As August opens, the Sun is in mid-Leo faithfully advancing about one degree per day. Meanwhile, Venus is retrograde, having made a station near the end of Leo back on July 22nd. That means that the Sun is going forward and Venus is going backwards and that they’re locked on a collision course. The two finally come together in a conjunction on August 13th. That happens in 20 degrees 28 minutes of Leo. After that, Venus will continue to move backwards until September 3rd, forty-three days after turning retrograde. By that time, the Sun will be well into Virgo. 

Built into that ho-hum recitation of dates is one of the most mysterious, elegant mysteries of our solar system: the Venus Pentangle. It will take us a few steps to understand it, starting with the fact there are two distinct types of Sun-Venus conjunctions – inferior ones and superior ones.. Most astrologers, myself included, don’t make much of a fuss about their differences, but maybe we should.

Think of an archery target with concentric rings. The Sun is the bull’s eye. The first ring out is Mercury’s orbit. The second is Venus’s orbit. The third one is us. Mars orbits further out in space, so it would be the fourth ring, and so on, out to Pluto and beyond. When Venus is lined up halfway between Earth and the Sun, we have the inferior conjunction. But then sometimes Venus aligns with the Sun from the opposite side of its orbit – that’s the superior conjunction.

Another way to say it is that at the inferior conjunction, the order is Earth-Venus-Sun, while at the superior conjunction, it’s Earth-Sun-Venus – with Venus obviously much further away in space on the other side of the solar system.  

These two very different kinds of Sun-Venus conjunctions look exactly the same on a natal chart – with one difference: at the inferior conjunction, Venus is always retrograde. At the superior conjunction, it is always direct. 

Have a look at Figure One:

It’s a list of both kinds of Sun-Venus conjunctions over the past eight years. Under the “P1” column, with one glance you’ll see one of the basic secrets of the solar system: every other Sun-Venus conjunction happens with Venus retrograde. That means that inferior and superior conjunctions alternate. But that’s only the beginning of the mysteries here.

The time between one inferior conjunction and the next one is 584 days – 583.92 days, to be precise. That never varies. The third one occurs 584 days after the second one, and so on around the circle. Interestingly, at the sixth inferior conjunction, the Sun-Venus alignment has returned to within a couple of degrees of its starting point. That means that we have a cycle of five inferior conjunctions, followed by the whole cycle rebooting.

Take another look at Figure One. You’ll see that the inferior conjunction that occurs on this August 13th happens at 20 Leo 28. On August 15, 2015, a similar conjunction happened at nearly the same place – 22 Leo 39. It always works that way – once again, after five inferior Venus-Sun conjunctions, the cycle starts over again in almost  exactly the same zodiacal degree. You can think of this Venus cycle the same way we think of a musical octave. The word “octave” makes it sound like it means eight notes, but it really means seven – the eighth note is actually the start of the new octave – and we’re hungry to start it! Just try stopping here: do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti  . . . 

Okay, go ahead: do. That’s like that sixth inferior conjunction. That’s the way it feels. 

It gets weirder – the time that elapsed between the first of those two Venus-Sun inferior conjunctions in Leo and its echo five cycles later is almost exactly eight years – actually eight years, minus two days, eight hours. Always. Invariably. In any series, the sixth repetition of the conjunction starts a new “octave” after eight years have passed.

If we plot the positions of any five successive inferior conjunctions of Venus and the Sun, something even stranger emerges: the famous Venus Pentangle. 

Figure Two maps out the last five inferior conjunctions and also shows the one happening this month – and as we just saw, its position coincides closely with the conjunction that happened eight years earlier. Within rough limits, the five points are all separated by quintile aspects of 72 degrees – one fifth of the circle. In other words, together they trace out a familiar shape: a  five-pointed star. That’s of course a symbol with a long tradition. We see it all the time on flags. Another place we see it is in Wiccan practices – and very likely an awareness of this eight-year Venus pentangle is at the root of it.

So we have an eight year Venus cycle defined by a five-pointed star. Take those two numbers a step further. Eight times five is forty – and there we hit another magic number, although this one takes a bit more thought to grasp. It turns out that there’s a forty year Venusian cycle too. What’s tricky about it is that in order to understand it, we need to add the planet Mercury to our thinking. Remember our archery target with the Sun in the bull’s eye? Mercury was the first ring. At the fifth repetition of the eight year pentangle cycle of inferior Venus-Sun conjunctions, Mercury appears in the sky in the same relationship with them. 

Have a look at Figure Three: 

Here we have two charts set forty years apart (within a couple of weeks.) Each chart is calculated for the inferior Venus-Sun conjunction. I arbitrarily set them for Borrego Springs, California where I live, but you could have set them up for anywhere on the planet – we’re not interested in houses here. It’s all about sign and degree positions. 

• In the chart for August 24, 1983, we see the Venus-Sun alignment in early Virgo, with Mercury 26 degrees 29 minutes ahead of the Sun.

• In the chart for August 13, 2023, we see the Venus-Sun alignment in 20 degrees of Leo, with Mercury in Virgo, 27 degrees 01 minute ahead of the Sun.

In other words, as our ancestors tracked the sky, they would have recognized that at the inferior conjunction, the Sun and two “wandering stars” were repeating the same pattern that they had created forty years earlier. If you’re interested in this from a more technical point of view, you can think of it this way: 

• The average synodic period of Mercury is 115.87754 days

. . . times 126 that equals 14,601 days. 

• The average synodic period of Venus is 583.92 days

. . . times 25 that equals 14,598 days. 

• The tropical year is 365.2423 days long

. . . times 40 that equals 14,610 days. 

That means that forty years of 365 days equals 25 Venus cycles of 584 days, which equals 126 Mercury cycles. That’s why the configuration repeats every forty years. 

Here’s another way that 40 is a magic number when it comes to Venus. Interestingly, in the 584-day cycle between successive inferior Venus-Sun conjunctions, Venus is retrograde for about forty days. The timing is actually slightly variable, and on average runs a little longer than forty days, but it’s interesting to see “forty” being so closely associated with these two basic Venusian rhythms. One can’t help but wonder if it has something to do with why that number comes up so often in the Bible.

• Remember Noah’s ark? It rained for forty days and forty nights when God wanted to cleanse the world and start over – then Noah waited another forty days after it rained before he opened a window

• Moses was on the mountain downloading the Ten Commandments for forty days

• The Israelites spent forty years wandering in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land 

• Goliath strutted his stuff for forty days before being killed by David

•  Jesus fasted for forty days in the wilderness

• Jesus was first seen again forty days after the crucifixion

There’s enough astrology hidden in the Bible to give a Bible-thumping Fundamentalist apoplexy. But it’s not just in the Bible – even in ancient Egypt, embalming a mummy required forty days. That’s because in their traditions it took forty days for a departing soul to prepare for the afterlife. 

How much of this goes back to an ancestral understanding of these Venus cycles?

We’ve now seen a Venus cycle of 584 days, one of eight years, and one of forty years. Ready for one more? The Venus pentagram itself completely retrogrades all the way around the zodiac and back to its starting point in 760 cycles, or about 1215 years. 

In Practice

A core practical principle of astrology is that slower-moving planets tell a deeper story than the fast ones. Pluto, for example, has a lot more time to develop depth and complexity of meaning in your life than does a firefly transit of Mercury. With the fast planets – Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars – we mostly find them reaching their maximum long-term usefulness in progressions and solar arcs. That fact has tended to leave transiting Venus on the sidelines. In a typical year, it covers all the signs, never spending very long anywhere. 

But now we have an eight-year Venus cycle, and perhaps a forty-year one as well.  Those are all slow enough to develop real depth of meaning – if only we knew how to harness them. The problem with finding a practical application for the Venus Pentangle is that it doesn’t seem to relate to your own chart in a personal way. Here’s the issue – one of the five inferior conjunctions might happen to fall on a sensitive point for you. That is worth noting – but, really, it is just a fast-moving transiting conjunction of the Sun and Venus, hitting a natal planet, and quickly moving on. There is also no astrological reason to assume that the next conjunction nineteen months later, will also hit one of your astrological buttons – remember, they’re all separated by multiples of 72 degrees, which doesn’t correspond to any major aspects. It all gets randomized pretty quickly, in other words. Bottom line: no one can ever say that “the Venus Pentangle is currently squaring my Moon,” or anything like that. Our familiar astrological techniques fail, in other words. 

There’s hope though! The more familiar Saturn cycle might perhaps provide a way of understanding these Venus cycles. For example, we know that Saturn takes just under three decades to get around the Sun, so everyone has a Saturn Return as they approach the age of thirty and another one as they approach sixty. Those are powerful, impactful events. Could there be a similar eight-year Venus rhythm hardwired into life and human consciousness? What kinds of turning points would these “Venus Pentangle returns” then mark? Presumably, they would bear strongly upon relationships and our capacity for intimacy. Obviously, by this logic, we would be looking at reaching age eight, age sixteen, age twenty-four, and so on. 

I want to be careful not to force the data here. Judge for yourself whether the simple schema which follows seems convincing and real. I am aware as I write that I am speaking in broad generalizations. But with the Saturn cycle, we generalize quite successfully about the basic psychology of youth, mid-life, and old age, so maybe it will work here too. What follows is painted in similarly broad terms. Also, as with everything in astrology, there are ways to get these “Seasons of Venus” right and ways to get them wrong. All of this, by the way, is covered in more detail in The Book of Earth.

• Around age eight, we are generally expected to stop whining, to learn suck up our disappointments and frustrations, and to begin to exercise some sense of self-control and responsibility toward other people. Our social relationships – at school, for example – begin to have “political” ramifications and complications, with much focus on hierarchy and status. We begin to compare ourselves to others outside the family.
• Around age sixteen, dating, courtship, and some degree of sexual expression are expected and generally culturally supported. All the mythology around turning “sweet sixteen” applies. Typically, around now we become obsessed with appearing to be desirable – and painfully afraid that we are not.
• Around age twenty-four, we have reached a plausible, socially-supported age for marriage and commitment, and perhaps for starting a family. We have now probably left home; our primary relationships have become voluntary rather than based on kinship ties. Life-long friendships are forming. We are learning to choose people.
• Around age thirty-two, our sexual energies are probably peaking. Youthful liaisons end; breakups and dramatic sexual affairs are common. We retreat somewhat from “running with our crowd,” and become more identified with our primary partnerships. The world begins truly to see us as adults, with all the attendant societal expectations. There is a fair chance that we are parents.
• Around age forty, we are in the classic territory of the “mid-life crisis.” We begin to realize the spiritual price we have paid for our Venusian status – for getting other people to like us, to respect us, to fear us, whatever. Enormous psychic pressure arises either to surrender and accept our currently-established relationships, or to recoil in horror from them.

Up through this point  (again, around age forty, which is the fifth return) I feel comfortable with everything that I have written. It all feels intuitively correct to me – not forced, as if I were trying to twist reality into the shape of an astrological theory. As I began to think about turning forty-eight, fifty-six, and beyond, my ideas do begin to feel forced, so I’ll stop at age forty. I suspect the Venus cycle continues to have meaning, but individuation is so advanced by that point that it becomes hard to make any similarly simple statements. Perhaps some of you can take it further. Perhaps you can add to the little bit that I have written here based on your own reflections about yourself and your friends. I think that doing that would be good for astrology, and probably good for the world too.

Collectively, I think it is time that we got past our paranoia about pentagrams.

Another Way of Looking at the Venus Pentangle

If I happen to be sleepless in the wee hours, my mind often turns to a meditation upon the Venus cycle. Eight years is a simple number, easy to work with. I encourage you to try this little experiment too – if nothing else, it will help you sleep. And you might also make a helpful astrological discovery as well. Here is how it works.

Choose any big, specifically Venusian turning point in your life – an actual event of an intimate nature. An obvious choice would be a romantic milestone. Most of us have had a few of those and they tend to loom large in our memories. We often remember dates too, at least within a few months and that’s close enough. I’m talking about our first meetings with significant people in our lives, plus marriages, divorces, breakups, and so on. 

Such events are always heralded by conventional astrological configurations, but my hypothesis is that strings of such events might be linked in time in a way that reflects the eight-year rhythm of the Venus cycle. This is nothing but speculation – but at least there’s a surefire way to test it: just take a walk down Memory Lane. Go back exactly eight years before any one of those romantic events. Go forward eight years into the future. Then ask yourself the obvious question: were those significant moments in your intimate life too? Perhaps more importantly, can you tie them all together in a developmental pattern, with significant, interconnected steps linked in meaning, but separated by multiples of eight years of time? 

Note that this is no longer about turning eight, sixteen, twenty-four, and so on. If it’s true, it’s an internal evolutionary rhythm that we can only detect from looking at events in your life rather than at any configurations in the sky.

Because of the deeply personal nature of the planet Venus, much of people’s actual experience in that intimate category is not a matter of public record. That makes it difficult to research these matters by using the life-stories of famous people. For one obvious example, the date of your first experience of sexual intercourse could be a natural anchor-point in the Venus cycle, but Google as you will, you are still not likely to discover that information about very many people.

How “clockwork” do these events have to be? Perhaps we know the exact date on which we met someone significant. Astrologically, we know that exactly eight years later, minus two days, eight hours, this hypothetical inner rhythm of the Venus cycle chimed again. But the odds are long against anything particularly significant happening on precisely that day. Always in astrology, we allow orbs – tolerances – around those dates of exactitude. There is no reason to think that we would not do the same thing here. With an eight year cycle, I find it plausible that we might allow an orb of a few months. 

Let me make all of this come alive for you by telling you some personal stories about how I’ve found this cycle working in practice in my own life. I tell these stories, plus a few more, in The Book of Earth, by way. Much of what follows is excerpted from that book.

The Ouija Board

For a while, when I was a freshman in college I was a subject at the then-famous J.B.Rhine psychical research laboratories at Duke University. By day, the researchers were strictly scientists – but by night, things got a little weirder and a lot more open to strange possibilities. One spring evening in 1968, I was experimenting with a Ouija Board with a fellow named Walt who was also a subject there. He and I felt the planchette seemingly moving of its own accord, guided by some invisible entity. (My roommate was a Physics major and he’d snuck a compass into the room. He said that in the instant that Walt and I “made contact with the spirit,” the compass needle swung 40 degrees and pointed directly at us – something was definitely going on!) 

Being nineteen years old, naturally I asked the spirit about my prospects for finding a girlfriend. The spirit, using the planchette, spelled out that I would meet her “very late in May. 

At about 11:45 pm on Friday, May 31, 1968, I arrived at my family home with a couple of pals. My sister Jan was down in the basement entertaining a few of her friends. That’s where I met Mary Jo and immediately fell in love – “very late in May.”  At the time, I wasn’t even thinking of the spirit’s prophecy on the Ouija board – those goosebumps only hit me much later.

Mary Jo and I were kids; our relationship didn’t last. But I still think of her fondly. We represented important developmental milestones for each other. I can honestly say that it was with her that I first felt anything like the deep soul-seeing kind of love that characterizes healthy adult intimacy. We lost touch with each other long ago, but I think that she might say the same thing about our relationship herself.

Now watch what happens when we bring the Venus Pentangle into play: going back in time eight years from that date in “very late May” of 1968, I had just turned eleven years old – and the roaring 1960s had just begun. I have one of those “diamond” moments of lucid memory from around that time. I was at a New Years’ Eve party with my church youth group. It was near midnight on December 31, 1959, just six months away from that “Venus Pentangle” moment based on meeting Mary Jo. The Ball fell in Times Square – and I looked at my friend Janice. Our eyes met. I saw beyond myself into another soul, probably for the first time in my life. I remember that moment as if it were yesterday. The great goddess Venus awakened something in me. I was only eleven – Janice and I never even kissed. But I believe that in that lucid Venusian moment, I began to learn why people kiss. And eight years later, I experienced an enormous enthusiasm for kissing Mary Jo and gazing into her eyes.

I would be the first to admit that all this is very subjective. I can only say that it is totally honest. Nothing about any of this feels forced or phony, as if I were trying to prove a theory. I would also like to say that in my opinion using our own charts and lives as learning tools is not only legitimate astrological research, but also absolutely necessary. How could I possibly have access to “data” such as these two deeply personal stories by Googling some movie star or political figure? Once again, this kind of material is mostly far too intimate ever to be part of anyone’s public record.

Going eight years forward in time from that anchor-point with Mary Jo brings us to mid-1976. Shortly thereafter, my girlfriend, Michele, and I quit our jobs, bought a sailboat and went cruising down the east coast. We bonded. Those months changed my life forever. Before that sailing  adventure, I “had jobs.” Afterwards, I was a full-time astrological counselor – and that is “Venus work” too. And, Venus-fashion, Michele and I got married about five months after that Pentangle peak. It didn’t last long, but hey . . . we were young. 

Move eight more years forward and it is 1984. In January of that year, I married Jodie Jensen, with whom I spent almost an entire Saturn cycle. If I choose to start my “Venus Pentangle clock” with my little friend Janice, the resonance with my marriage to Jodie becomes accurate within less than a week – but sixteen years later.

I could go on, but these episodes are enough to illustrate how all of this works in practice. I  suppose it could all be dismissed as anecdotal and personal – and indeed, before anything deserves to be read into the record as an astrological gold standard, it must demonstrate that it is reliable and generalizable. I’m not making that big claim here. “Works for me” is not enough to justify saying that it will work for everyone – but for me it is at least strong enough evidence for me to be happy to put this way of looking at the Venus cycle out there and encourage you to see if it works for you too.

My guts tell me that this “floating” Venus Pentangle – anchored to turning-point biographical events rather than to technical aspects – has a future in our craft. Next time you have insomnia, give it a try. It’s easy – all you have to do is to remember some approximate dates in your own life and be able to add and subtract the number eight. 

This newsletter has been something of a ramble and the latter part has been a lot more personal than usual. I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride and that perhaps I’ve planted some seeds in a few of you – seeds that might sprout and help keep astrology growing in some new directions.

Meanwhile, let’s remember that the whole world is rebooting its relationship with Venus on August 13th. We’re planting a seed that’ll flower in 2031 – so, until then, remember: all you need is love. 

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