The Midquarter Days

The problem there is that the historical data is from around 100 BC to AD 300. What we know of Venus symbolism as a pentagram is that it came from Mesopotamia through Greece and to the north. The earliest Greek pentagram I know of so far is from around 500 BC. So our knowledge of Celtic symbolism is quite late.

The eight-fold calendar as shown by the megaliths of the British Isles is from Neolithic and Bronze Age sites, so that would be two or three thousand years earlier. I veer on the side of scepticism when some people make the connection without acknowledging there’s uncertainty.

It’s not impossible there’s continuity – we know from historical records our modern festivals are at least 2000 years old.

There’s also a problem in finding significance in numbers without strong corroborating evidence. You’re right to say that 8 is connected with Venus symbolism, but it is possible to argue more or less any number is astronomically significant.

3 or 4 were the number of seasons seen in the ancient world. Venus made 5 appearances in the morning or evening sky over an 8 year cycle. I forget was 6 is, but seven is for the number of visible planets. 8 for Venus again. 9 is often held as significant because of the number of months in gestational period. 10 is the total number of appearances of Venus in the morning and evening sky in an eight year cycle. 11 for the number of years in a sunspot cycle. 12 and 13 for the number of lunar months in a year…

The ancients were keen observers of nature, so I’ve no doubt some of these cycles were known and marked. But which ones were important and when I couldn’t say. If more evidence can be gathered for an eight-fold calendar then eventually you have to conclude something is going on, even if you’re not sure what. At the moment I’m definitely in the not sure camp.

Certainly. If I wanted to keep it secret the putting it on the web would have been a Bad Idea. If you can prove me wrong then that would be great because then a lot mre things would become possible with the data.

This would put the pentagram in Mesopotamia at an early period, but still wouldn’t mean that Neolithic or Bronze Age Britain would recognise or care about the Venus cycle. The art we have on stones from this period in the British Isles are things like cup marks or odd patterns (Newcastle has a database of some of them online). If they were sharing Babylonian ideas you’d expect to see some import of Babylonian symbolism.

This doesn’t rule out the Celts having an interest in Venus in the early historical period derived ultimately from Babylonian sources, but doesn’t allow us to project that concept back into Stone Age Britain.

What makes it worse is that later the Babylonians used an eight-pointed star to represent Ishtar (Venus). The Babylonian goddess Ishtar influenced Artemis, Demeter and Aphrodite in Greek mythology, which got passed along to the Romans, so in the end you can connect cycles based 5 or 8 with at least three goddesses. Without independent evidence how do you show that a correlation is meaningful?

For Babylon we have the tablets which spell it out for us and telling us why eight. For the Celtic Calendar in the British Isles there’s only the statistics of the orientations of sites. It could be Venus that causes it. I think it’s more likely to be halving the four seasons into eight which would be a solar cycle instead. Maybe they just felt it was convenient to divide the year into eight and just counted off 45 days at a time. What makes it worse, there’s a lot of argument over whether the eight-fold pattern is statistically significant or not anyway. In the early 90s it looked like the argument was being lost but, as more data comes in, it seems that its gaining ground again.

This is why I prefer to work with Greek astronomy. There’s a risk of staring at numbers and convincing yourself they must be significant. Unfortunately astronomy is very good at producing significant numbers, so if you stare at the stars long enough you will see patterns. Some features are probably meaningful, but sometimes things just happen. Historical data is a huge help in sorting out one from the other, but we just don’t have that for prehistory.

I hope to put up an example of where I got it wrong like this soon. It was connecting Venus to the Olympics. I was convinced I almost had the proof. It’s an idea that’s been knocking around since the nineteenth century at least and it was mentioned in the Da Vinci Code too. Unfortunately making the Olympics a Venus festival creates far more problems than it solves.