Venus Retrograde…especially for 42-49 year olds

Venus symbolises our relationship to pleasure. When it goes retrograde, it’s a time to review and repair our relationship to our pleasure and how we pursue it. As ruler of airy Libra, it seeks pleasure through connection, harmony and balance so the mind and heart can rest. As ruler of earthy Taurus, it seeks pleasure through safety, abundance and sensuality so the body can rest.

Venus retrograde is associated with the Sumerian story of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld. Inanna, Queen of the Heavens, follows an impulse to visit her older sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld. Before she leaves, she makes sure others know where she is going and to send help if she doesn’t return after a certain amount of time. On her way down, she is stopped at seven gates where she has to remove a powerful item of clothing or jewellery that she intentionally adorned. When she arrives, Ereshkigal is in agony, feeling the sorrow of the humans she has given birth to who died before they were able to experience the most fulfilling moments of their lives. She kills Inanna and hangs her on a hook. When Inanna doesn’t return home, two agender beings are sent to her with the food and drink of life, and instructions to sympathise with Ereshkigal’s pain in order to appease her so she would be more likely to help Inanna. When Ereshkigal cries out in pain, they mirror her cries until she feels better. She agrees to bring Inanna back to life and release her as long as she finds someone to replace her. Returning to earth (Heaven), she finds that her husband is luxuriating in her absence rather than mourning her death, and she assigns him to be taken to the Underworld in her place.

The next Venus retrograde begins on 3rd October until 14th November. The pre-retrograde shadow began on 1st September, and the post-retrograde shadow ends on 16th December. Three phases, a story; beginning, middle and end. During the pre-shadow period there are threads puling us towards the Underworld, whispers from abandoned parts urging us to retrieve them. We adorn ourselves with appropriate support and protection in preparation. During the retrograde, we let down our ego defences in stages as appropriate so we can reach what is calling out to us. We meet the confronting parts of us that are in anguish because of unmet hidden desires, and my favourite part, when we acknowledge the desires and validate and unshame the pain, they unfurl and integrate into our being. As Venus stations direct, we emerge with a renewed sense of self and our creative power, bringing our reclaimed desires with us. However, we must sacrifice our disrespect for the power of the death-rebirth process so the integration can continue.

This may be a particularly potent time for you if you are currently 42-49 years old, because if you were born between March 28, 1977 to June 21, 1983 or May 18 to April 11, 1984, you have Pluto in Libra and Chiron in Taurus in your natal chart, both ruled by Venus. Even moreso if your Pluto is in the late degrees of Libra as Venus will be directly touching it three times during this cycle.

In evolutionary astrology, Pluto symbolises the soul’s reason for incarnating in this particular life; what it wants to learn and experience for its own evolution. This desire is so deep and intense that it can feel disempowering, activate your survival mechanisms and unconsciously drive your behaviour when you are not in conscious relationship with it. With Pluto in Libra, the soul desires to experience reciprocal relationship; mutuality, mirroring, balance, fairness, an equal giving and receiving. This can be with anything; people, projects, your creations, areas of life, the universe. Pluto in Libra has to experience a variety of relationships in order to figure out how to reach that reciprocity it desires.

Chiron symbolises the wound that doesn’t heal, but in our tending to it, it teaches us wisdom and provides us with medicine that we then desire to share with others with a similar wound. Its symbol is a ‘key’ that opens the door to our truer self. In Taurus, Chiron speaks to shame and wounding around how worthy you feel of abundance, safety, pleasure and embodiment.

These Pluto and Chiron placements tell a story of how experiencing or perceiving a relationship as being transactional, extractive or non-reciprocal, whether it is you or the other playing that role, that it says something about your worth. Not being worthy of being resourced with abundance, safety, pleasure or embodiment leads to death, and so survival mechanisms and protective behaviours are activated.

For those with these placements, Venus retrograde may be a time when you are called to pay attention to what reciprocity actually means, looks and feels like, where relationships do or don’t feel reciprocal, whether real or a projection or a mix of both, and what needs to change, if anything, for them to satisfy the desire for reciprocity. There is also a call to observe where reciprocity is entangled with self-worth and parsing out where that is true and needed, and where the tangles can begin to loosen because you’ve found more appropriate and empowering avenues for cultivating self-worth. The medicine of Chiron in Taurus includes slowing down to the pace of the body and cultivating self-worth and self-reciprocity by prioritising pleasure, safety and abundance.

Personally, I’ve been following a thread that is showing me how my intense sense of isolation growing up led me to abandon parts that painfully yearned for connection and I developed a complicated protective pattern of turning away from it, but as I am reclaiming and integrating these parts my heart protections are softening. One of them is a teenage part who developed a euphoric hope for connection through music. Pictured is the gorgeous wallpaper in one of my teenage bedrooms that I stubbornly protested against removing for renovation even though it was marked from all the band posters I stuck to it.

Some questions to consider:

Are there mirrors between others’ reciprocity with you and your reciprocity with yourself, or between parts of yourself?

What younger parts were abandoned because their yearnings were too painful to bear and can there be more space and permission to let them thaw out and flow through?

Which relationships are able to withstand the changes required and where is the threshold of attachment to them?

Taurus likes simplicity. What do you already have access to that can remind you of your inherent worthiness, security and abundance?

The houses where your Pluto and Chiron live and how they relate to the rest of your chart can deepen your understanding of how you can work with this Venus retrograde more intentionally. If you are curious to dive deeper from an embodied soul desire lens my Mirror Astrology readings are thorough, collaborative and inspiring. I can also suggest acupressure points to work with to support you after the session. Bookings can be made through my website.