“Venus has an eight-year rhythm, which formed the subject of the world’s oldest astrological text, a Venus-tablet from Nineveh. It was part of a series called Enuma Anu Enlil, the ‘Book of the Gods of Heaven and Earth’, and was dated to the 17th century BC. It effectively recorded the five synodic periods of Venus, giving a series of ten omens over the eight-year cycle through the pattern of Venus’s appearance and disappearance from view.

“To the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the musical interval generated by Venus and Earth was a ‘sixth’, given by dividing a string in the fraction 5/8.  He said the relation was a ‘marital’ one and varied between the ‘masculine sixth’ G# – E and the ‘feminine’ one of Gb – E. This ratio of 5 to 8 is the key to the pattern traced by Venus against the stars.

“Venus traces a pentagon shape in the sky over ten meetings with the Sun; it does this by moving, between each ‘inferior’ conjunction, exactly 1.6 times around the zodiac, and the time it takes to do this, 584 days, is its synodic period. The pentagon shape is traced around the zodiac in five such synodic periods, which is 7.993 years or 8 years to a fraction of a day. Venus returns to the same portion of the zodiac after ten solar conjunctions, over a period of exactly 8 years.

“The rotation rate of Venus on its own axis was not discovered until 1967 by means of radar. This was able to peer through the dense mists surrounding the planet, and find a rotation period of precisely two-thirds of an Earth-year, or 243 days. Strangely enough, it was in the opposite direction to its rotation around the Sun. This meant that, in an eight-year period, Venus revolves exactly twelve times on its own axis. The numbers 5, 8 and 12 are here interacting. “

— Nick Kollerstrom