Storyteller's Night Sky 2025-06-04 (Our Stately Progress Through the Stars)

This week in the stars it’s all about poets and novelists, although really, when is it not? The poetry and story this week is inspired by the planet Venus at its greatest elongation west of the Sun, which means the goddess of love and beauty is furthest away from the Sun, rising nearly two hours before sunrise. In his description of the “spiritual individualities of the planets” Rudolf Steiner once explained that Venus has a great deal to do with poets, and with the secrets the live deeply in human hearts. So this week it’s though Venus has swept far and wide, to get a fuller view. What comes to mind for me with this movement is the beautiful poem “Morning Star” by Irish writer and poet George “AE” Russel, which begins: In the black pool of midnight Lu has slung the morning star And its foam in rippling silver Whitens into day afar Falling on the mountain rampart piled with pearl above our glen, Only you and I beloved, moving in the field of men. Russel, who together with his friend William Butler Yeats strongly identified with the Theosophical Movement of the early 20th century, used the pseudonym AE, which came to him, he said, through a visionary experience. Then on June 2nd this week, it’s the anniversary of novelist Thomas Hardy’s birth, in 1840. Hardy was a slightly older contemporary of AE and Yeats and achieved his first literary success with his fourth novel, Far From the Madding Crowd, published in 1874. The story centers on Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors, and there’s a lovely passage in the narrative that also speaks to this experience of the morning stars right now: To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world is almost a palpable movement ~ so he’s talking about the Earth’s motion here, the roll of the world is almost a palpable movement. He goes on: To enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are disregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly to watch your stately progress through the stars. This week it’s as though Venus, because the planet is at its greatest elongation, is calling us to attend to the true nature of our movement through the stars, that this is not some random rolling along, but a stately progress toward a greater becoming, especially so when it is filled with love.