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Many stories about the planets and the stars tell a patriarchal tale. The first thing I noticed when Astronomer Suzanne Débarbat guided me through Paris Observatory was the fresco of the Transit of Venus, one of only two depictions of women, among the hundreds of images of white European men I saw that day.
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Image: Video still from ‘In the Footsteps of Venus’ 2020, LH
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| Millions of stars that are gravitationally coupled eclipse each other. Some of these were visible to ancient peoples, like β Persei, a binary eclipsing star situated in the constellation Perseus, about 90 light years from Earth. Every 2.87 days, Algol A appears to vanish for many hours when it is eclipsed by the fainter Algol B. |
Image: Screen shot from Stellarium by LH.
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| Arabs had also seen the star flickering in the sky thousands of years ago and called it رأس الغول ‘Ra's al-ghûl, or head of the ghoul. Ghouls for Arabs were for the Greeks ‘gorgos’, meaning terrible or dreadful, possibly with the same root as the Sanskrit गर्जन 'garjana'. |
Image: Disk-fibula with a gorgoneion. Bronze, Asia Minor, 6th century BCE. Collection Musée du Louvre. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.
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The Greeks placed the star in the constellation of Perseus, which is meant to represent the deity with his sword in the air, carrying the Gorgon's head. Here, Algol is Medusa's eye.
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Image: The Canes Venatici constellation from the Uranographia, 1690, by Johannes Hevelius. Public Domain. Source: Wikipedia.
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| Yet, for millennia, Algol’s occulations were taken as a sign of bad omen, death by decapitation, or violence. As Gorgon, the star embodies unbridled female malevolence. Why should this or any monster be gendered at all? |
Image: Video still 'In the Footsteps of Venus' by LH.
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| It was Débarbat who inspired me to reconstruct the work of those women whose work had been eclipsed from the limited documentary archive. Female astronomers like Edmée Chandon and Rose Bonnet. |
Iimage: 'Edmée Chandon (1885-1944)', ink on optical mirrror, Lily Hibberd, 2015.
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| But it was seeing this fresco at Paris Observatory of the transit of Venus that the patriarchal violence of historical astronomy dawned on me. Here, as Débarbat pointed out, we see that the 'Sun wants to conquer Venus'. |
Image: Still from video ‘In the Footsteps of Venus’, Lily Hibberd, 2020. Fresco by M. Dupain, 1886.
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| For Earthlings, Venus is the second brightest object in the night sky. It also seems to disappear and reappear every few days due to its synodic cycle and proximity to the Sun. |
Image: Venus from the International Space Station. NASA.
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| As such, myriad ancient cosmologies around the world have associated the planet Venus with the virility and power of plural genders. |
Image: ShardulaHara-muti, Guru of the Asuras, 1842. Source: Wikipedia Commons. Public Domain.
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| If we decolonise the naming of Venus, we discover that in almost every modern language it has a name that dates back to ancient history or even pre-history that is still in use today. |
Image: Venus seated on a rainbow, with her devotees who offer their hearts to her; from Christine de Pizan’s ‘Book of the Queen’, 15th century. License: Wikipedia Commons.
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| In ancient Sumeria, Akkadia and Babylon, the Star of Ištar was the most powerful feminine symbol. The eight-pointed sign is thought to refer to the eight-year cycle of the planet Venus. Initially shown in a sacred trinity with the Sun (Shamash) and the Moon (Sin), Ištar later supplanted the other gods as Queen of the Universe. |
Image: Kudurru of King Melishipak I with Ištar 1186–1172 BCE. Collection Louvre Museum. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.
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| In the earlier Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur (from c.2112 BCE), the fertility goddess Ištar was called Inanna, which means ‘Lady’ (Nin) and ‘Sky’ (An). Inanna famously journeyed into the underworld, ruled by her sister Erishkigal, but was rescued by transgendered figures sent by the god Enki (Ea). |
Image: Detail, 'Queen of the Night Relief’ (approximate original colouring), Mesopotamian terracotta plaque, believed to represent Ishtar or her older sister Ereshkigal, c.19th/18th century BCE. Collection British Museum. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 France.
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| The ancient Greeks saw the synodic cycle of Venus as two different stars: the morning star Φωσφόρος, Phōsphoros ‘Bringer of Light’, and the evening star Ἓσπερος or Heōsphoros. |
Image: Contest between Venus and Hesperus, Apollo sitting as judge, 1st century BCE, from the Casa di Gavius Rufus, Pompeii, Italy. Collection Naples National Archeological Museum. License: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
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| Babylonians created the first organised system of astrology in the 2nd millennium BCE. |
Image: Late Babylonian clay tablet, 1000BC-500 BCE. Astronomical treatise #1 of Mul-Apin ("the plough star”). Listing 3 divisions of the heavens, dates (set in an ideal 360-day year) of rising principal stars, those that rise and set together, and constellations in the path of the moon. Source: British Museum. License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
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| Māori First Peoples have thousands of years of knowledge of planetary motions of the visible stars in the Southern Sky: Kōpū (Venus), Hine-i-tīweka (Jupiter), Matawhero (Mars) and Whiro (Mercury). |
Image: Magellan radar composite of Paoro Tholi, a small dome-like mountain or hill on Venus, named after the Māori (New Zealand) goddess of echoes, who gave voice to the first woman Marikoriko. Courtesy NASA.
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| Astronomy is deeply embedded in many of the hundreds of First Nations cultures across Australia. Dating back 65,000 years, the world’s first astronomers provide some of the oldest star names ever known. |
Image: Unurgunite, an ancestral figure who fights the Moon for the Boorong people of the Wergaia language group in northwestern Victoria, was added to the catalogue of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for the star (Sigma) Canis Majoris in 2017. Photo: LH from Stellarium.
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| Around 35,000 years ago, the first 'Venus' figurines were carved from limestone, ivory, serpentine, bone and fired clay. Many have been found in tact across Europe and Eurasia, and the practice continued for more than 20,000 years. |
Image: Assemblage of 36 ceramics artifacts from Vela Spila, Croatia, offer the first evidence of ceramic figurative art in late Upper Palaeolithic Europe, c. 17,500–15,000. All are broken, but they seem to have been animals. Courtesy Farbstein R, et al. (2012) ‘First Epigravettian Ceramic Figurines from Europe (Vela Spila, Croatia)’. PLoS ONE 7(7): e41437. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0041437
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| Instead of a fertility fetish, feminists have called it the First Mother as a matriarchal talisman for the cult of a great mother goddess. Other theories suggest that the figurines may be self-portraits. |
Image: Detail of ‘Vénus de Willendorf et fossiles’, original daguerreotype ©Dominique Genty, courtesy Dominique Genty. Vénus de Willendorf, 28,000–25,000 BCE. Collection Vienna Natural History Museum.
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| Toward the end of the 16th century, Venus was taken up as a popular figurative trope in European art, not only as an excuse to depict a naked woman in a sensual way, but also because Venus had become a common adjective in many European languages used to describe an attractive woman. |
Image: Venus and Cupid holding a mirror, oil on canvas, Peter Paul Rubens. c.1650-1700. Collection Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
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Venus? Madonna? Or Queen?
'In the cosmos, women are portrayed as either monsters or domestic nurturers.'
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'The struggle of women in science is written in the stars', Leila A McNeill, Aeon.com, 2016. Image: Unpacking of the face of the Statue of Liberty, June 17, 1885. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
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| Superstition and assumptions are at the heart of discrimination about women. Astronomy, with its early ties to astrology, and the assumptions made about women’s lack of abilities to analyse, theorise and lead new discovery, has been hampered by similar cultural deductions. TS |
Image: Lithograph of a witch burning, Martin Disteli (1802–1844). Central Library, Solothurn, Switzerland. Public Domain.
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'A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them.' |
'Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) astronomer, sister of William; and others'. Adrienne Rich, ‘Planetarium’, Collected Poems: 1950-2012.
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The first goddess to emerge from Chaos into Cosmos, Gaia both embodied and symbolised Earth and nature. Her Germanic counterpart, Erde, gives us our planet’s name. Wife to Ouranos (Uranus) and first mother to all living beings (including the Titans), she plotted with her son, Kronos (Saturn), to overthrow her husband after he consumed her children.
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Image: Gaia rises up from the ground, in the Pergamon Altar, marble, c.197-159 BCE, held in the Pergamon Museum, Germany. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
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| One of the nine Muses of ancient Greece, Urania was the only muse to science, her sisters being devoted to art, music, dance and poetry. Child of Zeus and Mnemosyne, her name was taken from her grandparents Uranus and Gaia. Unusually empowered for a female diety, Urania wore a cloak embroidered with stars and held a globe and staff for measuring observations. |
The Muse Urania, Anonymous, 150 130 - 150 CE. ©Museo Nacional del Prado. License: Prado no profit publications.
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| For the ancient Greeks, the archetype of the femme fatale is, however, embodied in the constellation Cygnus – Greek for Swan. To get away from Zeus, who was stalking her, Nemesis disguised herself as different animals. But Zeus turned himself into a swan, which Nemesis as a goose could not resist. Nemesis became pregnant and delivered an egg but abandoned it. |
Image: 'Leda and the Swan', copy by an unkown artist of a lost painting by Michelangelo, after 1530. National Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
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| Aphrodite later became the lover of Ares (Mars) the God of War. They would have three children together – the fearsome twins Phobos and Deimos who accompanied their father into battle (the moons of Mars), and Eros the God of Love (an asteroid of Mars). |
Image: Curiosity's view of the Martian moons: Phobos passing in front of Deimos – in real-time. NASA.
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| The larger system the Greek astrologers created for each of the planets centred on binaries of gender (masculine or feminine), value (diurnal or nocturnal), and quality (good or bad). |
Image: Fresco showing the seduction of Venus by Mars, 1st century AD, from Pompeii. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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| Since Carl Linnaeus first used them to differentiate the sex of plants in 1753, the astronomical symbols for Venus and Mars have remained the signs used in biology to designate feminine and masculine: ♀ and ♂. |
Image: Detail of a Schlumbergera flower, with the gynoecium and the stamens that surround it. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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‘Astronomia’, meaning the study of stars is a terracotta sculpture by the Doulton Factory on the façade of the 1892-99 Royal Observatory Greenwich building designed by William Crisp in close collaboration with astronomer William Christie. This coincided with the start of the Astrographic Catalogue project, for which women were entering the astronomy workforce. - Toner Stevenson
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Image: ‘Astronomia’ by Dalton & Co Lambeth and WJ Neatby Sculp, 1895 Photo. T. Stevenson.
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| Binary archetypes ‘have structured Western systems of representation’ making anyone except older white men ‘practically invisible up until the twentieth century’. But new signs are showing up in the night sky! |
Image: New Zealand Parliament flies non-binary flag. NZ Government. License: CC 0.3.
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stars around the beautiful moon
hide back their luminous form
whenever all full she shines
on the earth
silvery |
‘If not, winter : fragments of Sappho’ by Anne Carson, 2002. From Sappho, lyric poetess, Lesbos, Asia Minor, 580-160 BCE. Image: Sappho Patera on Venus. Magellan radar image, NASA.
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When the planet Venus makes its passage across the face of the Sun, it is one of the rarest astronomical events seen from Earth. Repeating approximately every 243 years, Venus is a tiny black spot against the Sun’s brilliance. Why was this planet cast as a woman by the Romans, as well as ancient Sumarians who called it Ištar?
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Image: Detail of Venus transiting across the face of the Sun, image taken June 6, 2012 by the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Courtesy NASA.
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| β Persei was an infamous star for many ancient civilisations. For the Hebrews it was Rōsh-ha-Satan, or ‘Satan's Head’, while the Chinese called it 大陵五 , the 5th star of ‘the Piled-up Corpses’ asterism, and around 3,200 years ago it is thought to have appeared in the Egyptian Calendar of Lucky and Unlucky Days. |
Image: Algol A+B movie (still) imaged with the CHARA interferometer, 2013. License CC BY-SA 3.0.
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‘Gorgo’ better known as Medusa, was one of the three monstrous sisters called the Gorgons in Greek mythology. Serpent-adorned Medusa was the one whose gaze could turn anyone who looked at her into stone.
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Image: Video still 'In the Footsteps of Venus' by LH.
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Débarbat explained that while in European star charts, Perseus holds up Medusa’s decapitated head, Algol featured in important early observations of binary stars by Paris Observatory female astronomers in the 1920s.
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Image: Video still 'In the Footsteps of Venus' by LH.
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Maybe Algol is no mere myth but an archetypal precedent with an enduring relevance, as it represents the threat of women, and their dangerous, uncontrollable forces!
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Image: Video still 'In the Footsteps of Venus' by LH.
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| Chandon was the first woman appointed as an astronomer at Paris Observatory, but it was Bonnet who produced original research on binary eclipsing stars and Beta Persei. Only her thesis survives as a memoir, since no portrait of Bonnet can be found. |
Image: Title page of Rose Bonnet's thesis. Collection Paris Observatory. Photo: LH
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| Historian Laurence Bobis tells us that in the European ‘anthropocentric naming system of celestial bodies’ Venus is the ‘only planet to have been given a feminine name’. |
From Bobis, ‘Venus and Mars, Gendered Stars’, 2015. Image: Infrared photo of lower clouds on the night surface of Venus. Courtesy JAXA/ISAS/DARTS/Damia Bouic.
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| Venus was linked to gods who cyclically appear in the heavens, like Inanna the Sumerian Queen of Heaven, and عثتر Aṯtar, a deity of pre-Islamic civilisations of the Arabian Peninsula. |
Image: Akkadian cylinder seal representing the goddess Ishtar and her sukkal Ninshubur, c.2334-2154 BCE. Collection University of Chicago. License: Wikimedia Commons CC 0.3.
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| In Hindu astrology, the planet Venus शुक्र Śukra (Shukra) is a feminine and gentle man. Associated with fertility beauty and enthusiasm, Shukra means pure or brightness. |
Image: Śukra (Shukra). Unknown artist. Public Domain.
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| In 'Rig Veda', a Sanskrit Shloka (hymn), शुक्र Śukra is named 'Venushchodayat'. And the word Venus came to Latin from the Sanskrit term वनस् vánas (‘loveliness, desire’). |
Image: Three Astral Figures, Indra, Shukra and Indrani; ascribed to Mahesh of Chamba, c. 1725-50. Public Domain. License: Wikimedia Commons.
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In keeping with Venus's synodic cycle, Ištar was depicted in the morning as a virgin, in charge of war and death; and by night, the ruler of love and sex, in the guise of a prostitute. During the 3rd millennium BCE, the Ištar cult was central to Mesopotamian and Canaanite civilisations.
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Image: Ishtar holding her symbol. Terracotta relief, early 2nd millennium BC. From Eshnunna. Collection. Louvre Museum. Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen. Source: Wikimedia Commons. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic.
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In the Akkadian version of the story, from early 2nd millennium BCE, all sexual activity ceases on Earth with Ištar’s descent into the underworld. Ea, the god of wisdom and culture, creates Asu-shu-namir, an intersex being, who is given the water of life to revive Ištar from the dead.
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Image: Cuneiform tablet with the Akkadian version of the legend of Ishtar's descent to the Underworld, from the library of King Ashurbanipal (669-631 BC). Held in the British Museum. Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen. Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.
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| But Sumerians knew 2000 years earlier that the morning and evening stars were the same celestial object, embodied in a single deity, Inanna. |
Image: Winged goddess, 2nd millennium BC. Collection Musée du Louvre. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 France
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| In contrast, inhabitants of Medieval England still saw the planet as two stars: 'morgensteorra' in the morning and 'æfensteorra' in the evening. It was not until the 13th century CE that Venus was adopted as the planet's name in Western astronomy. |
Image: Venus from 'Codex de Sphaera,' c1469 CE, attributed to Cristoforo De Predis. Collection Bibliothèque Estense, Modena. Public Domain.
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The dawn-star Kōpū (or Tāwera), is the subject of hundreds of Māori poems. And in Māori cosmology, Venus has a wife Pareārau, meaning ‘Pare of a hundred lovers', who, as Jupiter, takes off to have affairs with other stars.
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Image: Magellan radar composite of Tāwera Vallis, a shallow valley on the planet Venus, named after a Māori word for planet Venus (morning star only). Courtesy NASA.
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| For Yolŋu First Nations people in Northern Australia, Barnumbirr, the morning star guided the first humans, the Djanggawul sisters, to Australia. |
Image: The Djanggawul Fossae, a trough or fissure system on Pluto, named after the Yolŋu Djanggawul sisters. Courtesy NASA.
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Carved from mammoth tusk, the Venus of Lespugue dates from 26,000-24,000 BCE, making it up to 9000 years older than the Lauscaux caves. As one of the earliest known forms of sculpture and ceramics, these figurines are thought to represent a creator goddess of fertility and health.
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Image: Detail of ‘Venus de Lespugue’, original daguerreotype ©Dominique Genty, courtesy Dominique Genty. Vénus de Willendorf, 28,000–25,000 BCE. Collection Musée de l'Homme, Paris.
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| This reminds me of the talisman of Paris Observatory, known as ‘the virgin of the underground’. |
Image: The ‘Notre Dame de dessous terre’, was placed by the founding astronomers in the caves of Paris Observatory in 1671. Video still 'In the Footsteps of Venus' by LH.
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Within a century, Venus had become a euphemism for the female nude, without the need for any link to divinity or astronomy.
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Image: Liberty Leading the People, Eugène Delacroix, 1830. Musée du Louvre, Paris Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
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Misogyny against women has for millenia been perpetrated under the charge of ‘witchcraft’ and goes all the way back to Hypatia in Alexandria. Even the celebrated physicist Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) had to defend and free his mother, Katharina, against charges of witchcraft in 1621. - Toner Stevenson
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Image: Statue of Katharina Kepler in Eltingen. CC BY-SA.
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As the Greek myth goes, the Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters, danced together under the night sky, which caused poor Orion to desire them, so he hunted them for seven years. Zeus turned the girls into stars to help them get away, but Orion has chased them every night ever since.
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Image: 'The Pleiades’, Elihu Vedder, 1885. Metropolitan Museum of Art. License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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| UK classicist Mary Beard argues that the Western world’s demonisation of women in power can be traced back to Ancient Greece and archetypes of powerful women as irresponsible, dangerous and conniving. |
Image: Still from 'Aellita Queen of Mars', Yakov Protazanov, 1924. Source: YouTube. Public Domain.
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| In a reflection of the Inanna myth, Persephone was the daughter of Demeter and Zeus but was kidnapped by Hades, the God of The Underworld, who tricked her into remaining with him for three months every year (Winter) before she could return to bring the harvest (Spring) back to the Earth – thus she became the Goddess of The Underworld and The Seasons. |
Image: Hades abducts Persephone. Pottery from Taranto (Italy), 350-325 BCE. Pierson Museum, Amsterdam. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
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The largest of the zodiac, Virgo (meaning ‘virgin’ in Latin) was associated with the feminine goddess of fertility by many ancient cultures, and was represented by the grain of harvest – the brightest in her constellation, Spica, is Latin for ‘ear of grain’. Virgo also contains a rich field of galaxies, known as the Virgo Cluster.
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Image: Over 75 million light years away in the constellation of Virgo lies NGC 4981 — a spiral galaxy with a rather explosive past. Source: ESO. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
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| Born from the severed remains of her father, Ouranos, Aphrodite rose from the sea foam bringing beauty into the world. She was represented by the first star to appear at night and the last to leave in the morning, forever associating her with love and sexual union. The Romans would later rename her after their own Goddess of Love, Venus. |
Image: Hermaphroditos statue (herma of Aphroditus, a male form of Aphrodite), Ancient Greece. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Wikmedia Commons. Public Domain.
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Astronomy has its roots in the mystical arts of astrology – the ancient belief that the planets as gods had an enduring influence on human lives. The gendered, and unusually balanced, astrological zodiac is divided into six female and six male signs.
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Image: Wikmedia Commons. Public Domain.
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| When it came to European astronomy, the gods and deities of Greek mythology provided the names for the celestial bodies of the solar system. Just as in Greek astrology, all the planets are classified as masculine, with the same exception of the Moon and Venus as feminine, and Mercury as neuter. |
Image: Overview of Mercury, NASA Science Solar System Exploration. Courtesy NASA
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‘The origins of these symbols are unclear, they appear to be the result of a stylisation process, Venus' circle being the outline of a mirror, Mars' being that of a shield.’
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L. Bobis, ‘Venus and Mars, Gendered Stars,’ 2015. Image: 'The Toilet of Venus,' Diego Velázquez, 1644. The National Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
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Established in 1919, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) still authorise the names of every celestial object or feature. A large majority of these names are European and masculine. The planet Venus is the only exception.
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Image: Sapas Mons, 3D perspective of the surface of Venus. NASA/JPL.
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On Venus, the northern continent is called Ishtar Terra after the Babylonian goddess of love, and is about the size of Australia. Ishtar Terra also contains volcanoes named after famous deceased women who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to their field.
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Image: View of Ishtar Terra, Venus. Courtesy NASA.
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