Sometimes I see people I haven’t run into for awhile and they ask how I’m doing. I hesitate, my mind explodes with the overwhelming complexity, and I can’t work out where I would even start explaining, so instead I say, “Oh you know, nothing much. I dunno. You?”

But really…

I’ve been considering the possibility of a songline that can be rediscovered that links Australia to Britain, possibly passing through Indonesia, Malasia, Thailand, India, Iran, the Mediterranean, and France; through Aboriginal stories, ancient Hinduism, Summerian, Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman mythology. Something that helps us make sense of the later witchcraft trials and is already something being explored in the present-day longings of modern Paganism for reconciling a spiritual past that has been demonised and dismantled.

I’ve been charting the course of the planet Venus and coming to understand she is connected to stories of Diana as the Moon Goddess, and the pre-Christian Roman Lucifer (meaning literally “Light bringer”) as the Morning Star and that there is a complex story to discover there spanning many cultures and landscapes. Stories of that shining star planet as both God and Goddess, bringer of fertility to people and the land, doorway to wisdom, the afterlife and to rebirth. There’s nothing evil, just stories of birth and fertility, dying and being reborn, stretching right around the globe.

I’ve been pondering the deeper meanings of the pentagram as a symbol full of meaning in all this – the five pointed star; it is a symbol of the Goddess, but not just in the common understanding of modern Paganism as a balance of five elements, but also as the shape of the connection between the planet Venus and the Earth – every eight Earth years almost exactly, Venus disappears between the Earth and the Sun five times. She cycles between being seen as the evening star and the morning star about every nine months (well it’s actually 263 days (about eight and a half months) as the evening star, then 50 days invisible with the sun, and then 263 days as the morning star, and then eight days with the sun, and then it repeats). So, there is a cycle between the two states that is very close to nine months on either side – the length of a pregnancy term. Of course, it is no wonder Venus then, why is associated with women, love, and fertility. In pre-literate times with no clocks, the stars and their cycles would have been very important for time keeping of such important parts of life. And the shape it creates, is a pentacle, or pentagram. The moon too, joins in the dance of eight years having exactly 99 cycles in that time.

How then, did the Morning Star – Lucifer was simply the name of the Morning star in Latin before Christianity – and the pentacle too, get mixed up with Satan and the Devil? Lucifer is never mentioned in the Bible. Satan means “the adversary” and is a title, not a personality. Jesus himself is Satan at times. These ideas of Lucifer and Satan being the same and a personality came much later, probably brought into common consciousness around the 14th Century with texts like Dante’s Inferno – about the same time that the Witchcraft trials began. Funny that.

Did you know that when the crescent moon is visible alongside the morning or evening star, it always has it’s points up, or away from the sun at least, – like horns. Is that where the horns come from? Is that why there were horned gods? Is that why the Devil has horns? Because we can see the morning star with the crescent moon? I wonder…

I’ve also been wondering about the use of the word “Devil” by people who were trialled as witches in Britain around that time and really the concept still persists when you consider folk tales of the Devil in the British landscape. I was curious, could they too have been talking about the morning star? I was curious and in my info rummaging I found that the etymology of the word “Devil” in English supposedly comes from the Latin “Diabolus” or Greek “Diabolos” meaning “slanderer”, but if you look up the first time the word is used in Old English it’s written “Dēofol”. I pondered… hang on, deo means God in Italian and there was an old Anglo Saxon text called De Falsis Diis or “On False Gods” which I need to look into more because it was about the Anglo Saxon and Norse deities from a Christian perspective, but just the name of the text has me wondering… maybe the etymology isn’t direct. Perhaps that Old English word Dēofol really just meant “The False God” and people heard that literally in their understanding of it, so it would likely have been used for any pre-Christian God, and indeed that is how it ends up being used. In the witchcraft trials they were possibly not saying they worshipped the Devil of Christianity, but rather term “the false god” referred to all the other ones, perhaps including one associated with the Morning Star?

I have been reading texts like Maragret Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe with new eyes – not necessarily to believe her, but perhaps to see something else there. Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches by Leland, that suggests an anti-authoritarian witch community in more recent times that prayed to Diana and Lucifer, (portrayed as a divine wrong-love couple – which is an important lesson for those seeking fertility and a common theme of many Indigenous stories of the world – teaching what is wrong as well as what is right). Was this story older than we might assume? The Golden Bough by James Fraser suddenly seems to make a whole lot more sense in its exploration of the various names of Diana and Dianus and their connections to places, despite his haughty and outdated elitist attitude; Carl Ginzburg’s Ecstasies is some heavy going, but definitely on the same kind of track exploring possible true meanings of the witches’ sabbat. I have hardly scratched the surface of these texts to be honest, but this new lens makes them interesting on another level to how I approached them before and my head is swimming with questions I hope they might answer.

I’ve also been looking at books like The First Astronomers which is about Indigenous knowledge of the stars and where my understanding of this idea was awakened maybe a year or so ago. The stories of Venus there, the similarities of the myths and their purpose. The claim of the Yolungu people that it was this star that led them to Australia. That it’s connected to many places and is a trackway/map songline moving West to East…

Are we connected? Does this story of the Morning/Evening Star and the moon mark a story that travels around the world? Have parts of the story been corrupted by fear and misunderstanding? Have those important lessons about fertility, pregnancy and childbirth that can be tracked with that beautiful star planet and its movements in the sky – so magical to see and easy to track with the naked eye – been lost in the slanderous labels of Devil and witch? These are stories of the Earth, the Sky and the mysteries of life. It is an utter tragedy that their wisdom might have been lost to fear and slander. That our connection through story around the world might be harder to find for it. That people might automatically discredit any story involving the words “Lucifer” or the “Devil” because of a fear of the words themselves. I know it made me uncomfortable when I started looking a this – I haven’t much looked into it before, mostly just brushing the idea of the witch trial witches using the word “Devil” off and turning to other names for the pre-Christian Gods and Goddesses in the older stories. But the more I look at it, the more I can see that that fearful perspective just comes from ignorance. The connections were made up, they are later inventions and fictional conjurations to make people feel fear and distrust in their time. What is really there is just a story of how children are made, how incest is bad and to be avoided, how pregnancy can be timed, and how we are all connected across this incredible Earth we all call home, perhaps telling stories at dusk as we see the evening star glowing alongside the crescent new moon.

Next time you look up and see the evening star, maybe you’ll remember.

Anyway, so, what’s been happening with you?