The library · The planetary correspondences

Correspondences of Venus

the classical correspondences of Venus: day, metal, colour, incense, angel and deva

What the tradition reads

The grimoire tradition gives Venus Friday as its day, the day the Heptameron's own working text assigns to this planet's operations, and copper as its metal, correspondences Agrippa's Scale of the Number Seven records. Agrippa's separate chapter on planetary colours gives Venus no colour of its own, grouping it instead with Mercury and the Moon under one shared set, all white, fair, curious, green and ruddy, between saffron and purple, while his chapter on planetary fumes gives Venus a suffumigation of musk, ambergris, lignum aloes and red roses, together with red coral, none of it a poisonous substance. Agrippa's own Scale of the Number Seven gives Venus the angel Haniel, while the Heptameron's working text gives Anael for Friday; the Heptameron's own comparative table does not flag this pair as differing the way it flags Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, the Sun and Mercury, treating Anael and Haniel as one name in two spellings rather than as genuinely different angels. The Vedic tradition names its own significator for the same planet, Shukra, read by the tradition not primarily as a planet of romance but as preceptor to the asuras and expounder of all scripture, a teacher of considerable learning, whose colour is white and whose own day, Friday, called Shukravara, matches the Western tradition's day for this planet exactly.

The story

Venus's correspondences travel the same route as every other planet's, through Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy and its Scale of the Number Seven, compiled in the early sixteenth century from older astrological material organised into one table. The planet's Roman name preserves the goddess of love and beauty, an office the Greek tradition gave to Aphrodite, and the astrological planet keeps that association directly in its correspondences, copper a soft, lustrous metal long linked to the goddess, and, in Agrippa's chapter on fumes, roses and musk for her own gentler rites. The Heptameron's working text names Anael as the angel governing Friday's operations where Agrippa's Scale names Haniel instead, two names from two independent grimoire lineages rather than one office spelled two ways. Shukra's own Vedic myth gives Venus an origin in learning rather than beauty: Wikipedia's account names Shukra's father as the sage Bhrigu and his mother as Kavyamata, and tells that Shukra alone possessed Mrita Sanjivani, the secret of reviving the dead, learned from Shiva, knowledge the devas later sought and ultimately gained, a story the tradition reads as explaining how that knowledge eventually reached beyond the asuras Shukra served.

Written from

Corpus key correspondence:Venus.