This article first appeared Friday, April 3, 2009 as part of Planet Waves' weekly publication, available to subscribers.
By ERIC FRANCIS
Today, Venus retrograde is in an exact square to Pluto, inching her way toward the Aries Point. The square was exact at 6:21 am ET and because Venus is slow and powerful in the sky, it's within exact orb as you read this.
Venus is visible above Earth's moon, which is illuminated solely by light reflected from Earth. Because of Venus' nearness to Earth and the way its clouds reflect sunlight, it appears to be the brightest planet in the night sky.
I've been working up to this aspect in previous columns all year, and the Venus retrograde series of events are described in the most precise astrological and psychological detail in the Next World Stories editions for Taurus and Libra (the signs with which Venus is most closely associated).
Let's consider the theory of the square for a moment. Remember that the square aspect is about inner tension that the psyche is trying to resolve and build on. In natal astrology, typically when we're younger, squares create a kind of split personality. We will jump from one side of the square to the other, living it out in pieces. This can feel like a deep inner division that cannot be reconciled, but it will keep demanding our attention.
As we grow and grow older, if things are going well, we'll gradually integrate the two sides of the energy dynamic, which results in an increasingly mature, consistent person. If things are not going well, some people will camp out in one side of the square, in denial of a crucial, deeply influential side of their nature. This other, neglected side will erupt from time to time (usually when under transit) and can cause a lot of problems. We've all met these folks, we meet them every day and we may even live with one.
With a transiting square, we all go through a similar process. Venus square Pluto is particularly strong because it happens three times in close proximity: Feb. 6, 2009 (with Venus direct), April 3, 2009 (with Venus retrograde) and May 2, 2009 (with Venus direct).
When a pattern like this takes place, nearby standing points in our chart will also be activated repeatedly, and from two directions (from each side of the square). Many people can seem to be going through the same kind of change, crisis or growth process at the same time.
From Aries and from Capricorn
Let's take the current Venus-Pluto square one side at a time, starting with Venus retrograde in Aries. Here, she is learning to center on herself, and also encountering the fact that this is about the struggle of getting to a point of emotional independence. I am working from the theory that this transit is primarily about what women learn growing up, and what it becomes later in life. I recognize that this topic is clouded with controversy, delusion and deception, not to mention what many mothers (inadvertently or intentionally) taught and teach their daughters about the nature of love, sex and relationships. It also pertains to what boys are taught about girls and women, but no matter how enlightened someone is, it's nearly impossible to contradict the power of another person's belief system.
Over and over again, by family and by the media, the message is given to girls that you are not complete unless you have a man. Worse yet, one is not socially acceptable unless this is the primary goal of their life.
First wave, second wave, and third wave feminism, Suicide Girls and every tattoo parlor in Toledo, Ohio notwithstanding, this message is still given to girls seemingly endlessly. Email me and tell me that things are different now. I will email you back and say this is what I have observed from twenty years of reading tarot and astrology for women, confronting this very crisis, from what I can see primarily turns up as a crisis of self-esteem or not feeling good enough.
Girls are still given the dichotomy that you can either have a relationship or you can have a life. We are once again seeing this drummed into millions of young girls in the form of Hannah Montana: The Movie. This is Cinderella, in modern terms and in grand style, and I really don't think that many girls are going to miss this movie. Is anyone really looking at the effects of these messages on girls? I can think of one professor who is. Nobody is revealing the end of this new cinematic masterpiece, but the entire structure of the plot is the division against oneself and one's goals; the man versus the career; personhood put on the sacrificial altar to relationship. Even the premise of the plot is that Miley, in order to have a musical career, has to be 'two different people' (Miley and Hannah). Sh e has to split herself in half, and cannot be a whole person, known as such.
We might well question whether the male ego could withstand the notion that one's female partner could be talented, famous and wealthy, but that is another conversation.
So, back to our astrology. The current square dials in all of these values, which are symbolized by retrograde Venus in Aries. It has an inner searching quality: for the true feelings associated with an autonomous sense of identity, or any sense of identity at all.
I'm not speaking here in metaphysical or cosmic terms, which is to say, I'm not arguing that the soul is ever separate from its source, or that there is not something authentic about this thing we call the ego. I'm speaking about the personality shell that we live in like a hermit crab, often unaware that this is what we're doing: inhabiting something that we identify with very closely, but which is not strictly who we are. Venus can also represent the emotional body, the subtle intellectual dimension and the desire nature. Venus can represent any set of values with which we identify.
The retrograde emphasizes tuning into the receptive nature of this inner reality, that is, how we are informed by our environments, and take on what we observe; and also, due to the retrograde, seeking something from the past. Hold that thought: I'll come back to it.
Pluto in Capricorn
Let's go to the other side of the square.
Pluto, the one we know from astrology, deepens everything, and puts us into contact with what we tend to deny. Pluto's subject matter runs a fairly consistent agenda from enforced change to transformational processes; soul-type growth; shadow material such as fear; anything hormonal; and death in its many forms, including transitioning from one major personality phase to another.
On one level, Pluto in Capricorn (2008-2024) is about blowing through the ludicrous 'traditions' we live with in our society. Many of those are expressions of stoic, stodgy, joyless and blatantly boring Christian and capitalist values.
Remember that Christianity was foisted upon society along with the murder of the sacred Vodan trees, the slaughter of Mother God, the spilling of an ocean of human blood and the sacrifice of thousands of women as alleged witches, along with many of their cats. After that a real measure of docility could be counted on, but if you ask me it's never really been complacent.
We don't know exactly what this New Order replaced, but pre-Christian rituals such as Beltane suggest strongly that there was a more equal emphasis on maleness and femaleness as collaborative, complimentary energies and as attributes of nature.
It is the core of that female self that we are now in a process of dialing in and attempting to recover and explore. This can be lonely; the poignancy of emotional birthing can often discover itself as alone first. But here is the really interesting part: The Aries Point (the first degree of Aries) is involved. As individual and private as this experience feels, it's widespread, collective and ultimately a public phenomenon. The Aries Point is that place where every private reality adds up to what we all share and must contend with, and where collective movements of society influence the consciousness of an individual. This is not theory. All you have to do is look.
If you want to live in a bubble and think you don't matter and be convinced that nothing actually affects you and that you don't have any power, this is precisely the thing to deny. But good luck with Pluto in Capricorn right there.
Combine this with a square to Venus retrograde and we get (potentially, under a best case scenario) a profoundly introverted process of shedding emotional attachments that clutter one's sense of identity or make it directly inaccessible to oneself. This could lead nicely to an awakening that individuation is a process of building the confidence to take part in society in the ways that you want.
Under this astrology, you're going to find out who you are, at least one or two more layers in. Who you are may have something to do with who you were before you forgot. In women, this would be who you were before puberty, when you had a true modicum of emotional autonomy and a sense of yourself as a distinct entity in the universe.
For many reasons, most eloquently covered by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, that autonomy is systematically stripped away at puberty and another female entity is transformed into: we call that a 'woman'. This is a social and cultural construction, not a biological entity. In De Beauvoir's view, the concept 'woman' is different than 'adult female person'. The girl who had many dreams of being an independent person still exists, though she is down there somewhere deep and must be located, recovered, made friends with and nurtured back into conscious existence if we want to know her; if she is to do anything but rage. Often that independent girl rages while the woman who surrounds her must endure so much that she was not planning on.
To Die, or to Mature?
What blocks the maturing process are beliefs, attachments and obligations. We all know about these; what the world does not like to acknowledge consciously is that women are given, take on or are saddled with many obligations that are (on one level) basically impossible to change, mostly because they lack the cooperation of other people who would make that change possible. Many of these situations can only be addressed and worked with. Many are cemented in specifically by inner attachments that create the problem. These attachments seem external (i.e., to a man or the need for men; to 'succeed in the career world' instead of doing what you want to do with your life) but they are actually internal in nature. They are so closely connected to the core operating system that it seems that to change them would literally be 'to die' and that is in a sense true: one version of the personality would have to die, Pluto-style, and metamorphose into someth ing else.
Venus retrograde square Pluto is inviting us all to do just that. Have you noticed? Like, have you noticed how deep into core self it's been relatively easy to go this week? I know it's not just me because I'm in numerous email correspondences with people saying basically the same thing. The true beauty of this transit emerges as we move from this seemingly private, interior space of questioning and breakthrough into the recognition that we are standing on common territory.
That common territory begins with the body: the biological level of reality. By that, I mean recognizing that female is first and foremost a biological entity; and that as it extends into personality, that includes the relationship we have with our bodies. In many girls and women, that relationship is basically hateful, painful and essentially guilty. Have we weighed the cost of nearly all pleasure arriving with some seemingly mandatory attachment to guilt or shame?
Hand-in-glove with this is the relationship women have to seeking their sense of self-grounding in connection not to themselves but to a man and often struggling profoundly to do it any other way. This never would have occurred to me, had I not learned it from women.
If we're going to get anywhere, we need to start with biology, we need to start with sex, and we need to start with educating young people. I call upon parents, first, to take this up as Dharma Yoga.
I think that young women, when they get around the time of the Bat Mitzvah (age 13, when a conservative, patriarchal culture begins to consider them women) is that they be given a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and a very good vibrator. This would be a rite of passage. With this would come a real conversation with an older woman who is not vaguely embarrassed or attached to one viewpoint (it could be the mother, it could be someone else) who explains the basics over a phase of time until the concepts and facts are internalized.
I have heard a stunning number of horror stories involving girls and birth control pills. Nobody seems to be talking about primary and backup methods of pregnancy prevention any more. Girls need to be taught how to use condoms, and told where to find them. The conversation needs to include applying them to bananas until they are good at it, and this thing health workers try to teach in Africa, called condom negotiation.
Boys need to be taught many things about themselves and about women, but the first and most important is that they are 100% responsible for what happens to their sperm.