Venus is retrograde from 5th October 2018 to 16th November 2018 – beginning at 10° Scorpio and finally going direct at 25° Libra
Venus retrogrades only once every year and a half and last for 40 days. When she makes her backward sojourn through the cosmos and archetypal journey to the underworld, it signals an important time for review, re-evaluation, reflection and realignment with all Venus themes of self-love, resources, sexuality, desire, values, equality and relationships. Venus retrogrades through Scorpio, the most intense sign of the zodiac bringing in the themes of sexuality, life and death, intimacy, emotions and shared resources. We can assume we will be dealing with some in depth material within ourselves and in our relationship to others.
In the sign of Scorpio, Venus seeks total intimacy. She wants to surrender to her own desires and consumed by the desire she has for others. She longs to lose herself in intense, passionate and even to the point of obsessive relating. This can bring up power struggles, drama, fear of losing relationships and strong emotional reactions. With this Venus retrograde, there will be questions of unspoken needs, unresolved emotional material, and an invitation to be more honest with oneself and others.
Venus fades as an evening star
- 2nd September – Venus enters shadow at 25° Libra
- 8th September – Venus at 29° Libra squares Mars at 29° Capricorn
- 9th September – Venus enters Scorpio
- 12th September – Venus at 2° Scorpio opposes Uranus 2° Taurus
- 16th September – Venus square the Nodes of the Moon
- 5th October – Venus stations retrograde at 10° Scorpio
- 10th October – Venus at 10° Scorpio squares Mars 10° Aquarius
- 15th October – Venus is conjunct Mercury at 8° Scorpio
Venus hidden as she goes into the underworld
- 18th October – Venus becomes invisible, falling below the horizon and into the underworld
- 26th October – Venus meets the Sun, forming a conjunction and a new 584 day Venus cycle begins, marking the transition of Venus from an evening star to a morning star
- 31st October – Venus at 0° Scorpio opposes Uranus at 0° Taurus and square the nodal axis at 0° Leo
- 31st October – Venus goes back into Libra
Venus rises as a morning star
- 5th November – Venus becomes visible again, this time as a morning star
- 9th November – Venus at 26° Libra trines Mars at 26° Aquarius
- 15th November – Venus stations direct at 25° Libra
- 30th November – Venus at 29° Libra opposes Uranus at 29° Aries
- 2nd December – Venus re-entry into Scorpio
- 18th December – Venus leaves the shadow phase at 10° Scorpio
- 7th January – Venus enters Sagittarius
Check your Sun and Rising sign below (as both work in parallel) to see how this Venus retrograde and other transits are going to affect you. To find out your rising sign you need your time of birth – you can calculate it here (at the bottom of the page).
Aries
With Chiron newly in Aries, you are on the brink of being challenged to be a total maverick. Saturn going through Capricorn in your solar 10th house suggests it’s a time of achievement for you, or you are sensing it’s around the corner. With this in mind, ensure you are encrypting into your very hub of this success, the very bottom line truth of who you are. At the moment, things need to be on your terms. Venus will be journeying through your solar 8th house. This is a good houses to have the Venus retrograde. It allows you to participate in the transformational journey of others on your own terms. It’s teaching you how to remain detached when confronted with the drama and intensity of other people’s, perhaps those closest to you, processes of intense inner reckonings. You are in witness to someone else’s deep internal experience and perhaps also their obsession, power struggles with you, their inability to let go or fear. You have a choice – you can be either be at the mercy of someone else’s deep stuff, or you can be detached observer position where you hold the space and stay connected to what’s important to you. You have gained strength through all the eclipses, and the Mars retrograde, you are clearer on what’s crucial for you on your journey, and you are clear what is your responsibility and what is not. Don’t try and assume any control over the dynamics of others’ experience. Self-sacrificing yourself on the alter in the name of martyrdom will not serve you. You are not here to be dependent on others and participatory to others own fears. Ultimately perhaps you are realising that the only thing you have a responsibility to yourself. When Venus is in Scorpio its very visceral, it’s an uncomfortable journey for Venus since she is in her detriment. It’s very tangible and emotional. Venus is a feminine signature and so this speaks to women coming into their power. If you are a man in relationship with a woman, then you might be in witness to a woman connecting to her Goddess power. If you are woman in relationship with a man, then you might be witnessing your partner getting in touch with his own projected our feminine. Over the next two months, you will see the stages, layers and levels of a process that someone journeys through. You will have your own reactions and responses, but this is less about you, right now, and more about the other and how you can best support them in the role of listener and detached observer. You might yourself be in a position where you feel like your stuff is part of their journey, and inevitably it is somewhat, but this is not your stage right now. In fact you might have just felt like you finished that journey with the recent Mars retrograde cycle completed, Mars being your sign ruler. It also foretells how with Chiron journeying through your sign, what is to come for you. Either way, watch, feel and be in witness. Venus retrograde is inevitably a time of relationships endings, and it might be that this is on the table, for you or your partner. Either way, you will learn through this process of deep witnessing and by the end of the cycle, be clear on what you also need to be dedicated to your own path of life fulfilment.
Taurus
Venus is in your 7th house, the house of partnerships, others, enemies and our shadow. With Scorpio naturally on your 7th house (this is a fixed thing – only in relation to your Sun sign), this means relationships are always about intensity, transformation and change. With Venus journeying retrograde here you can expect time where you will be looking more inwardly towards what needs to change, especially for the first phase of the retrograde phase, until the end of October. It might feel like you are moving through some unknown territory, and it might feel uncomfortable. Certainly as a Taurus, your sense of self, your identity, which can be quite rigid and fixed as a Taurean is going to challenged, especially in relationship to others in your life. The flow of the Venus retrograde is from outer to inner, past to present. These themes will be evident as you move through the retrograde cycle. What can happen is that old partners, those that were left unresolved or those relationships that perhaps never got off the ground, will float back into your awareness as you sort through the milieu of these Venus themes. As this Venus retrograde contains a Venus square Mars on 10th October, and it directly affects your identity and relationship house, you can expect a challenge on the level of masculine versus feminine, make versus female, a polarisation that might take the entire retrograde period to resolve. This might be old material from earlier in the year that now is up for revisiting and resolution. You might find your values in conflict with others. You are always growing and evolving through your partners, with Scorpio naturally on the 7th house cusp, so you can expect a lot of this. Let your relationships be your learning ground for the next few months as you sift through what they are teaching you. You are looking at what partners bring to your life, what they offer, how they sync with you and your value system. You are reexamining whether they can take you where you want to go. With Uranus newly in Taurus, although very soon to retrograde, this questioning of your conformity and your tendency to drop into status quo and resist change is really on the cards for this Venus retrograde cycle.
Gemini
Venus retrograde is going through your 6th house, the house of healing, service and work. To have Scorpio naturally on your 6th house suggests a need to go deeper in this realm than perhaps anywhere else in your life. With Venus journeying back through this sign, you might be called to to go deeper. Perhaps part of that might be a sexual healing process, but it is almost certainly to involve your connection to your physicality, your routines, how you support yourself in a structured sense in life. Sometimes with Scorpio on the 6th house we might struggle with physical issues, perhaps pain or symptoms that can be intense, it’s a time to really grapple with the healing of this, and a holistic approach would likely work well here. Chiron, the wounded healer, is also going through your 11th house (which has Aries on the cusp). This suggests even a group or community healing approach. Perhaps it might work for you to connect to your issues as also reflective or part of the wider community, rather than simply yours alone. This is where we might need to look at how our cultural or collective beliefs might need examining and reframing. You are all a part of a system, and so it’s connecting to that system and seeing how seeing things on a more systemic level might support you to step out of a focus on pathologising your own issues and seeing you as connected to a whole. Whatever you suffer with, whether within your relationship to being part of a group, social interactions, friendships, and whatever else connects to that, its important to see it as a role, that everyone on some level suffers with, it’s never just yours alone. We all feel lonely, isolated or oppressed at some point in our lives. Chiron supports you to make your healing process a public thing – attending community forums that discuss community and world issues that affect everyone will support you to process your pain and at the same time you will able to offer that healing to others. At the same time, taking your time with this, since while it’s a healing capacity to it, there’s also a potential for touching deep wounds, so going slow and staying with your feelings and awareness. Mars went retrograde in your 9th house of belief, spirituality, expansion, religion and horizons. With Aquarius on your 9th there’s a need to stand out, even be a little of a rebel in terms of your belief systems, while also feeling like you’ve got the capacity to conform or be expected to conform. With Mars retrograde, there’s been a limit on this in that now it feels like you really need to stand for your own beliefs regardless of what others around you think. This isn’t an easy tightrope to walk, as there’s a tendency to be dependent on a confirmation or reflection from others. Finally though after the recent Mars retrograde you are able to take it to the next level in respect to what you think and believe without caring whether others agree with you or not. Keep tracking the process and allow a degree of openness while honouring the process of coming to know yourself on a mind and belief level.
Cancer
You have been experiencing transiting Pluto in Capricorn in your solar 7th house and now Saturn has joined in on that party. This has been an ongoing process for at least ten years. The last year has been an acceleration of with Saturn also here. You have been ready to take the lessons of Pluto and capitalise and ground the transformation with discipline and devotion. This has been about examining relationships and facing the need to make different, more mature choices that reflect more of who you want to become. You have been able to harness discipline and warmth with those Saturn lessons, with the help of Vesta, suggesting you are finally getting things on your own terms. Venus retrograde occurs through your 5th house of creativity, expression, sexuality, play and children. In the 5th house we are not so much concerned with committed long term safe relationships but how we can wield our creative, free expression of who we are – how we can be our authentic selves. We are more interested in an experience of who we are and how we can make that experience fulfilling and fun. Wherever Venus retrogrades we are being asked to go more internal and reexamine that area of life to rediscover what we have lost, repressed or forgotten. In the 5th house we need to get in touch with our curiosity. We are not too serious in this house, life is more of a game. At the same time, Venus journeying retrograde through Scorpio is no lighthearted matter. But there’s no reason to say we can’t approach dark matters with an open, curious and engaged heart. In many ways the growth spot is about how we engage with our hearts in a way that isn’t falling into defences or inaccessibility. How can you open up and connect to your self-love and let it radiate out from within you? What’s in the way to you expressing your free, creative nature? Mars retrograde over the Summer was in your 8th house of sex, intimacy, shared resources and life and death matters. Perhaps the Mars retrograde made everything feel rather serious in these areas. The 8th house doesn’t easily negotiate a relationship with the 5th – which is anything but commitment. What is the dynamic tension between these two areas of your life? Venus retrograde is no doubt supporting you to look at your desire nature and reflect on what type of energy moves us forward. Do we do what we love out of a sense of obligation or our of desire and passion?
Leo
Venus will be retrograding through your 4th house of home, family, the home of the soul and our ancestors. It’s the deepest house in the system. Scorpio on 4th house indicates your family environment is was very intense and changeable. The environment would have felt even threatening at times, certainly emotional and a great source of challenge and growth. It’s where your transformation work is done. Also there were sure to be some taboos, family secrets, perhaps even of a sexual nature, these can all affect how we relate. What you are working with right now if your difference, perhaps through your early childhood you learnt what you didn’t want to be, and that somehow made you feel like you don’t belong, this sense of no home being right, not being able to perhaps put down roots and feel like they are permanent. Perhaps deeper underlying this is a sense of ancestral trauma, with Scorpio naturally on your 4th house, there’s something going back, in your early family life for sure, but most likely further, that’s suggests things have been genetically passed on or imprinted upon you around a vulnerability in this area. This all ties in with your 8th house and Neptune currently journeying through that house. That suggests a struggle with trust, over trusting, not checking out all the details of the contracts, confusion and the vulnerability of your position at some level in relation to power that you feel others have over you. You have had Chiron journeying through the 8th house also and moved onto your 9th house, although he’s back in your 8th again until February. This suggests a final revisiting of your issue around relationships, intimacy and trust. It’s worth looking at how your needs overlap with someone else and how your binding contracts keep you in this process of learning how to trust and negotiate with others. This will no doubt have also touched on issues of speaking your truth in difficult, intense situations. Mars retrograde has been moving through your 7th house, inevitably making you question your relationships and bringing up your need for boundaries or assertion of what’s ok and not ok. You have truly integrated, even embodied the need for honesty since you have learnt the hard way how a lack of it, even if it’s a white lie, can bite you in the butt. It seems like the ancestral or early childhood, or both might have a place in this work you are doing around trust now. Look at what your early childhood dynamics brought you in terms of your relationship to intimacy, feeling, trust and sharing yourself with others. Look at your relationship with power – where is it on the spectrum of you and the other. Do you see it with yourself or outside of you? It’s a time to examine all your relational habits, back to your early roots and beyond. When Venus move into Libra and your 3rd house, at the pinnacle of his retrograde you will move into communication about these issues so it seems you will be able to bring some sense of grounding in your relationships to what you are experiencing.
Virgo
You have been experiencing Neptune in your opposite sign for many years now. This has the impact of bringing a certain degree of confusion, chaos, uncertainty, fear and illusion into your life, particularly in respect to other people. It’s important for you to be clear on who you have in your life. Neptune makes the water muddy, so you might even have developed a degree of paranoia over who you can and can’t trust over the years. This is undoubtedly bringing up beliefs, fears, programmes from your past, and they may feel strong. You need to be clear on what you expect and need from others. With Capricorn naturally on your 5th house, your childhood was a cold place, it perhaps wasn’t easy for you to relax and play. It might have even involved a lot of adult responsibility or growing up too fact, looking after parents, being the parent for your parents, or feeling cast in that role. Pluto and Saturn is working to transform this so you can tap into something more creative. It’s time to get more serious about having fun. Work at it, start it now as otherwise with the 2020 conjunction of Saturn and Pluto, there could be a lot of energy released, and it might not feel so comfortable. Mars retrograding in your 6th house, where you have Aquarius on the cusp, suggests a need to bring in more individuality into the work space or your routines at home, in particular with respect to your body and self-care. You Venus retrograde occurs in your 3rd house of communication, expression, sharing and local environment. With Scorpio naturally on this house cusp, you naturally use emotion and intensity when you communicate. You also have a gift for psychological insight. It’s a time to think carefully about who you are communicating with and be in their shares. This is a time to rethink or refine your communication skills or approach. Mars retrograde in the 6th house over Summer helped you bring your assertiveness and independence into your working sphere. It might be with this combined with Venus retrograde, there’s been some sense of feeling like others are taking over. Essentially you are learning about unequal relationships here and how to communicate from different positions and ranks. Finally with Chiron in the 8th house of shared resources, sex and intimacy and Aries naturally on this cusp, you seek yourself through this sphere. So mutual exchange, feedback and sharing is an important area of your life. You are a powerful initiator in relationships and with Chiron here, it raises the bar and brings in more levels of awareness. There’s the potential for a lot of growth in this area, just be clear on who you want to be in relationship with.
Libra
Venus goes retrograde through your 2nd house, the house of self-worth – value not only of your physical resources but also psychologically and spiritually. So Scorpio is inherently on your 2nd house of self-esteem, which means it’s not the easy for you to get a solid sense of grounding in your self-worth. Scorpio has the tendency to bring change and alchemy to whatever it touches and so naturally it’s not of the earth, it’s more fluid. Retrograde Venus through your 2nd house causes you to journey through a short but intense and deep period of uncertainty around your value and worth. Scorpio is the sign of complexity, and with him on your 2nd house cusp there is a lot of complexity around that value, as it’s very much related to others. As we know relationships are naturally complex, so this tests your value in yourself. You have had a glimpse of Uranus in Taurus and Chiron in Aries, now they are both retrograding back through Aries and Pisces retrospectively. The glimpse you received might have taken the pressure off relationships in one way, opening you up to things you knew you were only just beginning to see, like a new born baby. But now the pressure has been reapplied so you can complete whatever was left unfinished. This seems to have something to do with your 4th house. Capricorn rules your 4th house and Pluto and Saturn are moving through it slowly, forcing you into a place of independence and strength, getting you emotionally and spiritually dependent on just yourself. Uranus in Taurus, where it will reenter next year will bring a different emphasis on relationships, where you are sharing resources more with others, but Chiron’s move back into Aries places a reemphasis on your relationships once again. Chiron is prepared to reformulate whatever it touches, he takes no prisoners. Chiron takes us deep into the place we need to go for our ultimate healing and sometimes it isn’t easy. If you can surrender and go deep with this Venus retrograde, you will setting yourself up for the upcoming Chiron transit, so you flow more gracefully with it. Chiron and Venus retrograde wants us to be really clear about how we value ourself, what we accept and cannot accept in relationships and how to be our true authentic selves without all the shifting blame onto others. The great news is that Venus ends it’s retrograde in Libra which means you have the capacity to go deep and connect with some big stuff only to then come back up to calm waters. Ultimately you will find your self-love from within, this is where you need to focus your energies to get the most of your Venus retrograde in Scorpio.
Scorpio
Venus is travelling through your 1st house, the house of self, representing your relationship to yourself, your inner other also. It’s a rare thing that Venus retrogrades in our own sign, it happens perhaps once or twice in a lifetime, so it’s a big deal. With it transiting backwards through your house of self, and with the recent Mars retrograde teaching you about your relationship to family, groups and your community, there are some big questions being asked by yourself about how you came to be who you are and how you can begin to uncover and get back to who you feel you really are at the deepest, more core and authentic part of yourself. A big part of the journey of discovering who we really are is taking a part the construction of who we thought we were, or who we have been in the eyes of others. You have an opportunity now to really find yourself, find your missing other half, inside of yourself. Not incredibly sexy I know, connecting with your shadow, but a huge leap in consciousness can come from this reunion. So firstly the Mars retrograde in Aquarius connected you to how your family dynamics have morphed into your group dynamics – the group is formed around the family of origin as anyone who facilitates group psychotherapy will tell you. Now you are looking beyond that – to see not so much how you have been a product of your family of origin, but how everyone else in relationship to you are just facets of yourself. Mars in retrograde showed you how you fitted or didn’t fit in, where you sensed you didn’t belong. Now you are looking at the context of you and how much you are integrated within. What do you split off and see as not you? What sort of relationship to you have to your inner identities? Are you able to accept the aspects of yourself that have been suppressed, repressed and disavowed by you as a result of your early, childhood years? We usually project or transfer out these parts of ourselves so that others can carry them for us and take responsibility for the which we are not prepared to confront. This is now an inner journey, to embrace the other that is within yourself. You might feel posed at a precipice, unable to really look at what you now are so ready to welcome back. It’s not about looking outside yourself for the missing other, it’s about finding the myriad identities within yourself reflected in your other. You might, by the end of this Venus retrograde cycle, be able to breathe a huge sigh of relief as core pieces of the puzzle start making sense, and your relationship issues come into focus and the deeper issues crystallise. Massive revelations are on on their way, particularly from 10th to 15th as a packed parade of planets journey through Scorpio, making strong aspects. A time of true transformation for you, if there ever was one.
Sagittarius
For you, the Venus retrograde occurs in your 12th house, a house of the hidden, other dimensions, our karma, our realities that continue to play out through our present consciousness in the wake of our multidimensional nature. The 12th house is the house of the otherworldly, it’s naturally ruled by Pisces, it’s slippery and isn’t easily defined. With Scorpio naturally on your 12th house, this house for you has a deep emotional nature. The hidden space is more impenetrable and hidden than it is for most others. Scorpio doubles the depth in the house of hidden realms, making this space even more internal for you. So while on the outside you appear very positive and expansive, there is always this other side, a concealed deeper layer which contains a natural understanding of the nature of existence and reality. Your inner reality is a very unstable, constant transformative place. Perhaps this is one reason why you resist definition and limitation from others – you know that you are so much more than a name or identity. When Venus moves into Libra at the end of October and beginning of November, then something veiled will be revealed to you. You will get some clarity on an issue or person. Use this time to ask yourself deep questions about what you need and value, particularly in terms of your emotions and where you want to focus your growth. Scorpio ground is often where there’s a shared reality and so look to the emotional impressions made by others on you – look to your relationships. While you have this very independent streak, there’s still a sense that others have a certain degree of control over you. There is an emphasis on secrets, of others and of those you keep from yourself. This is a time to be really up front with yourself, to really meet yourself and face reality and confront what you don’t want to see. What you hide from yourself and others becomes part of the unconscious and works against us – either in our personal experience of ourselves or in our relationships. See it as the more transparent you are, the less you become a magnet for things trying to burst through your consciousness in an uncomfortable way. That which is not acknowledged and simply unaware of still exists but in alternate and parallel dimensions – it impacts is still, but in a stranger often less pleasant way. It’s a great time for deep therapy especially work that can unlock those other dimensions of reality. Mars retrograde earlier in the year was in your 3rd house made you unwilling to compromise who you are. The 3rd house is where we communicate, express and share. Seek yourself through these expressions but ensure that you are not going along with some kind of norm, with Aquarius naturally on this house cusp, you are here to challenge collective norms. Mars has got you into new territory.
Capricorn
This October, Venus will be retrograding through your 11th house, the house of friends and social networks, including social media – this is where people can see you and you get observed and noticed. This house, with Venus journeying through, is about looking at the ways in which we get attention and our social interactions with others. Scorpio on this house suggests much complexity, intensity and emotions around this. One of the necessary approach to growth and spirituality is the ability to hold seemingly contradictory emotions open and not run from any of them or the seeming contradiction and let the energy serve as a propulsion to drive you inward and get you closer to yourself in respect to how you feel. You are getting to a place where you are interested in being seen for who you are now, not anything you are not, with all your feelings. This is about noticing how you are adapting yourself to fit in with a collective norm. That norm of buying into the societal and familial expectations, doing what everyone else does, if this wasn’t a part of your life or world who would you be? Standing out, speaking out for what you believe, your idealism for humanity, what you do. Standing in your shoes. Not hiding, being at ease in the world, making statements and having opinions. Its ok to have different styles, opinions. But without war and conflict, even in disagreements having patterns to express ourselves for everyone. The recent Mars retrograde has forced you to encounter your self-worth. Believe in what you say and do, really believe in it. This affects how you speak and what you say. The strategy is always important to Capricorn. Strategise how you speak. You are in a period of expansion of personal worth, values, perhaps also your values and resources, whether they be your inner resources, spiritual or financial resources. Think about how this meets your ability to be seen for who you are truly are. These retrogrades have been encouraging you to understand who you are outside of the collective and social systems in particular respect to your values, identity.
Aquarius
Pisces
Venus is journeying through your 9th house. The 9th house is traditionally ruled by Jupiter and relates to our God or Higher Self concept. Our belief systems also denote the 9th house, and with Scorpio traditionally ruling this house for Pisces, it’s where there’s a necessity to go deep and be open to transformation. Scorpio naturally in the zodiac system rules sex and so it is through the experience and expression of sexuality that Pisces gets to know and understand itself as a spiritual being, connected to the cosmos. With retrograde Venus journeying through this house, you could experience a rethink of your belief systems around how you conceptualise your idea of God. It could begin to include the idea of transformation as a crucial reference point for your idea of God, it could mean addressing the taboos in your belief systems, the things you need to question or challenge. It could be about embracing the idea of sexuality, death, merger and rebirth in your concept of God. With the retrograde aspect this makes this an inner journey, a reframe or deepening of yourself to envision life differently or in a more whole or complete way. With Mars also recently retrograde in your 12th house, placing Aquarius naturally on the 12th, suggests a time of reexamining your relationship to fear and groups. There has been a need to assert yourself while also know what you fear and holds you back – perhaps even things you do not notice, deny or avoid. You should now have more awareness of where you are held back, or feel held back by your fears and unconscious, hidden shadow material. Neptune midway through your sign continues to encourage an opening and vulnerable side. Wherever Neptune journeys we get in touch with our sensitivity and boundaries. It’s a long journey for you in relationship to this, and this alongside the Mars and Venus retrogrades suggests a time of noticing where others might not be pulling their weight, honouring their promises, transgressing your boundaries, and where you have had to sit deeply with that, and take clear action on standing your group. Perhaps this has felt like a challenge on your sense of discernment and judgment. Also a time when you have had to get ‘real’ about who you are in relationships and how you can take more personal accountability. Alongside Chiron’s dip into your 2nd house of resources, self-worth and values, you have a sense that it’s now about knowing yourself more deeply, your values and ethics. Aries naturally on your 2nd house means this is how you seek to know yourself – through identifying what you hold dear. This is a long term journey – to value yourself deeply and ensure this self-worth underpins how you choose to resource and finance your life. That means creating the right circumstances and being in the right environment for you to thrive and feel fulfilled.
