The Seba library treats Evening Star in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Campbell, Joseph, Edinger, Edward F., Harvey, Andrew; Baring, Anne).
As morning star she was the virgin, as evening star the harlot, as lady of the night sky the consort of the moon; and when extinguished under the blaze of the sun she was the hag of hell.
Campbell identifies the Evening Star as one of four mythological aspects of the Venus-goddess in Sumero-Babylonian astral religion, specifically the ‘harlot’ phase of Inanna-Ishtar’s cosmic cycle.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015thesis
just as evening gives birth to morning, so from the darkness arises a new light, the stella matutina, which is at once the evening and the morning star—Lucifer, the light-bringer.
Edinger, following Jung’s reading of Augustine, collapses the Evening Star and Morning Star into a single alchemical symbol—Lucifer—that emerges from the nigredo of ‘evening knowledge’ as the harbinger of renewed psychic illumination.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
As Queen of Heaven, Inanna and Ishtar were adored as the crescent moon and as the morning and evening star we now call Venus and the great star Sirius.
Campbell establishes the Evening Star as one of the primary celestial identities of Inanna-Ishtar, situating it within the Queen of Heaven’s compound astral symbolism.
, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 2013thesis
As Queen of Heaven, Inanna and Ishtar were adored as the crescent moon and as the morning and evening star we now call Venus and the great star Sirius.
Harvey and Baring confirm the Evening Star as a fixed cultic identity of the Sumerian and Babylonian Great Goddess, linking it to a continuous tradition of goddess worship from 4000 BCE onward.
, The Divine Feminine: Exploring the Feminine Face of God Throughout the World, 1996supporting
when the planet Venus disappeared as Evening Star and reappeared as the Morning Star… Cf. the whole Feathered Serpent complex of the Mayan-Aztec Lord of the Morning and Evening Star.
Campbell maps the Evening Star’s disappearance and re-emergence onto Mesoamerican ritual time and onto the Quetzalcoatl complex, extending the planet’s symbolic valence across cultures.
, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting
the original man is the moon; the morning star his first wife, the evening star his second. Just as Väinä-möinen emerged from the womb by his own act, so this moon man emerges from the abyssal waters.
Campbell presents the Makoni cosmogonic myth in which the Evening Star figures as the Moon-man’s second wife, coupling the planet’s symbolism with themes of emergence from the abyss and earthly generation.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015supporting
other heavenly bodies could be given this name, but only if they resembled ‘a Little sun’
Kerényi’s discussion of Phaethon as a solar epithet touches tangentially on the broader Greek practice of assigning luminous names to celestial bodies, providing etymological context relevant to Venus’s stellar epithets.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951aside
ἑσπέρα [f.] ‘evening, west’ (Pi., lA, after ἡμέρα). IE *ue-kwsp-er-o- ‘to(wards) the night, evening’
Beekes traces the Greek root of ‘Hesperus’—the Evening Star—to an Indo-European stem meaning ‘toward the night,’ providing the etymological foundation for the term’s cosmological significance.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside