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In Praise of Venus (Illusion ends 2012)

The planet Venus is my Beloved. She is between me and the Sun. I give her all of me and open my heart to her. She is embodied in the woman I love, who appears to me as a young girl. One day, she shall also be the tall, masculine shadow behind me as I kneel before the grave of my sweet mother Memory. This will not happen tonight, nor indeed can my mother ever truly die, being the consciousness of the continuity of existence.

Venus is the Evening Star and Venus is the Morning Star. She brings me light like a flower when I face the Rising Sun before the dawn. As I accept the day that is to come, she burns within my breast as the small light within me that yields to Father Sun. I am a child in her mild arms of morning. She is mercy in a star, the Magdalene. The humblest intercessor.

And in the evening, she is the Virgin. As I lean against the back of my grandmother's old rocking chair and face east toward the greatest darkness of the sky, I feel Venus behind me as my silent, departed grandmother herself. Her star is just above the horizon there behind my neck and I feel no enlightenment as I look at her with love with the eyes in the back of my head, ribcage, and anus. She is just being, plain and simple, and I take in the ordinary sounds and sights of this night sky that is enveloping me as a dome.

Evening star, in my imagination you feel as though you are just beyond the woods in front of me, but I know behind my back as the Evening Star, and I shall never catch you. You have caught me. Dear Grandmother Venus, you are myth personified, and this is your ordinary world in which I am now living. When I sit in your old rocking chair and face away from you, Grandmother, with my back to the West of the setting Sun, there is only I anywhere I can look, and I am one with you, my dear Grandmother whom I never knew and never will. Dear Venus of the evening, you are the sacredness of the mystery that can never belong to me. You are the loneliness I can now never experience as long as I live and the gentleness I must give to you when I die. Grandmother, through you I am my own mirror now. You are everything manifested that I am and am not. My Grandfather of the North is still the Lord of the Underworld and he is not here with you. You are the mask of the Moon, a way by which that dear little sister of the Earth can attain her purpose. The Moon wishes to unite with her husband the Sun and you, Grandmother of the West, are the means.

When I go forward tomorrow morning, you will be there to greet me there again as a maiden, Venus of Dawn. You, like the Sun, are never gone when I face him, with the exception that you flee from the midday sun who is my mother Rhea and from the Midnight Lord of Iron, Hephaestus. In those places only the Bright maiden Persephone who is my sister and again my daytime mother, Florence Peterson. I love to honor my mother with my smile and laughter, but she is too much of the Red planet to be of you, Venus.

I admit, Venus, that I place a veil on you in praising you like this. You are such a one about whom nothing true can ever be said, but ever double you appear even though, like the towers of the moon, you are one. It is not for me to remove the veil of your duality, my Beloved, in a poem that just anyone can read. It is for every man and every woman reading this to follow his or her own star and only then reveal you in your oneness. When the moon is exalted, she shows something very different from what we now see. You, likewise, cast no shadow when you are seen clearly. Your beautiful illusion ends 2012. When you are seen as you are, you are the light of the all-seeing eye. You are the flashbulb of eternity. No one who sees you clearly can live, which is why I address you in your dual guise, oh Star of submission to my fate.

 Eric N. Peterson is a Toltec priest and member of The Tequihua Foundation, a Riverside, Southern CA nonprofit whose mission is to continue the ancient consciousness-transforming arts of the Toltecs. The Aka Dua is an energy prepared by a particular Toltec line. The Aka Dua assists in the alchemical process of transformation by which an ordinary human becomes the shaman.

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