Over the next weeks—as a devotion to sweet Venus, my ascendant ruler—I’m offering a series on the upcoming Venus Retrograde in Leo.
Part 1 (today’s!) is a deep dive on Venus’ 8 year synodic cycle and how this summer’s retrograde is connected to dates in the past.
Part 2 (June 19) is on how this Venus retrograde is hitting (or not hitting!) each of our charts
Part 3 (June 23) is on how Venus connects (or doesn’t!) with the other planets during this summer’s retrograde.
Part 4 (June 26) is a cultural and (recent) historical survey of past Venus in Leo transits.
Part 5 (June 30) is an auto fiction gossip blog detailing my own experiences of Venus in Leo since 2007.
As always, if you’re reading and you want to know more about how this all relates to you, book a reading with me here and we’ll get into it! —for discussing Venus Retrograde specifically, I suggest a 60 minute reading :).
first, a note on looking back:
As we go back into the past to trace the connective thread of Venus’ notable transits through Leo, you’re going to be inspired to do your own archival research.
If you’re not the journaling type, places that are great for picking up loose narrative threads are: your inbox (who were you talking to and how was it being communicated?), your camera roll (what were you doing and noticing?), and your social media archives (what were you sharing with the world?).
I also want to note that digging into past lives requires a lot of compassion and humility for our former selves. Joan Didion’s wise advice in Slouching Toward Bethlehem was to “keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” but I think we all know that isn’t always possible. Tread carefully in those archives! If you’re a nostalgia demon like me, remember that going into the vault is for collecting data only. You don’t have to start living in the past to figure out the pattern. In fact, you won’t figure out the pattern if you get stuck there, you’ll instead get hypnotized thinking about things repeating the exact same way. When doing a dive, set a timer for 10 minutes, do some quick research and then lay out all the clues so you can come up for air and listen to the song.
Also! Before we get started, I’d like to acknowledge the astrologers whose work has greatly impacted my views on this subject: Arielle Guttman (for her work on the Venus Star Point), Austin Coppock (for an amazing class I took on Venus retrogrades back in 2018), Pallas K. Augustine (for their continous incredible work on the Venus cycle), and Nick Dagan Best (for all the work on Venus retrogrades in mundane astrology).
OK now let’s first get into some background on Venus and her cycle—
Of all the planets, Venus’ cycle is the most precise and elegant. The brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon, she sets our aesthetic clock. Over an eight year period, Venus’ orbit (as observed from Earth) traces a near-perfect pentagram in the zodiac as she moves from Morning Star to Evening Star and back again. Once you start tracking the Venus cycle, you can’t unsee it. Her reliable revolution gives complex information that rivals the drama of outer planet transits. As the brilliant astrologer Pallas K. Augustine (who has written and taught extensively on Venus’ cycles — I highly suggest you check out their work) says, the answer is always Venus.
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