About the Book

The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, by the ignorant mass—which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught—but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning. Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse. The academic backwoodsmen have been the curse of genius from Aristarchus to Darwin and Freud; they stretch, a solid and hostile phalanx of pedantic mediocrities, across the centuries.1

The Many Faces of Venus was originally published in 2001 and, at the time, represented the most complete compendium of Venus-lore ever assembled. In the preface to that first edition I pointed out that it was still a work in progress and much remained to be done. The mythology attached to the planet Venus is vast in scope and the task of properly cataloguing and analyzing it all is not only daunting, it will likely require multiple generations of specialists in assorted disciplines to sort it all out. That said, the basic thesis of Many Faces remains intact and gains in credence with each passing day. Briefly stated: It is our claim that, if the testimony of the ancient skywatchers is to be believed, the Earth was a participant in a series of recent interstellar cataclysms of a virtually unimaginable nature—cataclysms that were devastating in nature and traumatic in psychological impact. It can be shown, moreover, that such planetary events had a formative influence on the primary institutions of early cultures and thus their influence continues to be felt to this very day.

In this second edition I have done a fair amount of editing. At various points I have rearranged the chapters, eliminating some while substituting others in an effort to clarify and bolster the argument, which I trust is now more focused and cogent. I have also updated the footnotes and references where new findings bear on the argument. It is hoped that future editions will allow for including a generous portion of the rich iconographical tradition associated with the Venus-goddess. Alas, the budget of a lone scholar toiling away in obscurity does not allow for such luxuries at the present time, desirable as they may be.

1 A. Koestler, The Sleepwalkers (New York, 1959), p. 427.