
nor as vulnerable as the Knidian Aphrodite, but aware of and comfortable
with her astounding beauty. She is protected by the conch shell, the womb
of her birth and is offering the supreme gift -- her girdle. "
