John William Waterhouse “Boreas”

There is a changing of the guard in the evening sky. The time has come for Venus, our beautiful wandering star, who has shone so brightly over us these past months, to wander retrograde for 40 days and nights, away from the public gaze, through the Capricornian wilderness. She is met by Pluto, the god of buried treasure, with temptations of devilish decadence, and then stripped of her jewels and her luxuries. An initiate now, she is ready to ingest his powerful purgative, and to face the Sun’s purifying, clarifying rays. Venus retrograde: the feminine urge to descend, haunt and transform every 1.5 years.  

Venus retrogrades bring about, among other things, a referendum on our collective ideals, our consensus reality, and a balancing and accounting of relationships. In Capricorn, and with Pluto’s influence, we will be turning our attention to the power dynamics at play in both our microcosm and our macrocosm. Up for review and reconsideration will be our relationship to time, to money, to self-worth, and to our roles within our particular “establishments”. Our commitments, our investments, our work-life balance, our dependencies and independencies, will undergo an internal probe. 

Boundaries: how well do you exercise yours? How well do you respect others’? Value and currency: are you being sufficiently compensated for your labor? How about for your emotional labor? And if not, how and in what ways would you like to be compensated? Tradition: How do you and your partner inhabit gender roles? How beholden are you to the past, or to your ancestors? Where do you differ from your parents and grandparents, and in what ways are you replicating their patterns? The Feminine: how comfortable are you with slowing down, or with receiving? In what ways have you been exploited and extracted from? And in what ways have you been the exploiter or the extractor? Morality: do you carry shame around things you’ve done in order to survive? What are your notions of “sin” and where did they come from? Are they a burden you are tired of carrying? Can you learn to stop punishing yourself? And finally, legacy: in what ways has patrimony led us astray as a society? What have you inherited, for better or for worse? What are you building, of value to you, that you will leave behind one day? And what are you taking with you into the next life?

This is a very strong crucible for our heroine to be re-forged in, but though under the rulership of Saturn, no heart of stone will she emerge with. After she stations direct, Venus—reborn as morning star—will wait, as Mars comes to accompany her, out of Capricorn, past Pluto’s gates again, and on through Aquarius until the spring. A power couple indeed. And we will have transformed in one way or another as well: closer (I hope) to knowing our true selves, our true worth and our true power; feeling more deserving of life, love, happiness and success, and ready to move mountains to make it all happen.