The Venus Rose - Harmony in Heaven

A 5 fold ceiling ornament from Sheik Zayed Mosque, in Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia.

I’ve heard it said that in antiquity, Pythagoras, would begin his lectures on geometric form, by cutting open an apple across its equator, to reveal a cross section of the five seeds standing at it’s centre, and the elegant star they create. That one cut, transform’s the apple’s toroidal form into a revelation of the Golden Ratio, at its heart.

For a full primer on the Golden Ratio - click here. Suffice to say, for the moment, that the span across the widest part of a five pointed star - from point to point, when compared with the narrower span between any two adjacent points on the star’s perimeter - yields the elegant and unique numerical relationship of 1:1.618033…. The second number, more accurately described by its fractional representation as (√ 5+1)/2, is one of those great unending irrational numbers, referred for everyone’s ease - especially those who are unnerved by the tiny infinities that exist at the heart of all things - by the greek letter phi - Φ.

The golden ratio, or golden section defines many things in our world - governing systems in our world related to life - the spiral structure of DNA, the molecular bonds of living water, as well as phylotatic spirals throughout the plant kingdom. It also lives in the embodied world of cosmic phenomena, with one of its most elegant expressions being in the beautiful 5 fold pattern the orbits of Venus and the Earth make every 8 years.

You see, every 8 years, Venus orbits the Sun 13 times. This pairing of 8 & 13 means that the two bodies make thier conjunctions over this period in a most elegant 5 fold pattern. Fans of the Fibbonacci sequence - nature’s way of embedding the golden ratio through additive growth sequence - will notice that 5, 8 & 13 are three successive Fibbonacci numbers. The pattern that is traced, when we track the path of Venus around the earth, yields the aptly named “Venus Rose.”

The above animation shows what the pattern looks like when we set our vantage point of earth at the centre. In this image, the circle of Venus’ orbit around the sun then progresses around us, and in the 5 moments of the 8 year cycle when Venus comes closest to us, the kiss we and Venus make, creates the inner most petals of the roselike spiral.

How fitting it strikes me that Venus, the planet of beauty, growth and love - imbeds the very proportion that governs these concepts in our natural world.

My rendition of the Venus Rose - you can find it on my shop, here.