The patterns of Venus’s movement across the sky | Hacker News Reader

The patterns of Venus’s movement across the sky

timeanddate.com

34 pointsNKosmatos9 comments

Venus is actually one of the examples of where the adage about religion being destroyed not being rebuilt the same way falls flat.

Across different continents and different time periods, Venus's weird ass orbit has led to a number of katabasis narratives.

The oldest written religious story is Ianna's descent to the underworld, where a goddess associated with the morning star (Venus) goes into the underworld before emerging again later on, just as the planet's orbit causes it to dip below the horizon before emerging again.

On the other side of the world the Aztecs had the story as Quetzalcoatl, again associated with the celestial body, going into the underworld to resurrect humanity.

As cultures evolved to watch the celestial orbits, the strange movements of Venus seemed to have inspired their imaginations around the idea that what was put beneath the earth might rise again.

Something I've often wondered since learning all this is if Venus had a standard orbit - would human cultures today still have a similar degree of attention towards the concept of resurrection? I'm not so sure.

Edit: one of the oldest surviving religious stories

(I need a better HN client that supports edits - any recommendations for Android?)

i use a stock web browser. all of the features, none of the cost

I have been thinking about Norse and Native American myths lately, and it seems to me that their purpose was not to be a scientifically accurate description of the world…but they were meant to be memorable inside an oral culture.

If the migration path passed by a mountain that looked like a sleeping man, then it was natural to conjure up a myth about a giant (perhaps while you camped nearby) and tell it to the kids. If it helped them remember the place then so much the better.

These myths were more like an error correcting code. It meant that it would be transmitted and not forgotten for hundreds of generations. The details didn’t have to be true, they just had to be memorable.

Myths about the planets would have been a great way to make sure future generations took this hard won knowledge seriously.

The ancient Greeks knew about epicycles…if you look at some Greek dances the entire family makes a large circle and steps to the right but occasionally takes a step left. Just like an epicycle. I think this was a cultural expression of some piece of knowledge they valued.

I think this aspect of religion/history is fascinating. One of my favorites is the myth of the seven sisters who became the Pleiades constellation. It's a myth that appears to have originated before settlers migrated from Africa to Australia. In every culture, we see a story of seven sisters chased into the heavens by a hunter, but there's only six stars! The seventh star has faded from sight over the last few thousand years, yet the myth has persisted. It's likely the oldest myth in human history!

The sun and moon have resurrection stories applied to them as well, and they are much easier to track than Venus, so I'm leaning on yes these theories would not be dependent on Venus.

The human psyche want's to have answers. Over time, those answers tend to be refined. However, what happens after death is just something that can't be answered, so theories remain.

One of the cool things about the path of Venus relative to Earth is that the pattern forms a pentagram [0]. Watching an animation [1] of the path reminds me of the Spirograph toy I had as a kid.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagram#Pentagram_of_Venus

1: https://www.sciencealert.com/images/2019-07/ysaLqAf1.gif

i have never seen this before. now, i want to see it for the earth-moon, or the planets with a 3:2 relationship, or the..., or the....

thanks! i needed a new hobby related rabbit hole of projects for when we have cloudy skies, but still want to do something astro related.

Funny I just saw venus earlier and i've never seen it actually have a visible diameter rather than just being a bright dot. It does look like a small sphere right now.

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