Blog
by Steven Forrest
Venus turned retrograde on December 21st, right on the Winter Solstice. Those two pregnant moments coinciding is a rare event and it tells me that we should pay a lot of attention to the strong Venusian signature on the coming year.
On January 11, that retrograde Venus conjuncts the Sun at 21°12' of Capricorn. It remains retrograde for the usual forty-day period, finally turning direct on the last day of January at 13°33' Capricorn.
The Sun-Venus alignment on the 11th is called an “inferior conjunction.” Despite the term, there’s nothing wrong with it! “Inferior” here only means that Venus is directly between the Earth and the Sun. On the other side of its orbit, Venus again aligns with the Sun, but this time with the Sun between us and Venus.
September opens straightforwardly with Venus in Libra and Mercury in Virgo. Each planet is in the sign it naturally rules, in other words. And that symmetry can be a bit bland, like a beige rug in a beige room. But then things get a lot more interesting. On the 9th, Mercury crosses into Libra where it resides for the bulk of the month, until finally entering Scorpio on the 29th. Two days after Mercury slips into Libra, Venus leaves it, crossing the border into the classic sign of its “detriment,” Scorpio, where it remains until the end of the first week of October.
It is this period from September 11th onward, with Venus in Scorpio and Mercury in Libra, that I'm interested in. Harnessed in an evolutionary way, this planetary combination can trigger conscious deepening, support both truth-telling and truth-hearing, and foster the resolution of tough, longstanding intimate conflicts. Experienced unconsciously, it can read like the script of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf. People can tear each other apart in the name of love, in other words.
As I write these words, temperatures are nearing record highs all across the US. So it seems fitting that Steven's newsletter this month takes the sun as its subject. Have you ever heard of Solar Maximum? If not, you're not alone. It just so happens that right now we're in the middle of the peak of the solar cycle - called solar maximum. Below, Steven shares some thoughts on this. And to bring you up to speed, we're also including his chapter on sunspot cycles from The Night Speaks. We'll be re-releasing this beloved little book in ebook format soon. Meanwhile, enjoy the teaser.
Contemplating the astrological weather for the month of June, three “warm fronts” capture my attention. They all promise rain, at least in the symbolic sense. First, Neptune makes its station in Pisces on June 6th. Planets making stations are always at their strongest. Second, Jupiter enters Cancer toward the end of the month — on the 26th. Third, Mercury and Venus pave the way for Jupiter’s Cancer ingress, with Mercury arriving in that sign on May 31 and Venus following on June 3rd. So we will have a lot of Cancer steam in the air for the entire month, and it will be getting an assist from Neptune.
When I was a kid getting interested in astrology, I quickly learned that the Ascendant was a big piece of the puzzle. But what did it mean? The more I read, the more I heard astrologers rolling the drums and blowing the trumpets for it . . . but I still didn’t get it. The Ascendant is “your identity.” It is “your ego.” It is superficial; it is more important than your Sun Sign. The more I read, the more confused I became.
I decided I needed to figure it out for myself. I began by thinking about it physically. The Ascendant is the sign that was rising in the east when you were born. It was “dawning,” just like the Sun dawns in the morning. And it then came to me in a flash: the Ascendant represents how you “dawn on people.” It is your style, your affect, the way you present yourself to the social world.
