Venus emerges from the Underworld

We continue tracking the course of Venus through affliction, retrograde and combustion.

Just days ago, Venus emerged from a close encounter with the Sun called Kazimi. Kazimi occurs when a planet is within one degree of the Sun, and is said to be “in the heart of the Sun.” Kazimi is an underworld of sorts for the planet concerned, where the archetypal indications of that planet are refined by fire, and we are often forced to endure significant ‘burns’ in that area of life.

The deep combustion of Venus (August 12-13) may have brought some soul-searching in the realm of romantic relationship, pleasure, beauty and other Venusian themes. The external significations of a planet will tend to get burnt up and hurt during a combustion, while the internal significations are purified. For Venus, this means relationships with people outside of yourself may have been challenged, while your relationship with yourself, your own pleasure and your ideas of beauty may have been refined.

Regardless of how Kazimi might have played out in the details, the fact is that Venus is now emerging from this intensity of heat. At the beginning of this month Venus remains combust, but not Kazimini, until the 18th. This release from the Sun’s influence will lighten all things Venus, but we will still be contending with her retrograde motion until September 4th.

The entire period of intense Venus affliction really began in early July. After September 4th we’ll get a break from the vascillations of the planet, but this cycle of difficulty won’t officially end until early October, when Venus crosses the gandanta between Cancer and Leo for the third time within a short window.

Being now back in Cancer after a sojourn into Leo, the themes Venus navigates shift from the dynamic between power and beauty, to a considerations of pleasure as a form of care, beauty as nourishment, the sustainability of attraction and other reverberations of the ways that shiny, seductive Venus interacts with substantial, caring Moon—ruler of Cancer. Fundamentally, these are also themes that women may experience as they transition from the girl or woman phase of life (ruled by Venus) to the motherhood phase (ruled by Moon), if they should go there.

This phase of Venus, through the next gandanta in October may still be conflicted but it is significantly less compressed than the previous phase which began in early July. Venus remains trapped in an inward/backward/downward energy due to her retrograde motion, but the pressure which was created by affliction is gradually being removed and will be gone on the 18th. This means that we can contemplate and negotiate the themes of Venus in depth and in relative peace.

Because this has been such a prolonged period of relative duress for a fast-moving planet to endure, it signals a major renegotiation (through pain, obstruction and elimination) of personal and collective relationships with relationship: relationship with romance, relationship with beauty, relationship with self. Venus is the planet ruling over these things and will have brought them up for questioning and examination in the course of its nature being compressed, blocked, burned and otherwise tossed about. It is often the case that the planets which are most tortured in a horoscope are the ones with the most knowledge, so we should all come out of this a bit more refined in our ideas of relationship and the ways we connect.