Most people are oblivious to our solar system. I doubt if one in ten people could name the nine planets in order (actually only 8 now that Pluto has been demoted). And there are a lot of weird things that happen here on earth when "certain things" happen out there in our solar system. One of those interesting things is called the venus transit.

A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth, obscuring a small portion of the Sun's disk. During a transit, Venus can be seen from Earth as a small black disk moving across the face of the Sun.

Every 243 years, Venus passes between the earth and the sun TWICE in EIGHT years!

We are lucky to be a people who are living within that 243 window of a Venus transit. In case you missed it, the initial transit happened June 8th, 2004. Do you remember where you were when this marvelous event happened? I seriously doubt it (the transit of 2004 lasted six hours). But, you can get in on the second half of the 243 transit which occurs June 6, 2012!

A transit is similar to a solar eclipse by the Moon, but, although the diameter of Venus is almost 4 times that of the Moon, Venus appears much smaller because it is much farther away from Earth. Before the space age, observations of transits of Venus helped scientists use the parallax method to calculate the distance between the Sun and the Earth.

Our ancient forefathers who seemed to know more thousands of years ago than we do today looked upon Venus as the planet of beauty and the transits symbolized a sacred marriage (hierogamos) of masculine and feminine energies. Mayan stargazers were particularly fascinated by the cycles of Venus which brings us to the infamous December 21, 2012 date.

Mayan scholar Carl Johan Calleman (and Swedish biologist) theorizes that the Venus transits were related to the return of Quetzalcoatl.

Quetzalcoatl was the Aztec sky and creator god. The name is a combination of quetzal, a brightly colored Mesoamerican bird, and coatl, meaning serpent. Quetzalcoatl is often referred to as The Feathered Serpent- which is a combination of "heaven and earth". Quetzalcoatl was just one god in a pantheon of gods, not considered superior to the others. However, I see the Mayan writings as predicting an unfolding of consciousness that just might be what saves our planet and thus- US!