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When love and beauty return to our skies: this week on The Dark Sky

A lot has happened in the world since the goddess of love and beauty disappeared from view last March, and this week she’s welcomed back to the stage of the sky as evening star.

The goddess of love and beauty is the planet Venus and she was born out of the foaming waters of the sea. 

This week, Venus will emerge in the evening sky in the west, in front of the constellation Cancer, the crab.

 Cancer is called the “crab” because the ancients viewed this region of the sky as the place where the heart forces of the human being begin their development. This was a process that needed protection, the way the hard outer shell of the crab protects its own soft inner organism. 

Now even though we’ll see Venus this week, we won’t be able to see the crab constellation because the Sun is too close to this region of stars. But when you do see it, you’ll notice that it doesn’t look like a crab at all. The naming of regions of the sky was not based on what the star patterns looked like, it was based on what the ancients believed was streaming toward humanity from the stars.

More than that, they used sacred symbols to express this understanding, which we know as the signs and symbols of the zodiac. The symbol for Cancer kind of looks like two tadpoles encircling one another, and it reveals this idea that the heart forces develop in the cosmic region of Cancer at the same time that they develop in the human physical body. The symbol for Cancer would have invoked the sense that through the heart we are united in a greater reality. 

This shows up later in the renaissance art of Sandro Botticelli. His painting “The Birth of Venus” shows Zephyrus and Aura blowing the goddess of love and beauty to shore, where she is attended by a goddess of the seasons~an example of cosmic and earthly forces uniting in love and beauty. 

We can all use these ideas this week as the goddess of love and beauty returns to the sky, heralded by Venus as our evening star!