It’s been 84 years (not quite)… but I’m back! Life looks really different now, but how fitting that I return to more active engagement with my astrological practice in alignment with the Venus retrograde that thrust me into the astro-sphere in the first place. Being in a year where Venus is a major timelord has given me quite the masterclass in what it means to have an ill-dignified benefic that is doing her best to make life a little sweeter.
This post is heavily inspired by the chaos that is my dreamscape, where I am currently being haunted by exes of relationships past. But I think these ghosts are a useful tool that can reveal additional symbolism beyond the cookie-cutter significations of romance and relationships. After all, Venus broadly speaks to desire, and in some ways, a lot of existence involves the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Her retrograde through this part of the zodiac can reveal constructive and destructive expressions of these desires and the pursuit of them.
The Pleasure Principle
If you want to be reductive about it, life’s core pattern involves avoiding pain in the pursuit of a pleasurable experience. Whether we are talking about sensory experiences, interpersonal relationships, or internal experiences—Venus rules them all. You could argue that her level of essential dignity corresponds to the ease or appropriateness with which someone is able to experience pleasure or delight. One of the most striking features of this Venus retrograde is the contrast between the portions spent in her domicile, Libra, and the portion spent in her detriment, Scorpio.
Venus in Libra can pursue pleasure according to her own nature: through reciprocity, agreement, beauty, sociability, and proportion. The things that she likes tend to promote consensus and cohesion. Being the diurnal expression of Venus, it’s no wonder that she has implications for fairness and justice. Since Libra is a sign where Saturn exalts, this is a place where the rules of engagement are codified into social contracts, expectations, and norms around what is acceptable—not only in relationships, but also in matters of taste, decorum, and public conduct more broadly.
In Scorpio, she must operate through terrain ruled by Mars, where desire is more likely to become entangled with pain, conflict, taboo, excess, or compulsion. This is an interesting place for Venus, since she retains some dignity by triplicity in Scorpio despite being debilitated there. I think this captures that there is some aspect of the human condition where pleasure and pain can intersect in constructive containers. For example, there can sometimes be something beautiful about heartbreak. Or people can consensually explore forms of pleasure that deliberately incorporate intensity, taboo, or discomfort, as in some forms of kink. However, the most accessible manifestation might be the difficulty of accepting the transience of pleasure. When we become deeply enmeshed with a person, an experience, or a season of life, there can be an urge to preserve something past its expiration date: to immortalize it, recreate it, or keep pursuing it after reciprocity has disappeared. This can lead to unrequited love at its mildest, but fixation or obsession if left unchecked.
Desirability Politics
Desire does not exist in a vacuum. It is shaped by culture, status, power, beauty standards, gender expectations, and the stories we inherit about what kinds of pleasure are respectable or dangerous. In Postcolonial Astrology, Alice Sparkly Kat makes the point that Venus can describe the reason we go to war, while Mars describes the act of war itself. There is something useful about this distinction. To be desirable is to be deemed worthy of pursuit, protection, and praise. In that sense, desirability is deeply political: some people are taught that they should be desired, others that they should make themselves desirable, and still others that their desires are suspect from the outset.
Venus is one of the planets consistently coded as feminine across the astrological tradition, and is often used to describe the condition of women more broadly. It’s hard not to see how this corresponds to patriarchal societies assigning value to women based on their desirability and perceived worthiness of protection. This is a double-edged sword: that value is conditional, and is often weaponized to diminish the agency of women and others positioned outside of dominant masculine norms.
If desirability ascribes value based on someone else’s standards, then sexual liberation can partially be understood as an attempt to reclaim desire as something self-defined. However, liberation requires reciprocity. It’s challenging to benefit from greater sexual freedom when the person across from you does not believe that your freedom can place limits on their own desires.
The limits of treating sexual freedom as purely individual become harder to ignore once power enters the picture. Eight years ago, during the last Venus retrograde through Scorpio and Libra, the #MeToo Movement was reaching a major cultural inflection point. The allegations against Harvey Weinstein had helped catalyze a broader reckoning over sexual violence, power, and institutional complicity. Now, as Venus returns to the same stretch of the zodiac, Weinstein has once again returned to the headlines after being sentenced to 15 years in prison in New York.
Eight years later, these questions remain unresolved. A former Cornell student recently filed suit alleging that she was drugged and gang raped by seven fraternity members, and that the institution failed to protect her in the aftermath. The allegations are horrific, and the case forces us to reckon with a critical question: what happens when the desires of people with social or institutional power are treated as more important than another person’s autonomy, safety, or right to have violations of that autonomy taken seriously?
The politics of desirability are really the politics of permission: who is permitted to want, who is expected to be wanted, and whose desires are allowed to carry consequences for everyone else.
Desire’s Ever-Changing Face
This retrograde forces us to reconcile two feelings at once: the grief of losing what we once loved, and the euphoria of discovering what we are growing to love. Desire is self-revelatory. I think this is especially obvious for those of us with Venus in fire signs (looking at you Aries and Leo Venus folks especially). What we pursue teaches us something about who we are, what we value, and which parts of ourselves we are trying to exercise. But intensity alone does not make a desire sustainable. Some loves make us feel exquisitely alive precisely because they ask so much of us; some relationships transform us without being meant to contain the whole of our future.
I no longer feel embarrassed by the depth with which I have loved. Loving that deeply made me realize the weight of my own emotional capacity, even when those connections could not contain it forever. The task, if anything, is learning how to tend that intensity with greater discernment—how to direct it toward people, art, work, and causes capable of receiving it without requiring me to disappear inside them.
Perhaps this is one of the gifts of recurrence, whether you want to map this onto the Venus synodic cycles or not. The cycle resonates rather than repeats, allowing us to see the thread of who we were in each new iteration. We hear the same themes again through a different version of the self, and in doing so, we notice what has changed. Some desires need to be mourned. Others reveal the person we are becoming.
Impermanence does not cancel value.
If you enjoyed this write-up about the upcoming retrograde, I have a workshop on October 4th to discuss the topic in depth. Please register here to join me. If you need to book a specific consult instead, please do so here.
See you on the other side of this transit!