ALIGNED WITH VENUS

tuesday, 8 june 2004

hawai’i

       When ancient Sumerians called out the name of Inanna, they were summoning both the goddess and the planet.  Adept in astronomy and mathematics, they recognized that the Evening Star and the Morning Star were not two different heavenly bodies, but different manifestations of the same one.  After the Sun and the Moon, Inanna (the planet we call Venus) was the third brightest object in the sky.  Absent for two months, when she reappeared as the Evening Star in the western sky, people knew the rains would soon begin and they could plant their fields.  Prayers for fertility of the land accompanied public ceremonies to the life-giving power of Inanna and her lover Dumuzi, celebrated by ritual lovemaking.

          Imagine the joy with which the return of the Evening Star was greeted!  Couples carried woven mats to their rooftops to make love under the starry vault of heaven, vivid without any light pollution.  Except for a capricious breeze rustling the date palms or a dog’s bark, the night was undisturbed, until the moans of passion swelled to a symphony of pleasure in the city. Lovers’ sweat shone in the silver light of Inanna;  her reflection sparkled in the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.  Sweat – orgasm – rivers – rains – fertility  –  Inanna elicited all that flowed.  She would reign over the night sky for 263 days, by which time the harvests would have begun and babies conceived with her blessing would be ready to be born. 

          Then she would disappear for three days, only to return in the eastern sky as the Morning Star, heralding the dry season and the time of preparations:  grain to be stored, fruit to be dried, defenses to be fortified, trading ships to be stocked, babies to be strengthened.  All must be readied for the hot Mesopotamian summer and the two-month absence of the goddess Inanna.

          Inanna’s symbol was the star:  the eight-pointed star denoted the Venus-Sun conjunction every eight years, and the five-pointed star marked the path she traced in the zodiac during those eight years.  Sumerian and Babylonian astrologers studied the heavens and the apparent effects of the movements of the heavenly bodies on their society.  Accordingly, Inanna/Ishtar brought them love, beauty, sexual ecstasy, fertility, strength, and prosperity.  Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician, studied astrology in Babylon and carried his knowledge back to Athens.  Luminous bodies in the sky were personified by gods and goddesses! . . .  the idea grabbed a hold in ancient Greece.  As societies reeled across the canvas of history, Inanna became Ishtar, who became Aphrodite, who became Venus; the golden planet trailing her powers of love and life, up to this day.

          So here I lay on a black sand beach on an island in the middle of the Pacific . . . . a child of Venus if ever there was one.  How easy it was for me to lavish my body with coconut oil and surrender to the heat of the sun . . . how natural to revel in the sensuous pleasures and beauties of Paradise.  Be that as it may, I acutely felt the charge of Inanna;  with James I had conceived, birthed, and nurtured Venus and Her Lover, and it was our duty to bring it up to stand on its own legs in the world. 

          I heaved a sigh, sinking even more into the warm black sand . . . perhaps the eroded remains of ancient Lemuria.  Last night I had joined the Dolphinville community in celebrating the Venus Transit, one of the rarest of planetary alignments.  Over 70 people had gathered at Sky Island Ranch, the home of dolphin researcher Joan Ocean and visionary artist Jean-Luc Bozzoli.   Nassim spoke to the group from an astronomy point of view, Joseph Mina elucidated the astrology of the event, and I recited my poem, “Rebirth of Venus”.  The planet Venus finds itself visibly between the Earth and the Sun every 113-130 years, and its passage, or transit, across the face of the Sun occurs in pairs eight years apart.  Last night at sunset, in Hawai’i, Venus began its “eclipse” of the Sun (really it was a tiny dark dot compared to Sol).  Eight years later, in 2012, the second Venus Transit would end just before sunset in Hawai’i on June 6^th.
 

           After the explanations, Joan had led us in meditation, invoking the guidance of ancient Lemurians, spirit guides, and Star Elders, and encouraging us to learn “pod consciousness” from the dolphins as we came together and strengthened the power of love.  As we expanded our awareness, she said, we would have more contact with interdimensional and extradimensional beings, who could show the way through these times of fear, vengeance, and destruction.  She explained that 2004 was an opening of a doorway, through which we could establish peace on Earth, before the closing of the doorway in 2012, by many predictions the “end of the age”.  This Venus Transit raised another notch the increasing influence of the Divine Feminine on Earth.  The pendulum had been swinging back throughout the last century, but if you measure the status of women among people by how they revere their goddess(es), we still had a ways to go.  I remembered all that Inanna was to her people.  Here in Pele’s realm on the Big Island of Hawai’i, by using our position at 19.5° latitude as an acupuncture point of the Earth Mother as well as an energy upwelling place, we could share our love with the planet and send it out to the Universe.  We all visualized this.  Meditating with scores of people nourished me, reminding me of my priestess days in our pyramid by the beach on Caribbean shores.

          In the 1980’s Joan Ocean had embarked on what she called “participatory research” with dolphins.  Instead of studying captive cetaceans in an aquarium lab or netted pool, she preferred to interact with them in the wild and discover what they had to teach.  Her experiences are detailed in her books, Dolphin Connection and Dolphins into the Future.   It occurred to me that James and I were also doing participatory research, which we documented in Venus and Her Lover.  Like some brave (or foolhardy?) Acapulco cliff divers, James and I had thrown ourselves into the Sea of the Collective Unconscious, where we did our best to keep our heads above water as we invoked archetypes, balanced and merged our own Shakti and Shiva energies, and set our course to reach the legendary Isle of the Thousand-petalled Lotus at the crown of our voyage.  For us, we were learning to live our lives according to tantric principles using the “sink or swim” method.

Swimming with Dolphins
by Francene Hart
(francenehart.com)

       Here on the Big Island, the community of dolphin swimmers continually shared with one another their tales of healing, wonder, enlightenment, and exhilaration in the sea.  We, too, had learned to swim with them:  stroking a ways out to meet them, making no sudden nor splashy movements, keeping hands at our sides, not chasing them. 

              My first underwater contact with them was remarkable.   As I swam out into a broad bay, I heard high-pitched squeaks and tried to follow them.  Suddenly I caught a flash of light grey in the blue depths –  too fast for me to follow, so I just floated there, peering through my mask at how sunbeams filtered into a gaping ultramarine prodigiousness. Then, without warning, a pod of about a dozen dolphins sped toward me.  Before I could react, they encircled me, hung suspended in the water around me, and, as if on cue, bombarded me all at once with squeaks and high frequency chatter for about a minute. Just as they suddenly turned with a pump of two of their powerful tails, they disappeared.  Laughter erupted through my snorkel so fast, I had to put my head above water and rip off my snorkel and mask, and there, gazing at the slope of the volcano, I guffawed at the distant palm trees.  My body tingled with such an overdose of joy, I could only hoot and holler.  That was how the dolphins welcomed me to Hawai’i.

       Then I knew what the buzz in Dolphinville was about.  It had felt to me like I had been blasted with a palpable salvo of love.  No wonder Greek and Roman statues depicted Aphrodite and Venus accompanied by dolphins.  She had been born, after all, of the sea.  Logically, Poseidon recruited dolphins as “messengers of love”.  My Venusian curiosity propelled me to continue to swim with them, to learn from them what they had obviously mastered:  the vibration of love.  While that first swim was my most physically forceful contact with the spinner dolphins, I continued to attend their lessons in gentle grace.

((( )))

          The slap of a wave on the beach brought me out of my reverie.  I opened my eyes and sat up.  It was hot.  I should go; much work awaited me at home.  We were preparing for the first presentation of our tantric art and poetry in Hawai’i, and James was busy stretching canvases for the show.  As I gazed at the horizon, my eyes caught the brief gleam and tiny splash of a dorsal fin.  Without hesitation I grabbed my fins, snorkel, and mask, and stepped into the sea.  Work could wait.

          Swimming out to where I had seen the fin, I looked around for them to come up for air again.   Even though I did not always do it, I preferred to wait for dolphins to approach me; by floating in a meditation of gratitude, I felt, they would be attracted to me. After awhile I heard the rushing sound of their exhale, and it seemed they might be heading my direction.  Breathe in, relax, breathe out, they taught me.  Submerging myself, I soon spied the pod well below me, moving lazily in unison.  It amazed me how effortlessly a group of them could move in harmony, apparently communicating psychically.  Their slow gliding told me they were sleeping.  It seems that they rotated leadership, the leader keeping watch and piloting while the others rested.  Not wanting to disturb them, I quietly observed as they slid into the turquoise vastness.  Hoping that no one else had seen them, I slowly paddled back to shore.   Sometimes I had witnessed sleeping dolphins pursued, and though I and others tried to educate tourists and new swimmers, not everyone followed the same protocol, which meant that someday swimming with wild dolphins might be no more, either through the dolphins going elsewhere or government regulation.  I was grateful for my time with them now.

          Floating in the refreshing water, I felt washed through and through with freedom and love . . . love of my family, love of other creatures, love for the Earth, love for all Life.  If we were, in fact, treading through a portal – when the Divine Feminine amplified its power and balanced the Divine Masculine – when Venus and Mars could dance their joy unencumbered – then I was happy to be here now, bathing in this sublime moment. 

          I felt Venus smiling.

Return to Top