Stay in Flow | Venus in Scorpio. 40 days in the underworld of desire
Updated: Sep 11
There are moments in the celestial cycle when a planet appears to turn backwards through the sky. We call this retrogradation, but symbolically, it is less about going backwards than about turning inward.
And when Venus retrogrades through Scorpio, the invitation is particularly intimate.
Venus is not Mercury. Although Venus and Mercury will briefly retrograde simultaneously, their invitations are different. Mercury retrograde asks us to reconsider how we think, communicate, perceive and make sense of things. Venus retrograde asks us to reconsider what, and whom, we value.
Venus speaks to relationship, desire, attraction, reciprocity and pleasure. She speaks to the way we give and receive, to our sense of worth, to money and resources, investments and the agreements through which we exchange energy with one another.
And Scorpio does not skim the surface. Scorpio is water with depth. It takes us beneath appearances, into intimacy, vulnerability, attachment, power, trust, sexuality, merging, loss and regeneration.
It asks not only What do I desire? but |
What is underneath my desire?What am I attached to?Where is reciprocity alive, and where has the exchange become unequal?What am I investing in, and what is actually being returned?What must die so that something more truthful can emerge?
This is why the Scorpio territory of your natal chart becomes especially important during this cycle. Wherever Scorpio lives in your chart, Venus will be asking you to look again.
Not necessarily to act. To see.
The symbolism of 40 . Initiation
Venus retrograde lasts approximately forty days.
Across spiritual traditions, we encounter forty days of wilderness, forty days of rain, forty days of fasting and contemplation, and forty years of wandering before entering a new land. It is a symbolic container for withdrawal, purification, testing and transformation, a period in which the old is given time to dissolve before something new can emerge. Even quarantine carries this ancient echo | forty days of separation before returning to the world. So perhaps Venus’ forty-day retrograde is not a regression at all, but a sacred interval of retreat into the deeper chambers of what we value, desire and choose to invest our life force in.
Venus & the underworld
There is something inherently underworld-like about Venus in Scorpio.
In Greek mythology, Aphrodite is the goddess of love, beauty, attraction and desire. Hades, meanwhile, governs the invisible realm, the place beneath the visible world, where what has been buried continues to exist.
And although Aphrodite herself is not the goddess who makes the famous descent into Hades, her story becomes intimately entangled with the underworld through Adonis.
Adonis is loved by Aphrodite and Persephone. When Adonis dies, the two goddesses both claim him. Zeus ultimately decrees that he will divide his time between the worlds.
It is a beautiful mythic image for the paradox contained within Venus in Scorpio |
desire and loss, attraction and separation, life and death, possession and surrender.
What we love changes us. What we desire reveals us.
And sometimes, what we are unwilling to lose is precisely what we are being asked to transform.
The Venus cycle
Venus has her own extraordinary rhythm in the cosmos.
From our perspective on Earth, she alternates between appearing as Morning Star and Evening Star, disappearing from visibility around her inferior and superior conjunctions with the Sun, and returning again.
Over approximately eight years, Venus traces a beautiful five-pointed pattern in the sky, the Venus Star or pentagram, created by the relationship between Earth and Venus as they move around the Sun. Five points. Eight years. A repeating celestial geometry.
The ancients recognized this rhythm long before we understood the mechanics of planetary motion. And perhaps this is part of the deeper teaching of Venus | DESIRE is cyclical.
What we value changes. Relationships evolve. Things we once found beautiful lose their spell. Things we could not previously see become suddenly irresistible. Attachments loosen. New forms of reciprocity become possible.
Venus does not simply ask us whom we love.
She asks us | What is worthy of MY LIFE FORCE?
During these forty days in Scorpio, we are invited into the deeper chambers of that question to become intimate with the truth of our OWN DESIRE.
Because sometimes Venus must descend beneath the surface before she can return as the Morning Star, renewed, clarified, and able to desire from a different place. xx 💜
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