Love, violence & renewal: Venus Retro in Scorpio

Of all the planets that retrograde regularly, Venus is the cycle that captures my imagination the most. Perhaps this relates to the seductive quality of ‘Venus’ topics - love, relationships, joy, pleasure, beauty, desire, value. But it also relates to the broader Venus cycle which is mathematically breathtaking.

THE FACTS: The Venus ‘cycle’ refers to the position of Venus in the sky relative to the Sun’s orbit. We track the conjunction, or meeting of Venus and the Sun at the same degree and this happens with a regularity that is beautiful. Every 9 months they meet. Every second time they meet, Venus is retrograde and ‘inferior’ to the Sun, so it’s super close to Earth. This flips Venus to trailing behind the Sun, where it becomes a night star - visible after the Sun sets to the West. The inferior conjunction of the Sun and retrograde Venus is the ‘Venus star point’ that starts the cycle.

Venus and the Sun meet in the same five sectors of the Zodiac and when charted, it maps a pentagram. As it retrogrades and moves, it slips backwards a few degrees each cycle, forming this gorgeous flower-like path that merges astrology and sacred geometry. 

These bigger Venus cycles take 8 years. So a retrograde Venus in Scorpio has occurred every 8 years since 1914. There’s some excitement this year as the final conjunction in takes place in Scorpio (it’ll slip into Libra from now on).

THE MEANING: Libra in Scorpio isn’t a natural fit. We’re fusing desires, aesthetics and connection with Scorpionic tendencies such as obsession, darkness and violence. And a retrograde brings an internalised version where we might dig up secrets, and reveal desires and truths that cause transformation. 

SOME EXAMPLES: Despite being only 5 days into the current cycle, we’ve got our first Retro Venus in Scorpio story with celebrity Sam Wood arrested for alleged domestic violence offences. It’s a classic upending of our ideas of love and aesthetics as his perfect life with his gorgeous family is revealed to be something more complicated and darker. 

So this energy is a mucky affair, and looking back over history we can see some grim examples of how it manifests in topics of female and gender issues, particularly relating to violence and the fight for fairness. 

During the 2018 retrograde Brett Kavanaugh was sworn into the US Supreme Court despite allegations of sexual assault. He was nominated by Trump, who has also been convicted of sexual assault. That month the UN released a report showing that of the 87000 women who were murdered in 2017, 58% of them were killed by intimate partners. Talk about love + violence = secrets.

2010 saw the UK Equality Act come into effect and the US courts overturned the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ Policy and allowed openly gay service members to serve in the military. Gender + secrets = transformed. 

2002 was awful (incidentally this retrograde was the last entirely in Scorpio). Our Venus/Retrograde/Scorpio signatures were particularly strong with the Bali Bombings (202 died while partying), Chechnya rebels taking 800 people hostage in a theatre (167 died while watching art), violent protests in Nigeria against the Miss World pageant forced it to relocate and PETA invaded the Victoria’s Secret show to protest animal deaths for fashion use.

How’s that for a month of pleasure/aesthetics (Venus) combining with violence/death (Scorpio) in a way that forces us to revisit and reframe the world (retrogrades).

THE TAKEAWAY: So let’s watch what happens over the next 35 days or so. Track the Sydney Swans story and the Cornell University case, which both began in the Venus Shadow period - there should be some good justice for the women in these stories. Also catching my eye is the Christa Pike story, where a US woman has survived a lethal injection. And just today we’ve got an Indigenous leader charged with historic sexual assault, and Alan Jones still in court defending his indecent assault charges. 

Generally, I’m sensing that women are OVER IT. There’s a jaded fury around the misogyny that we deal with and a sense that we might lose our collective shit at any moment. If ever there’s a time to force revelations and demand change, it’s during this retrograde which ends on Nov 14.