“Who’s that beautiful girl? Could she be any cuter?”
Oh, that’s just Venus, the Goddess of Beauty, the Queen of this story hour, the blessed Virgin to herself. We gracefully approach the flowing robes of…wait a minute, that reminds me of a story. BRB.
My husband was playing a music festival in Portland, Oregon a few years back. He was talking with a band mate when she said “What is that wonderful smell?” And, like magic, the flowing robes of Tinariwen flooded around them like a sea, enveloping them in a mysterious and intoxicating aroma. The musical entourage passed by and through them as they left backstage to go onstage to perform. My husband still gets little anime eyed whenever he tells this story. These are the flowing robes of Venus.
The Earth goddess herself, the Queen of this day’s story hour, the lovely Fiddler’s Green of the dreamworld, Venus brings with her memory, pleasantry, intoxication, aromas, music and friendship. She shares foods and comforts, soft fabrics and gentle touches, she is patient and understands that the natural rhythms of time find no need to form into the arbitrary lines of linear space. The circle trumps the square.
And as much as I would love to wax lyrical about Venus, she is busy acting as our welcoming committee for the Decans of Taurus, the traveling emissaries to her Venusian palace. First Mercury, then the Moon and finally, Saturn.
Scene 1, Act 1: We are in the throne room of Venus, but looking at a cathedra that belongs to another deity, Hermes, the prince of roadways, thieves, literature, language, travel, luck, and invention. THAT’S ALL. (actually there is a LOT more that Hermes gets his sticky little hands on). I love Hermes, I use his Roman name, Mercury, when I’m speaking about the astrological transits in the sky, but when I talk about Hermes the they/them, I use this name more often. It feels like the darker, trickster, Dia De Los Muertos genre of this god. It is this darker, shadowed, sultry Hermes that draws us into the Venus throne room, to see him slouched over the chair. I imagine them with hematite worry beads sliding through their fingers, eyes down turned in contemplation while scheming the next plan, momentarily still. It is here that we sit on the floor and listen to their story, for it is Hermes who is the Decan ruler of Taurus I
Something is present & palpable in this space about the transmission or the act of correspondence. Mercury in the temple of Venus teaches about the transmission through an embodied correspondence, or transmission of divine messaging. To correspond is to communicate with to seek a harmony or an agreement. The conversation in a corresponding musical act of Mercury, is so delightful and brings levity at the bottom of the snow. In Salvador Dalí ’s famous painting The Persistence of Memory, there is the image of a melting clock, revolting against the idea that time is permanent in it’s exactitude. Dalí himself said he painted the soft pocket watch, not as a response to the coldness of the theory of relativity but instead inspired by the surrealist perception of a Camembert melting in the sun. Dalí’s natal Venus resides in this decan. His defiance through paint is a transmission of Mercury. The Persistence of Memory is just that, it persists as a memory of itself, not of the cold thing that initially imprinted in the mind. A memory is a memory of the last time it was remembered and so the trickster games of Hermes continue, in our own minds, somatic transmissions of melting falsehoods and formless truths. Hermes is in the weeds here, getting lost in the fields around the temple of Venus because it wants to.
“One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.”
― Antonio Porchia
On first glance, Mercury in Taurus’ domain may not feel like a fitted union. But with any decan ruler, there is a reason that these two were brought together. What resource does Mercury have that Taurus must utilize? The Method of Ioci or “Memory Palace” is a mnemonic system that utilizes memorized spatial relationships to establish order in the mind and recollect memorized content. It uses a visual (Venus) story to temporarily keep information (Mercury) in proper order for recollection. This incredibly practical method is a charm of this Mercurial decan. While memory can melt with time, with attention and neglect, it still stores in the body and Mercury here can provide a system of recollection. The body keeps the score, yeah? But not all memory is good, it doesn’t always allow us to hope. Oftentimes, memory leads to melancholy and that can lead to worry.
ENTER THE FIVE OF PENTACLES. The Lord of Worry
In the entire Fool’s journey of tarot, the Five of Pentacles is the only card showing snow, adding cold icing to the somber cake of this card. There are two characters depicted here, disconnected from each other outside of their shared pathetic condition. They both wear tattered clothes & poor footwear. What’s that phrase that northerners like to say “There’s no bad weather, only unsuitable clothing?” One of the characters here shows head to toe injury and is wearing a bell around his neck announcing that he clearly needs some help here, folks. The second character is a bit more lost, slower even, a posture of resignation, leaning to be out of the scene altogether. If it weren’t for that stained glass window, there would be little beauty in this card. Our eyes are drawn away from the distressed people towards the thing of beauty & solace of the window, so let’s model good behavior for those downcast people and look in at that window. The alchemy of making glass conjures Mercury + Venus, the sanctuary they share in Taurus I. That alchemy is also reminiscent of the Persistence of Time. The sand begins a journey, once held the memory of washing ashore, transformed into an amorphous state of both the crystalline structure of a solid and the molecular randomness of a liquid. So mote it be glass. From there the glass is shaped into a panel where light is cast, separating those on each side of the window. This window is the invitation to the characters in the card, that there is sanctuary within, if they only soften themselves like warm Camembert. Taurus I shows a result of the psychopomp, Hermes, stirring up the bio-luminescence of memory, in the place that the Moon exalts. The moon is a time keeper too, yet in a harmonic time signature that Venus recognizes. We watch, now, as the Moon softly takes the reigns from Hermes and we travel on to Taurus II
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