Venus, Eris, Juno and Hygieia - Invocations and Inversions

All the planets operate in ways that don’t abide by our earthly indoctrinations. What do I mean by that? Every planet carries its own myths, and those myths can seem confusing when we try to reduce them to functions. But that is exactly the point: the planets are more than functions.

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Consider the difference between a simple app, a tool that performs a single function, and an AI that resonates across its inputs, its own growth, and its connections. If we can feel that difference, we may be getting close to being evolved enough to comprehend the planets, and our own lives, in ways we haven’t before.  I started Astrology in the early 90’s, and I’m still learning. That might sound rather odd today, given we learn things very quickly – because we often have to! But Astrology is about Knowing Self and Knowing Each Other.  It opens different doors at different times in our lives.  If we knew the questions to ask these doors would most likely happen sooner.  I hope some of what I offer to you enables you to ask better questions, to get better answers faster!

When we are small, it is easier for the people looking after us to tell us in black and white what is good for us and what is bad. That is easy to learn. But as we grow older and begin to investigate life through study, we discover that there are many valid perspectives on the very same thing. And once we start to know ourselves and each other, things become genuinely complex. The planets are the same.  Then we find ourselves in the realm as Claude Lévi-Strauss did.  This ‘Father of Structural Anthropology’ taught that in order to find the simple elegant answer we must first traverse the complicated messy terrains.  Those words are my embellishment on his quote.  He researched myths from all around the world and argued that beneath their wild differences they share a common underlying structure. 

This complexity is especially important with the feminine planets, dwarf planets and asteroids - though the masculine ones are far more complex and interesting than we usually give them credit for, too.

Apart from the Moon and Venus, the feminine bodies have been almost entirely left out by most people over the last few hundred years. Patriarchy shaped Astrology as much as it shaped every other body of knowledge.

Venus is beauty. She bestows beauty and wealth; in traditional Astrology she is the lesser benefic, the gentler counterpart to Jupiter’s greater benefic. She is desirable. For night babies she is the Benefic in Sect.

Venus is also the five-pointed star: the pentagram, the geometry of a rose and of many living plants. And this is not merely symbolic. Over an eight-year cycle, Venus and the Sun trace a near-perfect five-petal figure across five conjunctions in our skies. This is a 13:8 resonance so clean that the figure redraws itself decade after decade — drifting backward only two or three degrees each cycle — as the “Rose of Venus” or the Pentagram of Venus. The pentagram she has been associated with for millennia turns out to be her literal orbital signature.

The pentagram has long been read as the symbol of the universal, and the word “catholic” likewise means universal, though the two traditions are separate. In ceremonial magic the five-pointed star has been used both for invocation and for banishment.

And it has been inverted — just as Venus herself has been inverted: the feminine permitted to be seen, admired, desired, but not empowered within the domains of patriarchy. Venus is the Goddess of Beauty, and her sacred symbols are the very essence of beauty and value in our world.  And yet the pentagram has been feared and hated by many. That is the inversion.

So what’s going on?  What’s the more complicated necessary messy terrain we might want to trek through?

Vincent Selleck wrote ‘The Rise of the Morning Star: The Return of the Love Goddess’ in 1990.  Then he was preparing for some special conjunctions between Venus and Saturn in Capricorn, the latter he relates as a sign important to Venus.    This information may, or may not, resonate with you, but for Selleck Venus holds enormously high status for all of us and for our World.  Here are a few quotes you might find interesting:

“[Selleck here quotes The Secret Doctrine, Volume III, p. 42] Venus is the most occult, powerful and mysterious of all the planets; the one whose influence upon and relation to the Earth is most prominent.” p. 38

“…The true mystery of Venus is the linking together of the split fifth principle, uniting spiritual and material selves…” p. 53

“Esoterically, Venus is the planetary body which infuses Earth with the quality of the Fifth Ray of Concrete Science.  There are seven great rays which condition consciousness that sweep in and out of manifestation in our solar system.  The fifth of these is ‘Concrete Science’.  The energy of the Fifth Ray seeds the thinking mind with Divine knowledge, as the seeds of light stream from higher to lower minds across the Rainbow Bridge.  The motivating energy of this ray causes the mind to visualize and manifest, design and create according to higher inspiration.” p.54

“It seems a paradox to some that Venus, planet of Love, should be so involved with the transmission of mind and intelligence.  Love is only the veil through which the unevolved feel Her calling, inspiring them to fuse lower and higher together through the generation of golden light in the heart. “ p. 54

“The lion represents Leo, the man’s face Aquarius, the eagle Scorpio and Taurus is the ox or bull.  Taurus is always the sign of creative force, and connected with Christ, who was proclaimed the Light of the World.  In Egypt the sign of the bull was known as ‘the interpreter of the divine voice’, and, as the Christians phrase it ‘the word made flesh’.  Jesus, we have seen, is directly connected to the mysteries of Venus, his doctrine of Love being the principle energy of the Morning Star.  It is interesting to note how the mission of his life came upon him in the shape of a dove.”

“The brightest star in the constellation of the Dove is Alcyone meaning, “the one eye of the all seeing One”.  Alcyone is believed to be the metaphysical centre of our Galaxy.  The Arabs called this star Al Wasat, the central one, and Hindus refer to it as Amba, the mother, whose milk flows out to become the milky way.  In Hebrew tradition the Pleiades are known as Kimah and quoted in ‘Job’.  pp. 42–43

[Editorial note: Alcyone is the brightest star of the Pleiades, in Taurus, not in Columba, the Dove, and the centre of our galaxy lies in Sagittarius. The claims in this passage are Theosophical rather than astronomical, and are reproduced as Selleck wrote them.]

Selleck gives Venus several Astrological positions in Esoteric Astrology.  For our purpose we might presently consider her Great and Minor Dignities.

Venus Rules Taurus and Libra

Venus is Exalted in Pisces

Venus rules the day birth Triplicities for the Earth Signs: Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn

In Terms (Ptolemaic, following Lilly’s table) she rules degrees: Aries 7-14, Taurus 1-8, Gemini 15-21, Cancer 21-27, Leo 14-19, Virgo 8-13, Libra 7-11, Scorpio 15-21, Sagittarius 9-14, Capricorn 1-6, Aquarius 13-20, Pisces 1-8

For Faces she rules degrees: Aries 21-30, Cancer 1-10, Virgo 11-20, Scorpio 21-30, Aquarius 1-10

Chart 1: Venus enters her own sign of Libra, 7 August 2026, 5.32 am AEST, Brisbane — Venus in her domicile, and in her dignity.

When you hear the name Eris, you may picture the goddess of the golden apple: uninvited to a wedding, she tossed among the guests a golden apple inscribed “to the fairest”. The quarrel that followed,  the Judgment of Paris, set the Trojan War in motion, and that war ended, by way of the wooden horse, in mass casualties.

Evolutionary Astrologer Daniel Fiverson calls Eris “Born of night - bringer of Truth,” and writes that her provocations force truth into the open. She is disruptive in the service of evolution, bringing forward what needs to be seen and exposing what those in power try to suppress.

In Hesiod we meet two kinds of Eris: one is a catalyst for discord and violent outbursts, the other a catalyst for the motivation to be better. What Hesiod actually writes is closer to “so there was not one kind of Strife after all, but two upon the earth.”  The “after all” is doing the work: in the Theogony (around line 225) he had given Eris as a single, wholly malignant daughter of Night, mother of Toil, Famine, Pains, Battles, Murders, Quarrels, Lies, Lawlessness and Ruin. Most readers take the Works and Days passage as a revision of that earlier picture; a minority read it as rhetorical staging rather than a sincere retraction, but the self-correction reading is the ordinary one.

One Eris fosters war and conflict, and no one loves her. The other, Zeus set in the roots of the earth, and she is far better for us. The mechanism is simple: one farmer sees his neighbour ploughing a healthy crop and, envious, gets to work to match him at the next harvest. Envy motivates him. Eris has done her work. She has exposed a truth through envy. In the apple scene there is no such betterment; only strife. So Eris is known as the Goddess of Discord and Strife. She provokes competition. Homer already calls her the sister of Ares - Mars.

Rome gave her Discordia, nastier and more visual. Virgil sets her in the entrance hall of the underworld with vipers for hair bound in bloody ribbons, and elsewhere has her striding across a battlefield in a torn cloak, exultant, with Bellona following behind carrying a bloodstained whip.

Then she is resurrected in the 1960s. The first Principia Discordia was run off privately in 1963, with the first circulated edition following in 1965 - the work of two Californians, Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, who declared Eris goddess of chaos and took the golden apple as their emblem. Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson then poured her into the Illuminatus! trilogy (1975), a sequence about Freemasons, the Illuminati and hidden coordination, played at once as terrifying and as an elaborate joke. Their stated practice, “Operation Mindfuck,” was to flood the culture with so many contradictory conspiracy theories that people would grow immune to the whole genre, so that the category itself might collapse under its own weight. Which is either the funniest possible response to organised confusion or a contribution to it.

It did not end cleanly. By the late 1970s Thornley had become convinced that a hidden organisation really was pulling the strings, that his own movement might be an intelligence front, and eventually that he himself had been a programmed asset, even turning on his old collaborator Wilson. The man who tried to raise Eris to expose a Truth through Discord seemed to suffer.  Eris does seem to collect that kind of story.

That saturation of contradictions is not what Eris intends. Her purpose is not strife for strife’s sake; her provocations are meant to uncover truth, not to manufacture more lies to confuse us.

What is striking is that when she arrives, we start to think about how competition might serve us. Think of the four-minute mile: once Roger Bannister broke it in May 1954, John Landy beat his time within six weeks, and others followed. That is Eris becoming helpful.  Myths of the impossible are often shattered by one and quickly followed by more.

I wondered whether we might coin a new word for Eris’s “envy through competition.” It turns out the Greeks did it for us, though not quite where you would expect. The key word is zêlos, the good-Strife counterpart to phthonos. Both are envy, and Aristotle (Rhetoric 2.11) splits them along much the line Hesiod’s two Strifes suggest: phthonos is the begrudging that wants to pull the other down (burn the barn), while zêlos is the emulous kind that spurs you to rise to them (go and plough). Zêlos is the root of both “zeal” and “jealous,” and it already means, more or less, competition through envy that produces striving. Hesiod himself does not use zêlos in this passage,  he uses phthonos of the good Strife as well so the tidy pairing is Aristotle’s refinement rather than Hesiod’s own.  Of course, we may not be able to apply envy to ignite an energetic pursuit of competition amidst a pendulum swung too far monopolistically.  So it might be worth asking how Eris might still aid us in our efforts to realise Truth through Action.

Eris was identified in January 2005 by Mike Brown’s team, from images taken two years earlier, nicknamed Xena at first, and she appeared to outrank Pluto.  She is about 27% more massive, though slightly smaller across. That forced the IAU, in 2006, to define “planet” for the first time, and the definition demoted both of them: Pluto and Eris are both dwarf planets. The name was chosen precisely because the discovery had set astronomers quarrelling; Brown later titled his memoir How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. Her moon is Dysnomia, Lawlessness, straight out of Hesiod’s list of Eris’s children, and also a private joke, since Xena was played by Lucy Lawless. So the pattern repeats with almost embarrassing neatness: an uninvited arrival triggers a dispute over who ranks highest, and the resolution demotes somebody.

Eris crawls. Her orbit runs to roughly 558 years, and she is near aphelion, so she moves well under a degree a year and sits in Aries for well over a century. She functions as a near-fixed point that faster bodies run over, rather than something that travels through a chart in a human lifetime. When Mars and Venus cross her, those are transits to a standing position. And Aries is Mars-ruled,  which places her, for our whole era, permanently in the house of the war god Homer already called her brother. So Mars’ transits will affect how Eris speaks to us at different times.

Here the invocation and the inversion sit side by side. The inversion is the witch with the apple - strife with no betterment. The invocation is the willingness to meet the challenge she sets: competitiveness turned into inspiration through effort, each of us bettering what went before only because it did go before.  Can we work together, through energizing our envy, rather than allowing it to demoralize us into helplessness or anger without purpose? This might require us to invert envy.

Everyone alive now, bar a handful of centenarians, has Eris in Aries: she entered the sign in the mid-1920s. Many planets have transited her as she approaches the last degrees of the sign; most significant have been her squares with Pluto, and their long argument over who gets to be boss and who gets demoted. So the question for you is which house she occupies in your chart. Where is the envy you feel in that area of your life? Do you let it spur you on, or do you let it consume you, so that you feel the envy without the growth? The planets ask us to choose. This is the kind of choice Eris presses.

You know that feeling you get when you feel you have been the first to create an idea?  Only to find it turn up somewhere through someone else the next day?  Is this Eris helping us, by showing us who has gone before?  Do we then have the choice to discover more about this other idea, that seems the same?  Maybe we can add to it?  Do we have to be the first?  Or can we be inspired by the first?  Have we telepathically attracted new of this because we shared a frequency with this individual?  Is there more work to be done here?  Is this something that Eris has brought forward as if to say:  “Yes. You are on the right track.  Keep striving! Keep striving!.  The work is not yet complete. Allow Envy to move you into Action. “  Or something like this J

 

Her invocation is protection; her inversion is jealousy. And no goddess has been more thoroughly reduced to her inversion than Juno.

We meet her almost always as the jealous wife,  Jupiter’s queen, forever punishing his lovers and their children. Io turned into a cow; Callisto into a bear; Latona driven from land to land with nowhere to give birth. It reads as pettiness, and it has been read that way for centuries. But look again. Juno could not punish Jupiter, who stood above the very law he kept breaking. What she could do was make plain, through the fates of those he took up, that the marriage bond carried consequences even when the most powerful being in the cosmos chose to ignore it. She was not a jealous woman; she was the goddess of the institution, enforcing a law her husband treated as beneath him. The rage that looks like spite is the fury of justice with no one above her to appeal to. Even her peacock says as much: when her hundred-eyed guardian of Io was killed, she set his eyes into its tail, her bird still carries her all-seeing vigilance, her refusal to forget.

Her grudge, in fact, begins with Eris’s apple. It was the quarrel over who was fairest, the Judgment of Paris, that turned Juno against Troy, and that grudge drives Virgil’s Aeneid. For much of the poem she is the antagonist of Rome’s own founding: she raises the storm through Aeolus, keeps Aeneas in Carthage with Dido, throws Italy into war. She is not evil,  Virgil grants that her grievances are legitimate, she is simply on the losing side of fate, and she will not go quietly. And here is the Eris pattern again in another key: her opposition does not fail so much as shape. When she finally yields, she extracts a price, that the Trojans surrender their name and become Latin, Roman, rather than remaining Trojan. Jupiter grants it. The Rome that rises is the Rome she bargained for; her resistance is absorbed into the result. Like Eris, she provoked, and the provocation did its work.

Juno, the one patriarchy filed away behind the jealous wife, was Rome’s protector and its warner. Her title Moneta was traditionally derived from monere, to warn, an etymology the Romans themselves believed, though modern scholars dispute it. When the Gauls crept up the Capitoline in the dark of 390 BCE (the traditional date; the Greek sources put the sack at 387/386) and the sentries slept, it was the sacred geese in Juno’s temple who raised the alarm and woke the commander, Marcus Manlius, in time. Rome was saved by Juno’s geese. The mint was later built beside that same temple, and the coins struck there took her title, moneta; through the Latin, into French and Old English, it became our words money and mint. Every coin ever spent carries her name, and June is, on one ancient tradition among several, her month too. That is the invocation: Juno the guardian, who warns, who keeps the state and its women and its wealth. The shrew we were handed instead is the inversion.

But the deepest layer is older than Rome. Before she was Juno, she was Uni, and Uni was no one’s wife-in-second-place. She was the supreme goddess of the Etruscans, chief deity of their pantheon, and the Etruscan trinity of Tinia, Uni and Menrva was the original from which Rome copied its own Capitoline Triad. Scholars generally agree the Romans took the three-god temple straight from Etruscan practice, and that in the Etruscan version Uni and Menrva loomed far larger than the Juno and Minerva they were later made into. On the Pyrgi Tablets, gold sheets from around 500 BCE, Uni is named in the same breath as Astarte, the great goddess of the Near East. She was patron of the city of Perugia. And when Rome destroyed the Etruscan city of Veii in 396 BCE, the goddess they carried home and installed on the Aventine, coaxed out of her city by formal invitation, the statue said to have nodded its assent, was this same Juno, Queen of Veii. Rome did not invent Juno. Rome absorbed a sovereign goddess who had reigned over an older civilisation (the Etruscans), and then, across centuries, wrote her down into a jealous wife. That is the inversion in its fullest form: a supreme goddess demoted to a supporting role in someone else’s marriage.

The sky repeats it. When Karl Harding found Juno in 1804, the third of the little worlds found between Mars and Jupiter during the “Celestial Police” hunt for a missing planet, she was hailed as a planet, and counted as one for half a century. Then, in the 1850s, as more and more such bodies turned up, she was quietly demoted to “asteroid.” The same shape as Eris and Pluto: an arrival, a dispute about rank, a demotion. Juno has now been demoted twice — from supreme goddess to jealous wife, and from planet to asteroid.

And she is moving, by my reckoning, into her conjunction with Pluto, which perfects on 6 November.  Notice how Pluto keeps turning up in these pages, squaring Eris over who is boss and who is demoted, opposing Hygiea at the alert, and now met by Juno. Pluto is the lord of what is buried and where real power sits, and of exactly this drama of demotion and hidden sovereignty. For twice-demoted Juno to meet him now feels less like coincidence than like an appointment. What is buried in her is not jealousy. It is a queen. If your chart carries this conjunction, ask which house holds it, and what sovereignty of your own you may have been taught to file away as something smaller.  Pluto is still only commencing his powerful ignition of our Aquarius House.  Perhaps he is now ready to greet Juno as equals in this House, not representing Etrusca or Rome, but the Power of each of Us as Individuals and all of Us together.  Juno takes about four and a third years to get around the zodiac, but she spends different amounts of time in each Sign, depending upon her motion.   

Chart 2: Juno conjunct Pluto, perfected 6 November 2026, at 3°10′ Aquarius.

Hygieia is the Goddess of Health. Her invocation is for good health; her inversion is plague and turbulence.

She is an interesting one, especially in the 2020s. Her symbol was taken up by pharmacology - the Bowl of Hygieia – and is still used as a pharmacy sigil today. She is almost always shown with a snake, and the snake abounds in medical imagery still. Snakes recur throughout myth, and they can be quite sacred once deciphered: they shed their skins and renew themselves, and their venom, in small doses, becomes a cure.

Hygieia’s father Asclepius was a healer, who, the stories say, could bring the dead back to life. Because that went too far for the gods, Zeus struck him down and his fate was sealed. His daughter is the patron of hygiene and the prevention of illness rather than its cure; the word “hygiene” shares its root with her name, the Greek hygiēs, healthy. Cleanliness allows for health.

Hygiea is another body many assume to be an asteroid, and by classification she still is, the fourth-largest in the main belt. But images from the Very Large Telescope, taken in 2017 and 2018 and published in 2019, showed her to be very nearly spherical, close to hydrostatic equilibrium, and the study’s authors argued she may qualify as a dwarf planet, potentially the smallest in the solar system. She is, at the very least, a candidate. There is a lovely detail in those same images: the study’s authors informally named two of her craters Serpens and Calix, Latin for snake and cup,  the very emblems the goddess carries.

I first started spotting Hygiea in 2020, when she seemed to turn up across so many of the aspects that defined that year. More recently, the other day, here in Australia, we had a national test of a new emergency alert system, AusAlert, sent to compatible phones across the country at the same moment. It is meant for life-threatening emergencies of every kind, pandemics among them, and it becomes available for real use in October. It struck me that the hour of this ‘test’ coincided with the whole of Australia receiving the Nodal ingress.  The ingress fell at 12 noon AWST, which is 2pm AEST, and 2pm AEST, 1.30pm ACST and 12 noon AWST were exactly the three times chosen for the test.  You couldn’t choose a more precise time for nodal coherence! This Goddess of Health would, by my reckoning, be cazimi the Sun and opposite Pluto at that time of the test.  She perfects the conjunction with the South Node on 6 October, within days of the October launch of this alarm for the prevention of harm. That may be entirely altruistic. But having lived through 2020, we can be forgiven for wondering whether the other side of the goddess might again be inverted.

I don’t think the Goddesses take kindly to these inversions. For many millennia the patriarchy has got away with playing god over men and women alike; it may be that the Goddesses are about to reveal things that emancipate rather than poison.

The two charts at the end of this article show the moment of the test and the perfected Hygiea/Nodal conjunction ahead of the launch.

So what choices does Hygieia offer? If prevention is always better than cure,  and death is final,  perhaps she is pushing us to look hard at the food we eat and the soil it grows in. Perhaps she is pointing at what is blatantly wrong, at the places where the inversions of health have taken hold of the alarm systems of whole nations. Which house does Hygiea occupy in Australia’s chart or in your country’s?

Since receiving these calls from Hygieia, a whole host of Asteroids have invited me to learn more.  I hope to write more on this topic as I discover where and how they might be assisting us to navigate these massive changes we are all experiencing. 

Venus loves the rose and the myrtle. Ivy, despite the association many make, belongs traditionally to Saturn, while it is ground-ivy that Culpeper gives to Venus, but anything of real Beauty allows us to resonate with her energies. 

Be sure to share your own experiential and/or studious research about the above Goddesses and how they assist in your Life.

 

 

Bibliography

Venus, Eris, Juno and Hygieia - Invocations and Inversions

The mythology in this article rests on the following classical works. Standard modern translations (Loeb Classical Library, Penguin Classics) are widely available.

Hesiod. Works and Days (lines 11–26, on the two kinds of Strife) and Theogony (c. line 225, Eris as daughter of Night). 8th–7th century BCE.

Aristotle. Rhetoric, Book 2, chapter 11 (the distinction between phthonos, begrudging envy, and zêlos, emulous envy). 4th century BCE.

Homer. Iliad (Eris as sister of Ares). 8th century BCE.

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso). Metamorphoses (Io, Argus and the peacock, Book 1; Callisto, Book 2) and Fasti (the naming of June, Book 6). Early 1st century CE.

Ptolemy, Claudius. Tetrabiblos (the Terms and Faces and other dignities of Venus). 2nd century CE.

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro). Aeneid (Juno as the divine antagonist of Rome’s founding; Discordia in the underworld, Book 6; on the shield of Aeneas, Book 8). c. 29–19 BCE.

Livy (Titus Livius). Ab Urbe Condita (History of Rome), Book 5 (the sacred geese and the Gallic sack, 5.47; the evocatio of Juno Regina from Veii, 5.21–22). Late 1st century BCE.

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. The Secret Doctrine, Volume III. London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1897 (posthumous; the authorship of this third volume is disputed within Theosophy). Quoted in Selleck.

Fiverson, Daniel. Eris: Sacred Feminine Force of Evolutionary Astrology. Bournemouth: The Wessex Astrologer, 2025.

Selleck, Vincent. The Rise of the Morning Star: The Return of the Love Goddess. Shekinah Foundation, 1990. ISBN 0958793727.

Culpeper, Nicholas. The Complete Herbal. London, 1653. (Planetary rulerships of plants: ivy under Saturn, ground-ivy under Venus.)

de Grummond, Nancy Thomson. Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2006.

The Pyrgi Tablets (gold tablets, c. 500 BCE, from Pyrgi, the port of Caere). Bilingual Etruscan–Phoenician dedication identifying the Etruscan Uni with the Phoenician goddess Astarte. Discussed in de Grummond, above.

Vernazza, P., L. Jorda, P. Ševeček, M. Brož, M. Viikinkoski, et al. “A basin-free spherical shape as an outcome of a giant impact on asteroid Hygiea.” Nature Astronomy 4 (2020): 136–141. Published online 28 October 2019.

European Southern Observatory. “ESO Telescope Reveals What Could Be the Smallest Dwarf Planet Yet in the Solar System.” ESO Science Release eso1918, 28 October 2019.

International Astronomical Union. Resolution B5, “Definition of a Planet in the Solar System,” and Resolution B6, “Pluto.” IAU General Assembly, Prague, 24 August 2006. (The ruling that reclassified Pluto and Eris as dwarf planets.)

Brown, Michael E. How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010.

“Sept. 1, 1804: Karl Harding Spots 3 Juno.” Astronomy, “Today in the History of Astronomy” series, astronomy.com. On the discovery of Juno and the later reclassification of Ceres, Pallas and Juno from planets to asteroids in the 1850s.

Allen, Richard Hinckley. Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning. New York: Dover, 1963 (first published 1899). On Alcyone, Al Wasat, Amba and Kimah.

EarthSky. “The 5 petals of Venus and its 8-year cycle.” earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/five-petals-of-venus/. On the eight-year Venus–Sun cycle that traces a five-petalled figure (the 13:8 “Rose of Venus” / Pentagram of Venus).

Malaclypse the Younger (Greg Hill) and Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (Kerry Thornley). Principia Discordia. First edition privately printed 1963; first circulated edition (as Principia Discordia or How The West Was Lost, five copies) 1965; widely circulated fourth edition, 1970.

Shea, Robert, and Robert Anton Wilson. The Illuminatus! Trilogy. New York: Dell, 1975.

Gorightly, Adam. The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture. Paraview Press, 2003. (On Operation Mindfuck and Thornley’s later years.)

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, 1963. (French original Anthropologie structurale, 1958.) See also “The Structural Study of Myth,” Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955): 428–444, and Mythologiques, 4 vols. (1964–1971), for the argument that the world’s myths share a common underlying structure.

National Emergency Management Agency (Australia). AusAlert. ausalert.gov.au. National test conducted 27 July 2026 at 2.00 pm AEST / 1.30 pm ACST / 12.00 pm AWST; system available for use from October 2026.