The Queen of Heaven: From Rome’s Venus to Revelation’s Babylon

Roman poets before Virgil had already begun to shape a story that bound politics to myth. They cast Aeneas not just as the founder of Rome but as the ancestor of the Julian line, linking Julius Caesar and Augustus to Venus Genetrix, the mother-goddess who gave divine authority to their rule. When Virgil wrote the Aeneid, he fused Greece’s epic form with Rome’s national ideology, turning Aeneas’s voyage into the birth story of empire itself. The colour purple, drawn from the rare Tyrian dye, came to embody that power; a shade reserved for emperors, priests, and the gods.

In the Aeneid and in Roman ritual, purple robes, gold, incense, and spices filled the atmosphere of divinity and luxury. Centuries later, the Book of Revelation echoes this world, describing the great city “arrayed in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold and precious stones,” her merchants dealing in cinnamon, myrrh, and frankincense. The prophet’s vision turns Rome’s self-image inside out: the splendour that once signified divine favour becomes a sign of moral decay.

Behind the Roman goddess Venus stood older eastern figures; Ishtar, Astarte, Asherah, Isis, Inanna; different names for a single archetype of the Queen of Heaven, the feminine symbol of fertility, love, and celestial power. In Virgil’s Rome she legitimized empire; in Revelation her imagery reappears as a warning. The same colours, scents, and symbols that once crowned emperors are shown as the finery of a fallen world.

In the oldest stories of the ancient world, the sea was never just water; it was the symbol of the deep, the place where unseen powers moved. The Greeks called its keeper Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea; a shapeshifter who could see the future but never serve mankind. From him and the sea-spirit Doris came the Nereids, the fifty daughters of the deep. Among them was Thetis, mother of Achilles, linking mortal heroes to the tides of that ancient power. Nereus was known by many names and faces through the ages: the calm prophet of the waves, merged at times with Proteus, Glaucus, or Oceanus; and behind him stood older shadows from the East; Ea/Enki, the god of the abyss, and Tiamat, the salt-water dragon who mothered the gods. Each was a version of the same figure, the ageless intelligence of the waters, creative yet dangerous, offering wisdom but also deception.

Rome inherited those myths and turned them into politics. Its poets claimed that Venus; born from the foam near Cyprus; rose from those same depths to become mother of Aeneas and ancestress of the Julian line. By tracing their blood to her, Julius Caesar and Augustus presented themselves as heirs of the sea’s creative force. Every coin stamped with Venus Genetrix announced that imperial authority came from the waters, from a power older than men or kings.

The Book of Revelation later spoke of a beast rising from the sea. To its readers the image would have been unmistakable: the empire that ruled them had literally grown out of the Mediterranean, its fleets and wealth flowing over the waters. The sea of Virgil’s poetry had become the sea of prophecy; a realm of chaos, pride, and deception. The old myths had promised birth and beauty; Revelation saw only domination and blasphemy.

Long before Rome, the Babylonians told of Tiamat, the primeval dragon of salt water, mother of gods and source of disorder. She was the deep personified, the abyss that the Creator had to subdue before life could begin. Through the ages that image of the sea; beautiful, powerful, but treacherous; followed every empire that rose by trade and conquest. In Virgil’s Rome the sea gave legitimacy; in John’s vision it gives rise to the final power that defies heaven. The same waters that once birthed gods and empires now signify the abyss from which all pride and false divinity emerge.

In Homer’s account, the survival of Aeneas is not an accident of battle but a decision made at the highest level of the "divine" hierarchy. When Poseidon insists that Aeneas must be spared, he invokes Zeus’s personal decree: “Zeus loves Dardanus above all his children by mortal women.” The words define a hidden logic behind the war. Troy may burn, but the line that began with Dardanus; the son whom Zeus fathered with a mortal woman; must live. Priam’s family, descended from later generations, has lost divine favor; its kings have fallen into pride and ruin. Yet the older Dardanian line, purified through Aeneas, is chosen to endure.

This moment in the Iliad reveals how ancient religion turned bloodlines into theology. The gods create dynasties through their unions with mortals, producing a race that stands between heaven, earth and the abyss. Zeus, the master of disguise and transformation, is the archetype of this process. In myth after myth he descends in new forms; bull, serpent, swan, shower of gold; to claim mortal women and leave behind children marked by his power. Each union establishes another “seed” of divine authority on earth, and through those descendants the gods maintain their hold over human kingdoms.

Homer’s passage, read this way, is more than a family record: it is a declaration that certain royal lines carry the favor; or the infection; of the "gods" (fallen powers). In Aeneas the poets found a vessel through whom Zeus’s will could continue, long after the fall of Troy. When Virgil later made Aeneas the founder of Rome, the myth of divine preservation became imperial ideology. The favor that once protected a Trojan hero was now the charter of the Caesars.

Across cultures the same pattern appears. The book of Genesis speaks of “the sons of God” taking wives from among humans and producing mighty men of renown; Greek poets told of Zeus and his mortal lovers giving birth to heroes and kings. Both traditions describe the mingling of divine (demonic) power with human flesh and the rise of extraordinary lineages that rule the world. Where Genesis treats such unions as the breach that leads to corruption, the poets of Greece and Rome turned them into the genealogy of empire. Zeus’s “beloved seed,” preserved through Dardanus and Aeneas, becomes the literary reflection of that ancient theme; a power born of heaven but bound to the earth, promising greatness yet carrying the shadow of rebellion within it.

When Virgil wrote the Aeneid, he wasn’t just telling a heroic adventure. He was rewriting history to give Rome a divine passport. The poem moves the sacred bloodline of Dardanus; the son of Zeus and Electra; from the fallen East of Troy to the rising West of Italy. Aeneas, the last heir of that line, escapes the flames of Troy carrying the Penates, the household gods, and the “eternal flame” of the old order. In mythic language, he brings the ancient "divine" spark across the sea to seed a new empire.

The Dardanian bloodline does not die; it is reborn as Rome itself. The god who once appeared as Zeus to Electra is renamed Jupiter, and his “divine seed” flows through Aeneas into the Julian family. Julius Caesar could now trace his ancestry to Venus Genetrix, while Augustus could rule as the living fulfillment of that prophecy; the man who restores Troy’s divine destiny under a Roman name.

Behind the poetry stands an idea far older than Rome: that power is inherited through a mixture of "divine" and human blood. Dardanus embodies all the key elements of that ancient pattern; the union of a "god" and woman, the survivor of a flood or cataclysm, the founder who carries secret knowledge into a new land. In Virgil’s Rome these motifs justify empire; they turn the Caesars into heirs of heaven. Later readers, especially among early Christians, would see the same theme in darker light; as a retelling of the oldest story of all, the claim that divine beings once mingled with mortals and produced rulers who called themselves gods. Whether one calls it mythology or ideology, the Dardanian line in the Aeneid exposes how Rome clothed worldly dominion in the language of divine descent.

Across the ancient world, people told stories of powers that once ruled the heavens and fell into darkness. The Greeks called them Titans, the first gods who rebelled and were chained in Tartarus. The Hebrews remembered them as the Nephilim, beings of mixed nature who corrupted the earth before the Flood. Beneath the different names lay the same pattern: forces that once stood above humanity becoming the masters of a world now filled with fear, appetite, and death. Every empire, every system that claimed divine right repeated their story, rising on the promise of power that was never truly human and never truly divine.

Early Christians saw in these myths an image of the unseen powers that still held the world captive; the “elements” Paul called stoicheia, the spiritual rulers of this age. They were not merely old gods but the principles of domination, violence, and deceit that shaped human history. The empires of men served them without knowing their names. In that vision, the coming of Christ was not just a moral event but a liberation: the breaking of the chains that bound creation to those fallen powers. The cross marked their defeat; the resurrection opened a way out of the old order ruled by the Titans of pride and the giants of corruption.

In this light, the myths of the ancient world become records of our own enslavement; a memory of the powers that once claimed to rule both heaven and earth. The gospel turns that memory on its head. What the poets called divine ancestry is exposed as bondage to the elements; what they worshiped as eternal power is unmasked as rebellion.

Even the Roman line that traced its ancestry to Dardanus and Venus; the Caesars who claimed descent from divine blood; were heirs of that same old order. Their constant intermarrying among noble and priestly houses was meant to preserve what they believed to be sacred lineage, binding political power to the supposed blood of the gods. In truth, it was the continuation of the ancient pattern; the fusion of throne and altar, the human and the divine, that kept empires under the sway of the same fallen powers the gospel came to overthrow. Through Aeneas, Dardanus, and the Julian line, Rome clothed its empire in the symbols of the very powers the gospel declared broken. In claiming descent from the gods, the Caesars revived the dream of the fallen; a beast empire built on powers from the sea/abyss.

The empire that rose from Actium was not the dawn of peace but the return of the same power that Scripture calls the beast from the sea. At Actium, in 31 BC, Rome claimed to have defeated Egypt, but in truth it absorbed its gods. The sea battle that made Octavian “Augustus” was not a holy victory; it was the rebirth of pagan dominion. The symbols were the same as those once worshiped in Babylon and Tyre: the goddess of the sea, the queen of heaven, the dragon beneath the waves. Cleopatra may have fallen, but the spirit she served passed into Rome.

Virgil’s vision of Actium on Aeneas’s shield was propaganda dressed as prophecy. Apollo’s “light” destroying the Eastern queen was not divine truth triumphing over darkness; it was the false light of Satan (adversary), the imitation of God’s glory used to justify empire. The Roman poets turned rebellion into religion. They said Augustus was the son of a god, descended from Venus born of the sea. They baptized conquest in myth and called it destiny.

The Euphrates became the other end of that lie; the boundary of Rome’s world and the river from which, according to Revelation, the armies of judgment would one day come. The same river that once marked Eden’s edge became the border of Babylon’s final empire. Rome pushed its power that far and claimed the nations as its own.

Rome’s empire was not the will of heaven; it was the continuation of the ancient rebellion, the lineage of the serpent clothed in marble and purple. What the poets called divine victory was the enthronement of the old gods under new names, the deception that turned men from the Creator to the worship of empire.

Beneath Virgil’s polished verses lies an older, darker pattern; the same one first revealed in Genesis 6. There, the “sons of God” took mortal women and produced a corrupted line, the Nephilim. In the Aeneid, that same story reappears in classical form: Jupiter (Zeus), king of the gods, joins with mortal women like Electra and gives rise to Dardanus, then to Aeneas, and finally to the Caesars. It is the same claim; divine blood ruling human kingdoms. What Scripture calls rebellion, Rome called destiny.

Virgil’s prophecy that Aeneas’s line would lead to Julius Caesar and Augustus wasn’t just patriotic flattery; it was the glorification of that hybrid seed. The empire’s authority rested on the idea that its rulers were part divine, born from the union of fallen angels and flesh. In biblical language, this is not the blessing of God but the continuation of the corruption that began before the Flood; the same bloodline of the serpent shaping history through empires and false gods.

The promise that Jupiter makes in Virgil’s Aeneid is not the voice of heaven but the echo of the ancient lie; that men of "divine" blood will rule the earth. He declares that Aeneas’s descendants will found an empire without limit, bounded only by the ocean and the stars, and that under their reign “justice” will return and fury will be chained. This is not the justice of God; it is the order of control, a counterfeit peace that exalts the seed of the gods above mankind.

Virgil’s readers knew who that prophecy served. It was Augustus, the adopted “son” of Julius Caesar, hailed as Divi Filius—the son of a god. Rome’s poets and priests proclaimed that the promise to Aeneas had reached its fulfillment: the blood of Jupiter, through Venus, through Aeneas, through the Julian line, now ruled the world. The empire that claimed to bring light and law to the nations was founded on that claim of divine (fallen) descent; the same union of heaven and flesh that Scripture condemns as rebellion.

Meanwhile, the gods of Virgil’s poem continue their deceit. Venus disguises herself, manipulates Dido, and steers her son by half-truths. Mercury and Juno take turns twisting fate and human emotion to serve their own rivalries. Every act of “destiny” in the poem is another deception from the same powers that once corrupted mankind before the Flood.

This is the theology of Rome: that the old gods have chosen a ruler, that empire is salvation, and that peace can be forged by the hands of those who claim divine blood. It is the voice of the serpent repackaged in marble and law, the empire of heaven’s rebels ruling under new names.

Has Rome mentioned Christ yet?

When Venus strips the mist from Aeneas’s eyes, Virgil lets us see what kind of gods rule the world he celebrates. The veil of illusion falls away, and the hero finally sees the truth: Troy is not burning because of Helen or human treachery, but because the gods themselves are tearing it apart. Neptune shatters the walls, Juno fuels the fires, Athena drives the warriors mad, and Jupiter watches as the city collapses.

The divine powers that men call protectors are the ones destroying them. Venus tells her son not to blame mortals but the heavens; and in that moment, the falsehood of Rome’s religion is laid bare. These gods are not merciful, not holy, not serene. They are furious, cold, and unrelenting. Virgil uses the rare word inclementia; mercilessness; to describe them. Their “fate” is not justice; it is the will of tyrants who play with human lives.

Aeneas obeys, not because he understands, but because he fears. His piety is submission to forces that claim divine right through terror, war and sacrifice. Every step of his journey; the fire on his son’s head, the visions, the death of his wife and her ascent to Cybele, the mother goddess; is orchestrated by the same cruel powers who destroyed his city. Troy’s ruin becomes Rome’s foundation. The same gods who murdered one empire will build another in their image.

And today, the pattern hasn’t changed. We watch the same powers at work; wars raging in Ukraine and Russia, and the merchants of death in the military-industrial complex growing rich from the trade in weapons and blood. The old gods have only changed their names. The Nephilim still profit from human suffering, feeding on conflict as they always have. And Rome still bows to the queen of heaven; now disguised as the Virgin Mary; keeping the world bound to the same ancient powers that Christ came to expose and overthrow. All of it; every ritual, every war, every symbol; serves to appease these corrupt spirits and enrich those who serve them, the powers that rule mankind through deception and blood.

I wonder how George Washington fares now in their false pantheon; enthroned among the old gods he was painted to join, another mortal exalted to Olympus, another offering to the same deceiving powers that demand worship in every age.

"Ye shall become as gods" …hissed the serpent, while the rest of us remain trapped beneath their web of control, bound within the power grid of their dominion.

“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”

Genesis 3:15

The enemy of your soul will do everything to keep you from repentance and faith in the gospel; the only way to escape this fallen world and the demonic powers that traffic in human souls. They thrive on deception and bondage, but the truth shatters their chains. Believe the gospel, pray to noone but God through Christ, for only the truth will set you free; and when it does, you will be free indeed.

Athanasius Kircher; the Jesuit priest and master of hidden knowledge; devoted his life to studying the pagan antiquities of Rome. He understood what lay beneath the marble and myth: the remnants of the old gods that still shaped the empire’s soul. In 1661, he dedicated the restoration of the Obelisk of Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers to Ferdinand III of the Habsburgs; a dynasty that styled itself as the divine heirs of empire.

And how fitting that the Habsburgs, so interbred in their quest to preserve “royal blood,” bore it visibly in their own faces; the infamous Habsburg jaw, a living symbol of degeneration disguised as divine right. The gods of empire always demand the same thing: purity of their chosen seed, no matter the cost.

The face of a dying dynasty — the Habsburg jaw, carved by centuries of inbreeding in the name of divine blood.

Book of Revelation 17:14 (KJV):

“The kings of the earth shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: for He is Lord of lords, and King of kings; and they that are with Him are called, and chosen, and faithful.”

Behold, the serpents move in shadow, clothed in the raiment of power. They whisper lies into the hearts of kings and merchants alike. Yet their dominion shall not endure; for the Great Harlot of Babylon shall be laid bare, and her kingdom shall burn with the fire of her own deceit.

Repent and believe the Gospel.