Talk:Pentagram/Archive 4

Venus-pentagram drift and the rule of Aanipada
I've removed some recently added text that looks like original research, and doesn't seem correct. The removed text is:
 * This pentagram rotates one point of 73 degrees in 243 years being 61 leap days and 12 drift days (2 days per 40 years). In 600 years the conjunction point has rotated 180 degrees as 150 leap days and 30 drift days. Thus a full circle was regarded as 1200 egyptian years (1199 Julian and 5 days) before realizing 5x243 years = 1215 years. So sadly, in this way the useful tool that a pentagram with zodiac is for calculating astronomy has become accused of paganism and cursed as being Wicca wile the useles Venus symbol of 8 points for 8 years is regarded as a meer writing symbol or decor.

And:
 * Since Venus has an 8-year cycle, the 80-year rule of Ur's first king Aanipada is ruled by or measured by Venus (2207-2127 BC). The 243-year rotation of the Venus pentagram can be overlaid in short Genesis as the end of his rule. This means the rule of Aanipada began with the birth of Serug and so supports the concept the king's name is Reu Aanipada the son of Peleg Mesannepada.

Now it would be good to have a discussion of the gradual drift of the pentagram traced on the zodiac by the venus-sun conjunctions. There is indeed a drift, however I'm pretty sure the figures of 600 years and 1200 years don't come into it. I could stand corrected, but I figured this out myself a while ago, and there weren't any round numbers! Also, the calculation should be simplified to avoid leap days and drift days, and simply use the time for a sidereal year: 365.256363051 days. Given venus' synodic period of 583.9211 days, we should be able to figure it out pretty precisely:
 * We know venus describes a pentagram in five synodic periods. That's 5 x 583.9211 days = 2919.6055 days.
 * In sidereal years, that's 7.993305 years, or 2.4437 days short of 8 full years.

If it had been a perfect 8 years then the pentagram would be precise, but it's not. It's short by 2.410213 degrees, and each eight years we can add another 2.410213 degrees to that error. So for the point to drift a full 360 degrees around the circle will take 149.3644 cycles.
 * 149.3644 cycles * 7.993305 years/cycle = 1193.9152 years

i.e. the drift will get right round the circle in nearly 1194 years.

This calculation is not correct. It assumes that the inferior conjunction positions drift continuously back round the circle (calendar). They do not. A given inferior conjunction of Venus only has a position when it occurs every eight years. Hence it is meaningless to say it drifts the full 360 degrees round the circle in 149.3644 cycles. At 149 cycles, it will not yet have reached its starting point. The next time the inferior conjunction comes about is at 150 cycles. At this point it will be slightly beyond that starting point. But since it does not exist in the intervening period, the time for that inferior conjunction to complete the full revolution has to be 150 cycles x 7.993305 years/cycles = 1198.99575 sid years = 1199 sid years minus 1.55 days. According to the latest NASA figures, though, the synodic period of Venus is actually 583.92137 days, making each cycle 2919.60685 days = 7.99330866 sid years. Hence the time to complete one full revolution is 150 x 7.99330866 = 1198.996299 sid years, which is 1199 sid years minus only 1.4 days. It would in fact be exactly 1199 sid years if the alignment position at the end of the 150th cycle were to fall precisely upon its position at the start of the first cycle. Since it appears at a position just slightly beyond this (in the direction of precession), it happens just over a day earlier than the 1199 sid years. Nevertheless, it is quite reasonable to think of this as a 1199 sid year cycle since the discrepancy is less than a day and a half, and those 1.4 days are accounted for by the precession. In fact, one could also consider it to be a 1200 year cycle that comes to an end one year and 1.4 days earlier due to the fact that it is a cycle of precession back through a single year and 1.4 days. When you add that one year and 1.4 days back on again you get 1200 years exactly.

I don't understand other parts of this, such as how the julian calendar comes into an egyptian year (it doesn't!), nor how this led to Venus being accused of paganism! The Aanipada info seems similarly unlikely, and it's not written so I can make head or tail of it. Who suggested this about Aanipada, and is there anything you could point us to to read that will clarify what you mean? Fuzzypeg ☻ 08:21, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Rotation of Venus pentagram
Why is it practice for you to remove before you question, on the mere premise it doesn't seem to be to you. I would like to see most members return data they wiped out if they are shown how it is true. But i think this is a case where being rebelliously self-willed comes first, and so giving people the self-appointed right to rule others.

I would like to see if you could just bear with me, and follow a thought. You delight in all your detailed decimal fractions proving ignorant that 4000 years ago no culture is going to be using fractions. It is common knowledge if you bother learing from anyone at all that Venus is regarded as a 584-day calendar (not 583.92 nor anyother lengthy decimal you wish to "correct" that too). That calendar is likewise known to be in Egypt and Maya as 8 egypitian years. (8x365 days) Leap days were not yet recognized by these cultures. This autmatically makes Venus 2 leap days short of every 8 years (5 synodic orbits). Then ignored by these ancients is that in 40 calendar years x365 days (5x8 years) that the Venus date of these 25 orbits (5x5 orbits) will DRIFT two dates back, so 2 drift dates and 10 leap days are 12 Julian dates. No ancient cultures used fragments, they used ATONEMENTS which means corrections. If you go back every 40 years you will have a drift of a month in 600 years of egyptian calendar which itself has drifted 150 leap days. This 180 days is half a year. That is why the 1200-year calendar if you do your research on calendars does exist and it has to be Venus, no other planet. It cannot be 12-year Jupiter whose 7 orbits are 83 years not 84 years. An example of 600 years of 365 days (minus 30 days) is 2369 BC Jan 6 to 1770 BC July 10, another 180 days back will then be 570 BC Jan 11. Get an astronomy program and go see it, dont just say you dont think it true. The 243-year Venus is also known to astronomers. Or are you going to say the Chicago Planetarium doesn't know anything because youre Australian. A conjunction of 2370 BC Dec 27 occurs again on 2127 BC Dec 27. A conjunction on 2029 BC July 1 occurs again on 1786 BC July 1. No one lives 1215 years (5x 243 years) they arent going to see the fractional differences. For you to say 1194 years you are ignoring the 8-year cycle as a calendar, which ancients would not do, 1200 calendar years are 150x 8years, but because they are years without leap days they drift back in Julian dates by 300 leap days, and as stated before the planet position drifts back 30 days per 600 years giving the 360 day retreat. This is why 1200 egyptian years falls in 1199 years, and it is why 1216 egyptian years falls in 1215 years, it has not deserted the 8-year calendar, but YOU have deserted it. You act as if they used your method of fractional math. I would like to know whether your fratcions for astronomy are calculated by you or taken from already recorded modern knowledge. So how is it that you some how expect these same ancient people to use your fractions that 1000 years of scholars had to calculate before you come along and disagree on how it was done 4000 years ago. Venus is given the same Julian date in 1215 years (5x 243 years) as a Sothic method. But the 1199 year method is 1200 egyptian years which occurs 16 years earlier and thus a date difference of 4 leap days. Has detailed algebraic math and geometrical math cuased you to forget simple math? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Elijah Michael (talk • contribs) 15:52, 3 February 2007‎


 * No offense intended, but you didn't explain what you meant very clearly at all. From what you wrote there is nothing to suggest that the drift you are talking about is the miscalculation of ancients rather than the actual drift of the pentagram's points.
 * Part of the problem is that you haven't clearly specified what you mean by a number of things: drift days, for instance. And I still don't understand why you're talking in terms of Julian years (365 days) and leap days when describing the Egyptian calendar, which was 360 days and 5 or 6 festival days each year (they had pretty damn good time reckoning, and their years certainly didn't drift as much as you seem to be saying, see . The drift over a period of 1200 calendar years would be measured in ?minutes?, certainly not years!).
 * Again, I'll ask: is there a source for this information that you could point me to? You may well be right with some of what you're trying to say, but you're not managing to get it across. For instance, you mention the 243-year Venus. The 243-year Venus what? If I could read the original articles you're basing this on, I might be able to figure these things out.
 * I live in New Zealand, not Australia, and despite popular conception the blood doesn't all run to our brains as we dangle off the underside of the globe here, because gravity pulls towards the Earth. My nationality has, in fact, nothing to do with how long Venus takes to do its dance in the sky.
 * The calculations I gave were my own, based on the sidereal year: 365.256363051 days, and venus' synodic period of 583.9211 (which I didn't figure out myself). Don't be alarmed by my use of real numbers (numbers containing fractions). It actually makes the arithmetic much simpler than trying to carry around "leap days" and "drift days" etc. I didn't put my calculations into the article, since they could of course be wrong, and that would constitute original research, which doesn't cut it for Wikipedia. I note that my results are sufficiently close to your figures that it suggests your figures are just rounded-up (less precise) versions of the same values I derived.
 * Now, until I see your sources, I can't conclude that this is anything other than your own original research. So far I feel completely vindicated in having removed the material.
 * Oh, and please check out WP:CIVIL and WP:AGF. Thanks, Fuzzypeg ☻ 05:22, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Venus creating pentagram patterns
This sentence needs evidence to be sufficiently deemed as true, otherwise it may have to be removed.

"When viewed from Earth, successive inferior conjunctions of Venus plot a nearly perfect pentagram shape around the zodiac every eight years."

88.105.93.103 13:22, 24 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Looks like the precession of points on the zodiac of successive earth-oppositions is about 2/5 of an orbit. I'll add a graphic for fun! Tom Ruen 20:43, 24 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Info is here. The calculation is trivial, and I've done it myself, based on the figures given in Wikipedia: The synodic period of Venus with the sun is 583.92 days, and the earth's sidereal year is 365.25636042 days. Divide the first by the second and we find that venus' synodic period is 1.599 years. The earth travels 360° round the sun in 1 year, so in 1.599 years it travels 575.5°, or one full revolution plus 215.5°. Or, approximately, one full revolution plus 3 fifths (3/5 of a circle is 216°). It's that 3/5 that gets us from one point of the "pentagram" to the next. Add on the next synodic period and we find we've gone 3 full revolutions plus one fifth, which completes the second "line of the pentagram". And so on, until after 5 synodic periods we find the earth has travelled 2.4 degrees short of 8 full revolutions, marking a good approximation of a pentagram around the sun, and taking 7.9933 years, or approximately 2 1/2 days short of 8 years.
 * I realise I'm describing this all in terms of the earth's position around the sun, as measured against the backdrop of stars (the zodiac); but the article is written in terms of a pentagram traced by venus's position against the backdrop of stars. This should become clear if you consider that at every synod venus is exactly aligned with the sun, i.e. it's position relative to us (and the sun's position relative to us) is exactly 180° from our position relative to the sun.
 * The place I first read about this was here. Fuzzypeg ☻ 23:27, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Pentagram of Venus
I restored the section with one blog link. There are plenty of sources of someone wants to write more details about it. I made the original diagram by request a long while ago. I should improve it since its hard to see in small sizes. Tom Ruen (talk) 00:34, 6 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Ah, a nicer image already existed. Tom Ruen (talk) 00:42, 6 July 2015 (UTC)


 * https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/the-pentagram-of-venus/ John Baez
 * Diagram was included in James Ferguson’s 1799 book Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles
 * http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/venus.html Venus and the pentagram
 * https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/AstronNotes/Earth-Venus.htm The (Almost) Venus-Earth Pentagram, Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences
 * http://www.keplerstern.com/Play_of__movements/play_of__movements.html
 * http://starworldnews.com/venus-transit-a-highly-interesting-planet/
 * http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/11/almost-perfect-cosmic-music-and-mathematical-ratio.html

New copy of "Grouping Venus discussion sections"
We have
 * The pentagram of Venus is the path that Venus makes as observed from Earth. Successive inferior conjunctions of Venus repeat very near a 13:8 orbital resonance (The Earth orbits 8 times for every 13 orbits of Venus), shifting 144° upon sequential inferior conjunctions. The resonance 13:8 ratio is approximate. 8/13 is approximately 0.615385 while Venus orbits the Sun in 0.615187 years.

Of those three sentences, the last two imply that the pentagram of Venus resembles, and nearly entails, an instance of a geometrical pentagram. IMO that will make it valuable to retrofit the first talk section re p of V as a subsection of a (top-level) talk section -- and then move, and subordinate to it, the other p of  V sections (prior discussions that it may help to have grouped together), preparatory to discussing the option of moving some of the p of V section of the accompanying article, out to a separate Pentagram of Venus article (replacing the Rdr at that page). --Jerzy•t 22:07, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
 * (Please treat this as the proper place to respond to my immediately preceding 1st comment in the section.) --Jerzy•t 22:58, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Omnibunstrosity
The misnomer "Article namespace" hinders awareness that the term embraces several distinct kinds of pages, including not just articles but (most notably) Dab'n pages. Encyclopedias are written in, but not about, words (and rather about topics), and topics often don't willingly line up with words. "Pentagram" has been allowed to develop without adequate attention to the tool of disambiguation; that could obscure the fact that "Pentagram" (like no doubt too many other pages to enumerate) has so far ignored the distinction. Specifically, the fairly severe weakness of the resemblance, between pentagrams and the Pentagram of Venus, has been ignored in the development of the accompanying main-namespace page: The pentagram of Venus evokes the shape of a pentagram, but it is not a pentagram in the sense of the whole rest of the the article. (It's possible the wonderful pentagenic 13:8 ratio deserves its own (topic-)article (and/or SIA) that would discuss not just the coincidence of names, but also the parallels in topic-pairs whose constituents may have nothing else in common.)  While discussion is welcome, this fundamental distinction has been completely ignored for years, so i'm doing due diligence by identifying every editor who contributed to the relevant part of the passage, or worked close enuf to it to have plausibly concurred, and notifying them that i am boldly proceeding first with exhibiting a corrected version, and unless and until discussion is in progress, proceeding to correct it, probably including splitting out all, or virtually all, of the Venus content to its own article, and either adding a Pentagram Dab page, or adding a HatNote Dab to the accompanying existing article. --Jerzy•t 08:10, 6 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Regarding "The pentagram of Venus evokes the shape of a pentagram, but it is not a pentagram in the sense of the whole rest of the the article", I disagree, at least the geometric meaning is identical: A pentagram have sequential points at 144° angles, and the Venus superior conjunctions also repeat in ~144° as the diagram suggests. There's no need for or any justification for any thing else, although if there is an generalized explanation of how a 13:8 period ratio reduces to 144° conjunctions, that sounds worth linking, like explained a here - . Tom Ruen (talk) 02:06, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Wow! An infinite, open, non-self-similar smooth curve, that "almost" coincides with an abstruse closed curve that could never exist in this universe, is a form of
 * five Not crooked or bent[, i.e.] having a constant direction throughout [their] length) strokes.
 * On the other hand, the geometric significance of pentagrams is too small to have an entry for the term in my aging hard-copy dict  ' pedias (and probably adequately covered in star polygon. And i've never admitted to responsibility for everything in WP; i don't think i'll even bother checking other fully curated dicts  ' pedias. --Jerzy•t 00:03 & 00:08, 10 January 2016 (UTC)