Kiss from a Rose—Venus Emerging
Love is fearlessness in the midst of the sea of fear— Rumi
The first flurry of delicate blossom ushers spring’s joyful arrival as the Sun and Moon meet in the sign of Aquarius today.
New Moons denote entry points, like doors ajar that invite us to garner new experiences, to cross back and forth between the past and the future, to experience the joy of new beginnings and the ache of final endings.
This month begins on a New Moon in Aquarius, a sign that encompasses our participatory belonging to humankind. Aquarius’s wavy glyph suggests those powerful currents of energy that flow through the deepest stratum of our relationships with friends, family, and those intimate soul filled engagements.
The ancient cross-quarter festival of Imbolc on February 1st and 2nd is the first midpoint in the cycle of the year, welcoming the first tentative stirrings of spring, a guiding metaphor of new beginnings.
Saturn joins the new Moon today, and unites with the Sun at the week’s end, as Mercury turns direct on February 4th, an invitation to attend to our responsibilities with patience, to seek fresh perspective as familiar themes circle and cycle in our own lives and in the world around us.
There’s a solemnity in the sky script as seven Saturn-ruled planets speak to the challenges of the literal events that absorb our attention, and those things that matter. As some governments try to find a way to move through the pandemic by removing mandates, tens of thousand tonnes of Covid waste spill from landfills, contaminate the air, and clog rivers and oceans, a dark counterpoint to our collective longing for play and pleasure.
Cautious Saturn stands sentinel at the threshold of this month dedicated to Lovers as commerce pays homage to the brutally murdered martyr and unlikely lover, Valentinus with symbols of sensuality—red roses, dark chocolates wrapped in cerise or shiny scarlet foil, pretty cards that offer love’s promise. For those who may be grieving the loss of a loved one; for those who have been shamed and shunned, harmfully shocked, ignored or brutally intruded upon, the scar tissue that wraps around the heart may ache as lovers walk arm in arm in the soft light of spring.
For thousands of years, the spectacular cycles of Venus have been tracked and observed by our prehistoric ancestors. The Mayan and Mesoamericans timed wars when Venus emerged as the Wasp Star from the darkness of her 40 days and 40 nights sojourn in the underworld—renewed, resolute, resplendent in her fierce beauty.
On January 15th Venus appeared, strengthened, transfigured, glistening like a diamond on dawn’s softly curved breast after her 40 days and 40 nights descent into the Underworld. Venus stationed direct on January 29th and will linger in her post-retrograde shadow until March 1st while Venus and Mars unite in the sign of the Mountain Goat on February 14th—a tender embrace that signifies a new tempo in a soulful life.
All planetary archetypes portray our human experience of relationship—attachment, separation, autonomy, and dependence. Jungian analyst Ann Bedford Ulanov suggests that “as the instincts are to the body, so the archetypes are to the psyche.”
Our entire birth chart, and more specifically, the archetypes of Venus and Mars, describe our innate responses to our environment; the myriad ways we love or defend ourselves from the soul mate we long for. Mars is the warrior god. In so many cultures, he has been associated with the masculine principle, with fierce gods of war. To the Greeks he was Ares, his name emerging from the root, “to destroy” or to be “carried away” which is so often experienced in the ecstasy of falling into love when we are carried by our desire, within reach of our holy longing.
We may experience Mars energy vicariously through movies or sport; or in the narcissism of our times, embody Mars in impassioned exchanges on social media or through the windscreen of our vehicle when we’re stuck in traffic. In our culture of haste, as we lean in, stretch forward to the next bigger, better thing, it might now be helpful reflect on the rich symbolism of the current Venus Retrograde as she has revealed those things that pained us—the jagged schisms in our relationships, our concerns about money, our creative or sexual anorexia, our relationship with beauty and art, or angst about ageing. In myth, Venus was not faithful. She delighted in variety, she evoked jealousy. She defied the patriarchal Greek and Roman morality. In our birth chart, she leads us down to the Underworld to experience colourful explosion of passion, loss, and longing, to emerge once more bearing the marks of our initiation, willing to be utterly loved, shored up, supported as we offer our creative gifts to the world.
Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset wrote that “no land in human topography is less explored than love.” It is the exploration of love’s landscape that is essential to the soul’s holy longing, and we must be brave wayfarers. The Venusian art of relating and healing the heart’s contraction has evolved from Agony Aunt columns and our urge to pathologize, improve or fix, into the collective experience of relationship therapy. The “telly-therapy” of Esther Perel and Orna Guralnik offers voyeuristic participation in couples therapy, revealing the archetype of Venus in all her guises, and inviting personal identification with couples who are living in the trauma world of fear, disconnection, and shame.
We expect so much from our partners, in love, and as we continue to live with the existential anxiety of the climate crisis, those relationships that have sustained us—friendships old and new, the intricacies and vagaries of family relationships, the encounters with our virtual tribe or colleagues at the office—we absorb and embody experiences that take us down the twists and turns, repeats and spirals, back to ancient themes.
We might pause in our focused busyness today on this New Aquarian Moon and follow a thread of memory back to the Venus Retrograde in the air-sign of Gemini that began on May 13th-June 25th, 2020—a cycle that was defined by the pandemic, worldwide lockdowns, economic recession, as well as major bushfires in Australia and the Western United States. We may pause to remember the brutal killing of George Floyd that unleashed the Black Lives Matter protest cry that bloomed and flowered all too briefly. We may ask ourselves what we have done to be kinder, more conscious, more tender. Now, as Venus emerges in the sign of Capricorn as a Morning Star may we replenish our faith in the unseen, may we trust that our gifts will be welcomed in love and appreciation, may we feel a sense of purpose and value in our community. May we cherish each other and find shelter in Love today.
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Now let us welcome the New Year, full of things that have never been—Rainer Maria Rilke.
In the ever-changing sky, Saturn and Uranus are still in a discordant square all through 2022 and 2023, a celestial symbol of clashing points of view, polarities, and divisions, as these ancient mythic enemies confront each other in the heavens and an old order collides with the new. Saturn transits arrive as the henchmen of stasis that often thwart our efforts to move forward, yet they present as circumstances that grow us up, if we’re willing to learn. When these two archetypes face off in the heavens, they reflect tension, upheaval, limitations of freedom, resistance, and rebellion. In our own birth charts, transits of Uranus break us open, shatter and destabilise those things that are too tightly defended or have outlived their purpose.
As tensions mount, scapegoats will be driven out, minorities become criminals. A Saturnian policing bill now targets Roma, Gypsy and Travellers in the UK if they “trespass” in places that have not been designated for them. In 1930 Saturn and Uranus were in Square and between 1933-1939, the Roma and Sinti were interned and murdered by the Nazi Regime.
December, the diamond-frosted clasp linking twelve jewelled months to yet another year—Phyllis Nicholson.
For so many, this has been a difficult year. A year that has tested our patience, our integrity, our ability to temper our desires. We may have found ourselves in a strange landscape—a world that has changed. Friendships may have altered, truths may have shapeshifted, divisions deepened. Free floating anxiety clouds political agendas and a stealthy manoeuvring for power continues as Pluto moves through Capricorn and Saturn presses his boot heel on pleasure and possibility. Yet, for all we know, beneath the surface of our lives something is emerging, inching its way forward, as we transition into a new way of being.
The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater—Haldir.
J.R.R. Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on a waxing Pisces Crescent Moon. He began writing The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings after the insanity of the first World War. The Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954, as Saturn and Uranus were separating from their square (1952/53) inciting crisis, uncertainty, civil unrest, and repressive authoritarian reprisals.
As we honour the rings that encircle our human story, the Moon arrives, ripely round, full-bellied, on September 21st. This is the last Full Moon before the Equinox on September 23rd. This Full Moon falls in the final degrees of nebulous Pisces, an archetype associated mystics and dreamers, artists and blank-eyed addicts who cannot bear the jagged edges of this world. Pisces is where we retreat from the shrillness of life, where we withdraw to weave our dreams. Pisces is where we dissolve into love and faith and Oneness with all living things. As this Pisces Moon floats through the skies, we may be drawn to our soul place, through a dream, a feeling, the waft of a scent that transports us to a place where “oft hope is born when all is forlorn,” as Legolas reminds us.
On September 6th, Mercury entered its pre-Retrograde shadow period, in readiness for this last Retrograde cycle of 2021. Mercury will be moving Retrograde in Libra (September 27-October 17th) as we choose to wear rings-of-love or the rings-of-power in our soul encounters.
Love Apples—Celebrating the Sacred Feminine in Astrology and in Fairy Tale—Saturday 25th September 2021—14.30 BST.
Somethings can only be seen in the shadows—Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
makes us aware of the shadow.”
Cancer embodies the primal force of the Magna Mater, the Great Mother who at a whim, turns her head and exposes her dark face and eyes of burning coals. She is the One who gives and takes life in casual and constant cycles of destruction and rebirth. She is the wicked witch, the evil stepmother, the mother-devourer demonised by patriarchal religion, yet who initiates those who are willing to pay attention and walk carefully among the shadows. Cancer is a Cardinal sign that requires us to act, perhaps to protect any violation of our boundaries. Yet, as author Marion Woodman says, “there is no sense in talking about ‘being true to yourself’ until you are sure what voice you are being true to. It takes hard work to differentiate the voice of the unconscious”. Cancer is a water sign; its energy is fluid and receptive. Yet we may feel petrified, immobilised by the sharp scrape of the world. Like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, we may have fallen asleep, cradled by the curse of the Dark Mother, drowsy with inertia. This is the spell of enchantment that traps us in a tangle of false beliefs. This is the long dark shadow that seeps from our unconscious and scatters clues of white breadcrumbs in our dreams as we follow the path that leads to something new. This New Moon, speak softly to the Dark Mother who feeds us poison apples. Pay attention to those judgements and beliefs that knock loudly at the door of our integrity.
Love Apples—Fairy Tales and Sky Stories…
Here in the north, the shimmer of summer sparkles across newly mown meadows of powered gold. We’re drunk with light, overwhelmed with a surfeit of beauty. Now the sun pauses at the zenith of the year. Something extra-ordinary is happening; we feel it viscerally. Old traditions return, threads of comfort as the earth’s axis shifts and the scent of dog rose wafts on a hot honeyed breeze. Perhaps in our own lives, there is a sense of returning to a familiar place as we come full circle in the wheel of the year.
Astrology doesn’t cause events but offers us a container for understanding them. As ancient Sarsen stones drink the heat of the Midsummer sunrise we may not go back as our ancestors did at Stonehenge, Maeshowe, or Newgrange, to wait for the death and rebirth of the sun. We can still draw from the eternal circle of knowing that describes the mythic journey of the hero/heroine and fall into a new more revitalised rhythm in our own lives. After the enthusiastic departure, the blistering fire of initiation, we may still feel raw, burnt and bleeding, yet we may sense the worst is over. Now comes the Return as our feet learn to support us again, as our hearts open once more to a love we can trust. The world is so different to the world we have left. There may still be tears to shed, a deep throb of pain yet to be tended to. We may still brace ourselves against the confinement of those tight corners we have grown used to. Now as the Sun dips into the cool waters of Cancer, a sign that clasps us to the familiar breast of comfort and security, our hearts open like peonies. We dare to begin again.
Mercury emerges from the shadows of this Retrograde period on July 7th and makes an ambiguous square with shape-shifting Neptune (July 6-7th) while corpulent Jupiter in Pisces (faith, long journeys, excess) switches backwards from June 20th-September 14th) and joins Neptune Retrograde in Pisces. It also can signify the tsunami of grief and loss at the ending of a relationship or the realisation that we have been unrealistic or too naïve concerning our finances or what we hold dear to our heart. We may sense something ancient and primal stirring within us as something comes to a natural end, as we begin to emerge from pain into pleasure, an expanded sense of our next self. This is our invitation to take off those rose-coloured glasses as we move fluidly through this time of stops and starts when nothing is clear or certain. Byron Katie, who has Jupiter Retrograde in Cancer, suggests pragmatically, “When we stop opposing reality, action becomes simple, fluid, kind, and fearless.”
Now at this time of pause, of empty space, may we allow peace and contentment to enter in as the sun sinks molten into the sea spilling a phosphorescent flash of chartreuse followed by a tiny dot of honey to mark the day’s end. As the earth’s axis shifts, we’re dazed and dazzled with by the beauty of the flowers that tumble over walls and spill over meadows.
Sagittarius is the nomad, the pilgrim, the outlander, the foreigner. Those who are introverted by nature may feel like a foreigner or outsider amidst the noise and the laughter of a social gathering. Those of us who are in a place of transition, may feel like outsiders in our families or communities.
The troublesome Saturn (rules, restrictions, delays) /Uranus (electric, iconoclastic) square infuses 2021 with drama, violence, plans upended, sudden shocks and serendipities. The waning square is in effect throughout 2021, with the final square on December 24th. It came up close on February 17th, and again delivers a concentrated clout on June 14th shaken, not stirred, by the Solar Annular Eclipse on June 10th as police prepare for mass protests in the UK. Priti Patel’s “digitise the border” project alters the UK’s asylum and immigration system that separates human beings into “them and us”—cast adrift, shut out. Strangers in a foreign land. This is the motif of Sagittarius as the wanderer, walled and shut out by Saturn’s bureaucratic boundaries and the unpredictable omnipotence of Uranus.
“To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journeying is to be a pilgrim,” poet Mark Nepo writes.
I had embraced you… long before I hugged you—Sanober Khan.
Twins in myth and fairy tale, are similar at first glance, then reveal themselves to be fundamentally different. The story of Castor and Pollux, and their beautiful twin sisters, Helen and Clytemnestra is a brutal story of theft and revenge, kidnapping, murder, and loss. Maya Angelou once said, “I don’t believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.”
Yet, whether we’re twinned, a resourceful only child, a pioneering first born, a cossetted baby, or the lost child in a family too big or too poor to give nurture, we’re engaged with the mythic story of the Twins in our everyday human encounters with friends and colleagues, lovers and husbands. Those sympathetic similarities that draw us in; those polarised differences that repel. As the Sun moves through Gemini expect these themes to be highlighted as our Gemini planets are nudged to think a little differently about finding a twin flame or a Soulmate. The well-worn sweaty T-shirt study by Claus Wedekind showed that the pheromones that attract us most are from people who are genetically very different from us. As the magic sparkles begin to flutter and the golden glow fades, we may find that our Soulmate is both our Jekyll and our Hyde.
As many countries ease restrictions, Mercury and Venus move through sociable Gemini this month as we make space for new relationships, new family configurations; as we move through our grief after months spent shepherding someone through illness, after the loneliness of confinement. We’re reminded that Gemini rules the lungs and the hands as we breathe new energy into those parts of our lives that may still feel cling-wrapped in fear and we re-connect with those vital, resilient parts of ourselves that press up against the warm urgency of longing to touch again. When our world has become precarious, when our natural impulses coil tightly inside us, it may be hard to feel connected to each other as we did before. The old ways of living on this earth have become harder to justify as the long shadow of the pandemic stretches across shrinking glaciers and warming skies.
Mercury backtracks at the end of this month, (May 29 – June 22) symbolising a turning point and a time when a protective chrysalis is shaped around an area of our psyche, depending on where these planets are moving through our birth chart. Pluto moves Retrograde (April 27 – October 6) stirring toxicity in our relationships, dredging secrets, exposing misuse of power, drawing our attention to those anemic areas of our lives that need a transfusion. Jupiter dips into familiar Piscean waters on May 14th amplifying our longing to escape into fantasy or denial, perhaps inflating empathy fatigue, addictive behaviour, or pain. Saturn and Uranus are still in square, a sky story that speaks of liberties curtailed as the old ways of living on this earth become harder to justify, and as the long shadow of the global pandemic stretches across shrinking glaciers and warming skies.
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If your nerve deny you, go above your nerve—Emily Dickinson.
As Venus (relationships, what we hold dear to our hearts) moves into Aries on March 21st and makes her annual appointment with the Sun (March 24th), the words of author Isabel Allende may resonate as we burn for something new “we don’t even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward…” Venus and the Sun conjoin Chiron on March 28–30th—an indication that for most of us, the road ahead may not be easy.
The motif of the Saturn/Uranus square—a cycle that began in 1988 with a Saturn/Uranus conjunction in Capricorn—infuses our lives with defining moments as regulations tighten, people push back. This year, three waning squares define the zeitgeist of disruption—the first was February 17th, June 14th is the second. In tandem and working in the darkness, the ominous Pluto/Eris square dredges up all that is putrid in our societies, as we wade through what Eckhardt Tolle calls “the pain body.”
As new lockdown measures are imposed in many countries, Mercury muscled into Aries on April 4th. Frustration simmers. The passage of Venus (April 23rd) sensitises the destabilising Saturn/Uranus square, followed by the Sun (April 30th-May 4th) and Mars adds fuel to the flames this year and next. (July/November 2021; March/April/July/ 2022.)
The birds they sang
The torrent of Tweets has stopped. In the silent space between chaos and something new, there is the descent into the unknown. Joe Biden has answered the call. He has worked and waited and prepared for this day’s dawning. He gazes out at a map of shifting possibilities. If he is to succeed, it will be as a Shaman, a Wounded Healer, not a problem-solving politician. January 20th is the first anniversary of the first case of Covid in America. As the death toll rises, it may soon surpass the 405,000 Americans who died in the chaos of WW II.
Mercury turns Retrograde on January 30th (square Joe Biden’s Scorpio Sun). There is so much to be healed and repaired. The slow retrieval of what has been lost or captive will be painful. As Pluto opposes the US Mercury from 2017–2024 there will be walls to dismantle, bridges to build, digital communications to reform, and Silicon Valley Titans to tame.