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The Little Book of Black Venus
and the Three-Fold Transformation
of Hermetic Astrology
by Teresa Burns
The
Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus
, attributed to John Dee, presents us with a curious puzzle in
the history of magical manuscripts. It instructs the reader how to perform the “Horn of Venus,” which at
first seems a lengthy but straightforward rite in the tradition of Henry Cornelius Agrippa. “Dee” tells us that
this “Horn” might be used for “lifting hidden treasures, for Navigating, Trade, war, and other ways likewise
where the Spirit can be of service to you;” and instructs the reader, repeatedly, to make all preparations on
the day and hours of Venus, and to perform the rite itself only during these hours
We might suspect this
“Horn” describes a not-so-veiled tantric working, also appropriate to the days and hours of Venus. But then
why write the book on Saturday,
which would seem a quite inauspicious day for most of these activities?
The rite’s final section advises the reader to make sure that any treasure or coins brought by the Spirits be
emptied into a new perfumed, consecrated container. Yet in England after 1563, a person caught even
attempting something like sending goetic spirits to fetch coins would face life-threatening consequences:
using magic to discover hidden treasure was against the law. A first conviction got the treasure hunter a
year’s imprisonment and four trips to the pillory, and a second one meant death. In the late 1570s, John Dee
had already asked the Lord Treasurer, William Cecil, for an exemption to this rule, and was turned down.
Moreover, the
Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus
sounds nothing like any of Dee’s other works and
lacks his usual heavy Christian tone. It lacks the stern valuing of scholarship we see when we read the
frontispiece of the
Hieroglyphic Monad
: “QUI NON INTELLIGIT, AUT TACEAT, AUT DISCAT” (“He
who does not understand, should either be silent or learn.") In the “Horn of Venus,” in the eight lines that
follow “John Dee’s” greeting, the writer almost seems to tell us not to worry about understanding magic at
all, because it’s too hard, so “we sound a Horn for you, Beloved Reader!” Is “Dee” telling the reader to not
worry, just follow directions?
One might be tempted to stop right now and dismiss the book as nothing more than an opportunistic forgery
which tells us little about Dee or his magic circle. Yet the name
Tuba Veneris
, the Horn or Trumpet of
Venus, seems echoed in a work mentioned by none other than Edward Kelly, “The Sounding of the
Trumpet.” Kelly makes repeated reference to “The Sounding of the Trumpet” in his treatise “The Stone of
the Philosophers,”
which Kelly reportedly wrote for the Holy Roman Emperor while in prison, years after
Dee had returned to England. Furthermore, John Dee’s
Five Books of Mystery
contain repeated references
to the Archangel Anael, who Dee considered the ruling Archangel of the Age, and who the “Horn of
Venus” calls upon in its closing.
Handwritten copies of the
Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus
appear in different places on the
continent from the early 1600s as late as 1794
Several of the figures on the Seal of Venus appear in a
1614 manuscript by Johann Baptista Großchedel
and are engraved in 1620 by Johannes Theodorus de
Bry and retitled
Magical Calendar
De Bry, the “Palatine publisher” whose house also put out the
beautifully illustrated works of Robert Fludd and Michael Maier, is made much of by Frances Yates in her
classic
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment
.
The
Magical Calendar
comes out in 1620, just after Fludd and
Maier. In short, at least some of the images in the
Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus
spring from an
underground tradition often traced back to Dee, one slowly returning to light these past few years as more
and more connections have been made between different Rosicrucian writers and Dee’s
Hieroglyphic
 Monad
.
Similarly, other images appearing in the
Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus
, particularly the glyphs on
the Seal of Venus, appear in the
Heptameron
, or
Magical Elements
, attributed to Peter de Abano (1250-
1316) and translated into English by Robert Turner in 1655.
The same glyphs appear in “Dr. Rudd’s”
“Nine Great Celestial Keys or Angelical Invocations” as part of the Seal of Anael
two others with the
discussion of the Olympic Spirit of Venus (Haggith) and a third with the discussion of the Olympic Spirit of
Mercury (Ophiel).
It appears with a group of manuscripts that Adam McLean refers to as “The Treatises
of Dr. Rudd,” likely Thomas Rudd, who published an edition of Dee’s
Preface
to Euclid in 1651. This
group of manuscripts copied by Peter Smart in 1714 was bundled with another work attributed to Dee, the
Rosie Crucian
secrets, which Vincent Bridges links to the recently published manuscripts rediscovered in
Manchester, the Byrom Collection, which had been in the possession of a family related to Dee by
marriage
If those aren’t enough tantalizing connections to fragmented traditions, the mystery in the manuscript itself
swirls around the Black Venus to whom it is consecrated. One wonders if the “Horn of Venus” could be
part of the same tradition catalogued by Ean Begg in
The Cult of the Black Virgin
Begg argues that the
Black Virgin cult “seems to point in the direction of two alternatives in particular. One, the alternative
church of Mary Magdalene, James, Zacchaeus, Gnosticism, Cathars, Templars, and alchemists . . . [which]
contains much of the wisdom of the old religions as well as certain new phenomena that reached
consciousness in the twelfth century, such as the Holy Grail and courtly love.” Secondly, the dark Mary
may stand for a “heretical Judaism” where Christian and Jew are one.
In
The Hebrew Goddess
, Rafael Patai notes that the Matronit, the fourth being of the Kabbalistic tetrad
which corresponds to some extent with the Gnostic
aeons
, in popular terms shares many characteristics
with ancient love and war goddesses from Inanna and Ishtar to Venus, Diana, and Aphrodite.
In Gnostic
writings, she also parallels many of the medieval representations of Mary: “Mary, like the Matronit, was
considered to have taken over the royal, governing, and controlling functions of God to the extent that her
sovereignty actually eclipsed that of God.
But while the Virgin Mary’s purity and chastity are
interwoven, the Matronit, as she becomes the “Matronit-Shekhina, the medieval Kabbalistic Goddess
figure,” remains, like the ancient love goddesses, both pure and sexualized. She is the reflection of the
“dark” energies of Binah giving form to the universe, expressed as the reflection of the Sephira Binah in the
path of Tau, uniting Yesod to Malkuth. To non-Kabbalists, She is most easily conceptualized as a dark
Goddess.
The most intense concentration of Black Madonnas are in the south of France, springing from the same
cultural well as the first Arthurian stories of the Magic Horn
in the Old French
Lai du Cor
, as well as the
primary text of the Kabbalah, the
Bahir
Could our Black Venus be a survival of that 12
th
century
syncretic tradition? If so, finding texts will be even more difficult than piecing together the later
Rosicrucian stream, since the last likely public surfacing, among the 13th century Cathar Perfecti, was very
literally burned out of existence in what many consider the first genocide of modern times. If it exists at all
in Dee’s time, its members survive by appearing to be something else.
The “Black Venus” on the different frontispieces of the
Little Book
certainly
appears
to be something else:
for one thing, they’re never dark, much less black. But more to the point, as Phil Legard points out,
Venus as described by “Dee” in this manuscript is a talismanic image, not a pagan goddess. Certainly, it is
important to look at
Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus
first as practical magic, and understand it
within the Solomonic tradition, before leaping to other readings. But might it not be easy for a Kabbalist
and a Solomonic magician to conflate the two, remembering especially the bride of Solomon in “Song of
Songs” 1:5, who even in the King James version is “black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the
 tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon?”
If we want to speculate about the
Black Venus’s
connection to both John Dee and a more feminized and
sexualized underground tradition, we need to analyze it in terms of Dee’s own magical system, to the
degree that we can understand that system. If John Dee were teaching students “Negromancia” (as this
manuscript implies) in the Solomonic tradition (as this rite is), then that means we should be able to explain
both in terms of Dee’s
Hieroglyphic Monad
and the conception of Hermetic astrology and sacred geometry
contained therein.
This writer thinks that is possible, and the implications extremely significant: it would seem we have at last
found a manuscript that fuses the “high magic” of male Renaissance scholars, artists, magicians, and proto-
Rosicrucians like Dee and his circle with the so-called “witch cult,” described by Margaret Murry in her
controversial book
The Witch Cult in Western Europe
,
but perhaps now better thought of as an
amalgamation of indigenous followers of the “old religion,” heretical Christians, Jews, Moslems, gypsies,
and mystics of various spiritual traditions for whom hiding has become a way of life.
The “dark art” practiced by some of these “cultists” was alchemy, of a “school” typified by the writings of
Maria the Jewess, Comarius, Hermes, and Cleopatra
The iconography of their “dark goddess,” be She
Mary, Venus, Diana, or Aphrodite, connects almost seamlessly to the tradition to Isis and the absorption of
those Isean symbols into a heretical tradition that existed for hundred of years under the thinnest of
Christian veneers before being forced underground.
If that is the tradition “Dee” is drawing upon, then
the “bad Latin” of the title (“LIBELLUS VENERI NIGRO SACER, which grammatically should be
nigræ
instead of
nigro
) is an inside nod to the tradition where “Nigromancia” or “Negromancia,” the dark art,
does not use “dark” pejoratively but as a reference to the art of the black land (Egypt, Al’Khem), or
alchemy
Though it may not seem apparent at first, this would also mean we’ve finally found the key to
understanding what the Dees, Kellys, and their followers and benefactors were trying to accomplish in
Trebona. While astrology, alchemy, Kabbalah, and
hieros gamos
rituals don’t always or even often
intersect with each other, in Dee’s Monadic universe the overlap is total.
The Consecrated Little Book of
Black Venus
, even if it is not by Dee but one of his students, affords us the chance to piece together the
parts of this cosmology which have been most often censored, and speculate about what the Dees and
Kellys may have been trying to accomplish in their much-snickered-at but little understood spouse-sharing
pact in Trebona.
I don’t presume to be able to turn that key in one article, or even two, but hope to at least set out the
outlines of what “The Horn of Venus” may have been trying to accomplish and what groups it would have
been associated with.
Let’s start by looking at the opening four lines in their Latin original:
Est VENUS a Superis mihi datum nomen in Astris
Incola mox Stygius dum TUBA cantat adest
Subditus En Dæmon SIGNI virtute gemiscit
Euge! animi mactus victor ab hoste redis.
Readers who enjoy scanning Latin poetry may agree this sounds a bit strained, the word choice awkward,
pronoun references ambiguous, and includes a key word (
mox
, English “soon”) whose placement depends
totally upon understanding the esoteric context. In the final line, which we translated as “Well done! As the
victor, infused with glory, you return from the enemy,” the “you” can refer to either the reader, or Venus, or
both. Let’s stop a moment and think about why “John Dee” puts these lines into the working, and for that
 matter, why the working itself is in Latin, when it was becoming more and more common to write in the
speaker’s native language, be it English, French, German, or Italian.
Latin is the language of most alchemical texts. Beyond that, it affords this writer a way of safely conveying
very “packed” concepts impossible to communicate in English, because by pun and allusion one could, in
Latin, convey ideas that had become heretical. Latin
dæmon
, for instance, could retain the meaning brought
in from ancient Greek mythology, of a divinity, genius, or tutelary deity; or of a supernatural being which
serves as an intermediary between gods and humans. In Renaissance English, “demon” already meant
mainly an evil spirit, and by extension the gods and goddesses of the older “demonic” religions. If one still
believes in those old religions, one might prefer
dæmon
.
Venus, Mars, and the Tree of Life
Nowhere is the poet’s ability to convey complex ideas via what seems awkward poetry more evident than
in the choice of
tuba
instead of
cornu
.
Tuba
usually refers to the straight bronze war-trumpet of the ancient
Romans. Here’s how this “trumpet” appears in French version of the Key of Solomon:
“
Elohim Gibor, Dieu des Armées
” (Elohim Gibor, Lord of Armies) reminds us of the familiar Kabbalistic
associations with the Sephira Geburah or Severity, including its attribution to Mars. The energies associated
with the reflection of the sphere of Mars onto the path of Peh - often called Victory (Netzach) over
Splendor (Hod) - might give one pause if we consider what a large-scale working involving the Kabbalistic
path of Peh might entail. In Tarot decks then and now this path is usually shown as the “Blasted Tower.”
The path of Peh, the lowest of the reciprocal paths on the Tree, is often described as “Victory over
Splendor,” the alchemical transformation where the energies of Mercury (Hod), propelled by those of Mars
(the path of Peh) act upon Venus (the Sephira Netzach). That seems alluded to in the straight Roman war
trumpet pictured above.
Now, let’s look at our curved “Horn of Venus:”
This Horn looks more like a
cornu
, the curved horn of the “cornucopia” or horn of plenty. The engravings
on the left Horn are the similar to some of those on the Seal of Venus, except for second long glyph, which
 as we’ll see later is a glyph for Anael. The right Horn has the Seals of the six spirits. If we count one for the
symbols associated with Venus (on the left) plus the six spirits, we have seven, the number usually
associated with Venus and the number of planets in Renaissance astrology. In contrast to the blast up the
tree announced by the French Trumpet, the energy runs through our “Horn of Venus” the other way, as a
lightning flash bringing “above” to “below”: Venus (Netzach) gives motive or force through Mars (path of
Peh) to Mercury (Hod.) Imagine an influx of artistic inspiration and knowledge of what form to put it in,
and you’ll have the idea. The last line of the poem also implies that after we have sounded the Horn and
brought down the energy, we’ll be able to again connect “below” with “above:” “Well done! As the victor,
infused with glory, you [Venus, or the magician/alchemist, having invoked the energies of Venus] return
[ascend] from the enemy.” So why doesn’t “Dee” just say
cornu
?
“Dee” likely muddies his Latin and uses
tuba
rather than
cornu
so his Horn clearly refers to the Tree of Life
in multiple traditions.
Tuba
stressed on the first syllable sounds like
tubah
in the Koran, which may come
from the Aramaic word for “beatitude” (
tuba
) or the Hebrew word for prosperity (
tobah
), basically
implying a state of having good things flow into one’s life and being happy. The tuba-tree, to Moslem and
especially Sufi poets, refers to a tree growing in Paradise where the Simorgh bird (often translated into
English as “Phoenix”) nests. In writers like Hafiz, we find the recurrent image of the soul as a bird resting
on the tuba tree, descending into material existence again, and then returning to the tree to find peace before
descending again. By choosing
tuba
instead of
cornu
, “Dee” provides a governing image instructing an
informed reader to understand the “Horn of Venus” in terms of Kabbalah and suggesting that this same
governing image could bring peace to three warring traditions.
We also notice that the drawing of this Horn looks perspectivally challenged. If it is two sides of the same
horn, they can’t be shown side-by-side pointing in the same direction, as they are in the line drawings in
this manuscript. Might this be a “wink” to an informed reader, to not take the rendering of Venus too
literally, either?
This Horn of Venus suggests the
shofar
horns of the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. The
shofar
, traditionally
made of a ram’s horn, is sounded to announce the New Moon and feasts, and as per Leviticus 23:24,
announces Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the seventh month of Tishri and traditionally the beginning of
the Jewish New Year. More than any other Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashanah is thought of as a Day of
Judgment.
The horn as a
shofar
also resonates against the odd Latin phrasing
Scopusque Libelli
which comes right
after “John Dee’s” greeting, in the line translated as “It is not our intention or the goal of our little book to
write about the different Negromantic Arts, their definitions, subdivisions, methods or even their various
practices of which Views and Books many have already written about.” We’ve translated “
Scopusque
Libelli
” as “Views and Books.” English
scope
comes from the Latin
scopus
, which usually means a goal,
view, or target. It comes into Latin from ancient Greek, a language Dee knew well - just as he would know
the ancient Greek
skopus
in Biblical texts carried a built-in allusion to Mount Scopus in the Holy Land,
famed for its strategic view of Jerusalem.
Finally, we get to the opening verse’s last line, “
Incola mox Stygius dum TUBA cantat adest
,” translated as
“Soon to be a Stygian Sojourner, she appears when the Horn sounds.”
Stygius
refers to the underworld and
puns on stiga or “witch,” and suggests that Venus, or the energies associated with Venus, will go
underground until this working is undertaken. It also directs us to an ancient astrological understanding of
“night,” when the Sun was conceived as going “underground” or “through the underworld,” to be reborn
the next day. In a sense, because of its smaller orbit, Venus viewed from Earth seems to follow the Sun, or
Kephera (the Sun at night) through the underworld: Venus appears in the sky as the evening star, then fades
behind the Sun, reappears as the morning star, disappears as the Sun brightens, disappears as it reaches
occultation, then reappears once more as the evening star. “Soon to be a Stygian Sojourner” - soon to
disappear into the “underworld” behind the Sun - makes more sense than putting
mox
with the independent
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