Venus

A continuation of detailed looks at the planet quilts:

Venus is represented by Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, in the Greek pantheon. She is the planet of artists, governing the creative urges, passion in all its guises, from procreation to culture in general. Lush and green, she bursts with growth. Friday is her special day (ah, that weekend ahead!). In the world of power numbers, with sevens popping up all over, Venus claims that number for her own, hence the 7x7 magic square on the back side.

Venus/Aphrodite rules love and affections, art, pleasure, grace, beauty, compassion, marriage, music, friendship, happiness, romance, and harmony.

Planets

I thought I'd add a series of posts about each of the planet quilts, giving details and info that didn't fit with the Quilting Arts magazine article. Warning: not all the quilts are finished, so it'll be a while to see all seven. ;-)

Sol

It's hard to imagine back to the days when the sun was considered a planet, one of seven known to ancient man's geocentric planetary system. Sol is the Roman name, and Helios is the Greek version -- hence our current heliocentric system. In the Greek Pantheon, the sun is Apollo, the Lord of the Day and light of consciousness.

Each of the seven planets is associated with one of the days of the week (seven was a power number and I've been thinking about lots of series of seven). It's no surprise that Sol connects to Sunday. It also seems imminently reasonable that the color and metal associated with Sol are both yellow gold.

Sol confers all things sunny and bright -- honor, good reputation, influence, power and popularity, riches, freedom, vitality, succes, intellect and wisdom, fame.

I'm not quite certain how the planets got connected to magic squares, except that numbers were themselves considered so powerful and magic squares must have seemed purely mystical. After all, the incredible Benjamin Franklin was quite taken with magic squares as well. Sol is planet number 6, so a 6 x 6 square will have all the numbers from 1 to 36 inside, and the rows and columns will all sum to 111, and 6 x 111 is 666, the number of the beast from the Bible!