Energy Update: Venus conjunct Pluto and the metamorphosis of the Venus and Mercury retrograde cycles

Today Venus meets up with Pluto at 25° Capricorn – she is deep in her shadow now, she retrogrades in 8 days on the 19th – and this conjunction will play a major role in the 48 days ahead. (We will experience this conjunct three times: today on 12/11, while Venus is retrograde on 12/25, and finally when she moves direct on 03/03 – mark your calendars)

Something has got to die. Some part of us has outlived its welcome. It’s time to move on.

This whole year, with its complicated Saturn-Uranus square, has been indicating this and now our Venus retrograde cycle rolls in to finish off the job. She’s got a helper, too, as Mercury will also retrograde in relationship to Pluto early in 2022.

There’s a lot to unpack here so I want to begin at the beginning (wow, imagine that!) – back in January of 2020, we were exiting a Cancer-Capricorn lunar node cycle (we’d just had our last solar eclipse in Capricorn on 12/26/19) and then the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all joined slow-moving Pluto in the sign of Capricorn. It was a lot. You could say (without hyperbole at this point, I think) that it broke the world.

Sometimes change happens from the inside out but not this time – this time, change had to happen from the outside in. The world broke but we all still have to live in it. The past two years have been, undoubtedly, the hardest of most of our lives. We’ve had to grieve what we have lost, we’ve had to make sense of where we are, we’ve had to readjust to where we are going. We’ve been stopped and turned around so many times that many of us are dizzy and unmoored.

Many of us us have had to accept the very real truth that we have never had control over our lives – not really, not like we wanted to. That life is bigger than us. We’ve come face to face with our human structures – where they work well as well as where they fail us. We’ve come face to face with our own coping mechanisms. We’ve come face to face with our jobs, our living environments, and our relationships. We’ve seen who we become under the greatest pressures we will likely face in our small human lifetimes.

The planets and their endless cycles have a way of breaking everything down and it can feel like a sucker punch. But there is a deeper truth – if you are on your true path – the one that lights you up inside – the one that is solely and completely meant for you – nothing can lead you astray. Setbacks just slow you down, roadblocks deepen your resolve, and time spent alone is time to plan.

The deep truth that nobody wants to confront is that most of us are not on our true paths. But the even deeper truth is that the planets always spiral around us, they always give us another chance – as long as you are living, you can right your path. You can make the hard choice. You can walk away from what holds you back. You can say “yes” to the scariest thing or “no” to the comfortable thing that keeps you in a place of stasis.

We are about to encounter two major personal planet retrogrades: Venus will retrograde from 26°-11° Capricorn and Mercury will retrograde from 10° Aquarius-24° Capricorn. Look at those numbers, see the interplay there between them – see the beautiful butterfly pattern of change that is about to unfold before us. Now, before this starts – map out what you want to change.

Now is your chance. We are in the calm before the storm.

In ancient astrology, both Capricorn and Aquarius were ruled by our planet of constriction Saturn – it is no coincidence that this is happening under the energy of our last of the squares between Saturn in Aquarius and Uranus in Taurus, aka, our Immovable Force Paradox. We have had our eyes peeled open, we’ve been forced to confront what doesn’t work – what doesn’t work outside of ourselves on the world stage AND what doesn’t work inside of us in our own personal lives. So many people have, in the past, used the outside world as a way to escape the problems in their personal lives. Without that crutch, they have found themselves bereft of home or endlessly lonely among the people that were supposed to be theirs.

The planets say, no more. Venus and Mercury are endlessly personal – there is no escaping their influence in our own lives. What they symbolize in our birth charts (by sign, house, and aspect) shows the way that we individualize – when we follow these paths, we open up the light of our Sun signs, we become who we truly are. When we don’t, we get more closed down, more anxious, more depressed, we feel unworthy, we feel unwell.

In this way, this pair of butterfly-like retrogrades is a god-send (a planet send? But what are the planets if not gods – can you tell that I’m an animist yet?) – for it is designed to bring us back to our primordial goo. If we give in, if we let them unravel our knots, we might truly find who we are again, we might be reborn – not as we have been told to be, but as we really are.

If you are not Scorpionic by nature, being told to give in to the great undoing and death cycles of Pluto might be absolutely terrifying and I get that. But after these two years, what do you have left to lose? What are you still holding on to? If you’ve had to hold on that tight, might you, just for a second, let go and just see what happens?