CHAPTER SIXTEEN VENUS AND

It is no longer fashionable to believe that Venus and Mars are beautiful bodies, with some congenital blemishes. Like Moon and Mercury, like Earth itself, they shriek of more recent disasters. The major question now is “ How recent is ‘recent’?” We address the question to their peculiarities of motion, position, composition, and behavior. Myth and legend (in its deliberate attempts at science) afford voluminous material about both planets, their transactions with each other, and their encounters with Moon and Earth. Research of the past generation has evidenced that the planet Venus dominated the human cosmogonical mind in the years between 3 500 and 2 000 BP and that the planet Mars entered upon the competition to catastrophize the human mind in the latter 800 years of this period. Venus had hundreds of names and identities, many of them secret, sacred, and obfuscated. For example, the Hebrew word “shakris ” means the Evening Star, Morning Star, to sacrifice, to kill something, to make sacred. Logically, one initially seeks information about the first ap-pearance of these celestial bodies; when were they born? In th