Along with learning to speak, my two year old daughter is also learning to sing and dance, courtesy of a rotund purple dinosaur and other quality children’s television programming. It is pretty cute to hear her sing, “Tween’gle tween’gle diddle tar.”

But when she started to sing the “Star Light” song, I got to wondering what the background of this song could be.

You remember the rhyme, don’t you?

Star Light, Star Bright
First star I see tonight
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have the wish I wish tonight.

Most nursery rhymes have no known author, and some stretch pretty far back into our history. Granted, English nursery rhymes are far younger than their counterparts in other languages (relatively speaking, we had just barely invented this hodge-podge way of speaking).

However, many rhymes, or at least, their icons, metaphors, and meaning can stretch back into the mythological beginnings of our culture, as on a star has been a part of human activity as soon as we noticed them.

The first star that would often see, is also the brightest… well, next to the Moon, that is. Anyone watching a sunset would soon notice a star appear, and this star, called appropriately the Evening Star is actually not a star, but the planet Venus. The “star” takes on a different role later during the year as the Morning Star when she is actually the last star to be seen before the Sun arises.

We know Venus as the Roman goddess of love and romance, but at one time in our mythology, she was part of a trio of goddess that was basically everything. The discussion of the Triple Goddess is extensive, but while I can’t prove it, I think this goddess was comprised of Venus, the Moon and the Sun. These obviously would be the first “wanderers” to be noticed by early man before the four patriarchal gods showed up and rounded the number up to 7.

Yes, I know that depending on the culture, the Sun and the Moon often switch genders, but I’m sticking to my speculation of how early man viewed the heavens.

Did I say “early man”? I really should have said “early woman” because many paleontologists believe that since it would have been a woman who first noticed the cycles in her body matching the cycles of the Moon, it was probably the women of a tribe that held the key to heavenly knowledge. Chances are good that she watched the sky a lot more than her sleeping bastard of a husband because she was up all night with a teething child.

Was it women who first noticed the other stars that wandered around the sky? Probably. Did she attribute a feminine gender to each of these as well? Who knows. While our stories are sometimes old, they aren’t quite that old. However, some of our earliest stories are ones about a god (like Apollo) who kidnaps (that’s mythology speak for “rape”) another goddess (like Artemis) and takes over her power and position… so the four smaller planets flex their muscle and the rest is history.

Their biggest victory, I think, is the gender change of either the Sun or the Moon into a guy. But I find very few cultures where Venus became any less of a woman. Perhaps this is why she continues to hold her position as the one every one wishes on.

Isn’t late night speculation fun?