The number five is a goddess number, and is particularly associated with the goddess as Venus, the love goddess. Represented geometrically in the pentagram, it has been used as a symbol by alchemists; adherents of the occult of all stripes, and lately, by Wiccans.
This association may be because the letter V (which in Roman numerals is the number five), is a also a glyph (primitive picture-symbol) of the female pubic area. V would therefore also refer to the mysterious sexual power of women and to the exclusively female power of creating life by giving birth. By extension to the abstract, V also refers to the goddess, who is woman writ large, and who created all living things. In another chapter, it has been stated that "life" is the translated meaning of the word which is the secret name of the goddess, which contains the letter V..
Another possible, or confirming, reason for the association of the number five and the goddess may be related to the astronomers and mathematicians of the ancient goddess temples. The Almagest reveals that the ancient mathematicians devoted a great amount of time to analysing all the combinatorial possibilities and powers of the number. These tables of properties (called quintals), have no application understood by modern mathematicians. The ancient mathematicians may have gained their obsessive interest in the number five from their fellows, the astronomers, whose role it was to observe the movements of the light in the heavens, the planet we call Venus, and which they knew as the light of the supreme deity, the Great Mother.
Venus Rising by Jean Leon Gerome
The following is a posting to a bulletin board concerned with the poet Robert Graves and his book, The Greek Myths:
Some time ago I installed an astronomy program on my computer. This enabled me to view a map of the night sky as seen from any nominated point at any time in history (I chose Alexandria, 1500 BC). With a few clicks it was possible to greatly speed the time base, and to see the slow movement of the "fixed heavens" (the background of stars) and the relatively rapid movement of the planets across that backdrop.
My object was to verify a piece of occult lore, namely, that the planet (and goddess) Venus was associated with the number five and the pentagram because when viewed over a period, due to the differing orbits of Earth and Venus, Venus traces out a five-pointed figure (the pentagram) against the backdrop of the fixed stars, returning to its original point after eight years. This I failed to do (maybe I need a better program ) but I did make an interesting discovery...the behaviour of the planets in the sky matches the characters given to the gods and goddesses by Graves in The Greek Myths!
Venus is the brightest light, and consorts first with Saturn then with Jupiter, then Mars, while her most frequent companion is Mercury, which dashes about the sky from one conjunction to another, as Hermes was said to do in his role as messenger of the gods. My conclusions?...the makers of these myths were advanced astronomers (because it would take generations of observers to notice and to record these facts, and this implies a society advanced in other ways); and that Graves' method of revealing the past through myth interpretation is vindicated.
My difficulties in observing a pentagonal path for the planet Venus are explained by the fact that the sun obscures events. The derivation of the pentagram is explained below, for which I thank the Transit of Venus team at the European Southern Observatory.
This is the diagram on the zodiac that Venus makes in eight years. After that period, Venus, the Sun, the Earth and the stars are again in the same relative positions. It means that Venus, seen from the Earth, is in the same position with respect not only to the Sun, but also to the stars. This happens because five periods of Venus take eight years (When we round Venus' synodic period to a whole number 584, we can calculate that 584x5=2920 days, 2920/365 = 8 years). Take a particular point in a synodic revolution of Venus, for instance the greatest elongation east which places it in one zodiacal constellation. After an interval of 584 days (or nearly 19 months) later, greatest elongation east will take place again, this time almost seven constellations away. These events repeat every nineteen months and the result is that in eight years the eastern elongation point will return close to the point where it started - only about two degrees less - making a pentagram on the zodiac.
The Five Things which make the Muses sing...
The five things which make the the muses sing are the vowels: e, o, u, i, a. Because they are the living, resonant part of the alphabet, and because they make up, together with a few of the consonants, her most secret and unpronounceable name, they were said to belong to the goddess. When a poet fashions rhyming pairs, such as 'blue' and 'true', it is the vowel sounds which are most useful in rhyme and meter.
Similarly, in music, the vowels are equivalent to the pentatonic scale used in the temples, and in song it is the 'eeeeeeee' and 'oooooo' etc sounds which can be sustained and which have interesting, shifting, living patterns in say a cappella or chanting. While it is difficult to pronounce a word composed largely of the vowels, it is possible to sing it...the result is a kind of yodel or ululation. The Romans said that the goddess-priests of North Africa would make this cry as they died.
