In the Shadow of Venus

"Accept no compromise in which death plays a part."

-- A Course in Miracles (Manual for Teachers)

Dear Friend and Reader:

Venus stations retrograde in Scorpio on Friday afternoon. Scorpio is where Venus is what you might call uncomfortable, in the sign opposite one that she rules (Taurus); in a sign ruled by Mars; yet also in a feminine sign associated with surrender, transformation, death and sexuality.

Scorpio is the home of all things unmentionable at the Thanksgiving dinner table. What Venus represents in this place of the zodiac is a discussion not found in most places in the world except for where high tantric teaching is welcome, and there are not many. However, it sometimes finds its way into popular culture as death showing up as a woman, and an unnamed phobia of women that is found in many cultures, including our own.

One version of the Sri Yantra, a tantric mandala. The symbolism is all life and all of existence, including time and space, emerging from the feminine. One of the objectives of tantric practice is to turn awareness toward the source of existence, rather than our usual position of having our backs to it.

Within the tantric frame of reference, woman is the giver of life and therefore the one who takes it away. What we think of as the sacred feminine is the pool from which life emerges, and therefore into which it yields itself. Yet consider the daunting responsibility that would come with accepting this. And consider the potential for the abuse of power if it is denied, not kept in full awareness, or expressed in an unloving or toxic form.

Such is the root of our social and political woes. Imagine if every discussion of the role, power, and place of women began with the statement, "All life emerges from the female body. All of our mothers gave up something in order for us to live."

Yet this is unacknowledged; it's the biggest open secret in the world. And as something that is not admitted, not recognized, not ritualized, and surely not celebrated, it is part of the repressed world of what Jung called shadow material.

Into the Realm of Shadows

With any retrograde planet, we find our way to the shadow realm: what is forgotten, lurking in the recesses of the past (personal, ancestral and collective); what is not openly spoken of; what is expressed in a way that is 'unacceptable' or inappropriate; what is misunderstood; and what is consciously repressed.

In a natal chart, retrograde planets can represent a form of mastery that must be recovered, though it might seem problematic or a dubious gift until it's claimed fully and reabsorbed into the psyche.

With all of these possibilities, we are into some deep territory when Venus is retrograde in Scorpio. There is so much that women are not told, or intentionally deceived about, so much spoken in whispers, particularly the most basic facts of biology. In our era, those are not so much points of concealed knowledge as of intentionally propagated ignorance, or what is avoided because of its seemingly uncomfortable or embarrassing nature.

I have said before that in my perspective, the essence of female power is biological. We think of it as being social or political, though I think that to have some connection to reality, and any effective expression, the connection must go deeper.

Painting by Alex Gray.

No matter what social revolts, revolutions, reforms, Supreme Court decisions or constitutional amendments may occur, we will still live in a world where women gestate all of us.

There are, of course, possible technological alternatives to that. In Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, women and men are equal, and babies are made in gestation factories. Is that a world you would want to live in?

Were we to imagine an alternative universe where women did not have the all-powerful role of woman as giver of life, where would that lead us? Were we to have a society where all responsibility for nursing and raising children were equally divided, how would life be?

More realistically (and more immediately available), how would it feel to fully acknowledge the existential fact of woman as creator? To never take it for granted? How would it feel to be in deeper contact with the biological fact of the uterus -- the first home we all occupied?

It would seem, at this time in history, that most of the basic facts of the female reproductive system have been vanquished to the land of shadows. During my sex education class at John Dewey High School, we were all versed in the many phases of the menstrual cycle. Is this taught today? Raise your hand if you recognize the term corpus luteum.

We have also pushed female desire into the realm of shadows. If you listen to the current discussion in feminist circles, it would seem that only men are interested in sex, to the point where any might steal it at any time -- and that, in theory, is the only way that sex will ever happen. There is a distortion involved here.

My observation is that the culture's obsession with transgression and consent is in part associated with a scrim thrown over female desire, which is no longer supposed to exist. In the contemporary school of gender studies, in theory anyway, no woman is interested in sex, or at least not with men; it is her job only to resist the supposedly uncontrolled, animalistic male desire nature. While clearly not true, we hear this by implication over and over again. In this environment, asking a woman on a date can be construed as sexual predation; yet there is no discussion, that I have heard, of appropriate etiquette; of what conduct would be considered wholesome and welcome.

We all know that female desire exists, though when something is denied or pushed below the surface, for whatever reason, it enters the realm of shadows. And when something is relegated to the shadow-realm, it tends to grow angry and revolt in toxic ways.

What if we were to have a full airing-out of the truth of female desire, what it feels like, how we feel about it, and how we relate to it? And what if we were to discover the true range of what men really want? We might find many more meeting places, if only as a result of being real with one another.

The Question of Self-Esteem

Photo from Book of Blue, New York sessions, by Eric Francis.

Venus is an important indicator of self-esteem. In Scorpio, we place this into the context of a relationship and the sharing of resources. Often, self-esteem is measured in terms of our perceived value to others.

The fundamental question here is how you feel about yourself. What is the value you place on your existence? I mean this as much in the deep dark of night when you might be alone, as during the day when you are actively serving a purpose, or some other time when you may have company.

What do you believe is the source of your value? The environment of Scorpio could cast this question many ways: economic value, intellectual value, emotional value, sexual value, companionship value -- or something much closer to the core of who you are.

I've suggested before that self-esteem is the single most important issue we face as individuals, and which aggregates into a collective situation that is holding back the progress of all of society. Imagine if we could all feel better about ourselves, love ourselves more, and be in close harmony with the fact of our existence.

Yet what kind of a process would it take to get us there? Right now, we're all under constant pressure to suppress our self-doubts, as much as to hide our true light under a bushel.

Betty Dodson: Out of the Shadows

In the midst of Second Wave feminism, circa 1970, a Kansas-born artist named Betty Dodson emerged as the prophetess of masturbation. She proposed to all of us that your most important relationship is to yourself, including your most meaningful and necessary sexual relationship. All other relationships emerge from this primal (as in primary) territory of self-to-self relating. My take is that this was the single most revolutionary concept of the sexual revolution (and perhaps the only one).

Page from the Kinsey Report on female sexuality. This was revolutionary in several respects. First, from the standpoint of a scientist, he informs the world that female masturbation is normal and harmless. He also heralds the truth that women orgasm from masturbation 95% of the time. He also suggests that the psychological problems in relationships may be what makes it difficult for women to experience sexual satisfaction -- not some kind of "Freudian" issue.

I translate it to: without self-acceptance, can we really accept others? Without selflove, can we truly love others?

Today we live in a world that is obsessed with partnering and marriage. Millennials are making the divorce rate plunge. The only gay and lesbian issues of our era have been the right to marry and the right to serve in the military. TV is overrun with ads for Match.com, eHarmony, OurTime, and countless other services promising the ultimate romance. There is a cultural obsession with finding "the one."

On the other end of the spectrum is hookup culture, exemplified in Tinder and Grindr. My observation is that these are offering forms of sex that are essentially substituting for meaningful masturbation, which is a subject we don't hear much about.

Masturbation, as a topic in our culture, has been pushed into the shadows as a synonym for porn. In that sense, it could hardly be experienced as a path to self-awareness, self-relating or self-awakening. There is a projection screen involved.

I was looking through my copy of the Kinsey Report on female sexuality. For whatever statistics are worth, I learned that even in 1953, women reported that they experienced orgasm from masturbation 95% of the time -- more than any other form of sex.

I have (to my amusement) been ridiculed for my idea that masturbation is the most feminist form of sex. I once got into a lively conversation with the storied radical feminist Carol Hanisch, of Redstockings fame (author of the phrase, "The personal is political") when I proposed this idea. And I have had my share of discussions with Vagina Monologues aficionadas, who don't seem to like my theory that masturbation is the opposite of rape. What I mean by that is, particularly for men, self-sex involves fully taking possession of all of their feelings, addressing them inwardly, and not projecting them onto women.

I would propose that self-sexuality in all forms has, in our time, been relegated to the realm of shadow Venus. And it's going to be something we need to reclaim if we want to take possession of our sexual consciousness and begin to unravel the web our society seems to be caught in.

One important aspect of this is that masturbation remains the seat of sexual guilt; it's like the dustbin where we sweep all of our reticence, ambivalence, body shame and -- yes -- desire. I have pondered for years why exactly there is a taboo around masturbation. The best I can come up with is that it's the only form of entirely non-reproductive, pleasure-centered, absolutely free, obligation-free and psychically free (you can imagine anyone and anything you want) form of sexuality. As such, it's a threat to the marriage economy.

This is a sample page from the first edition of Betty Dodson's essay that became the bestseller Sex for One. You can read the full essay here.

It's also a pathway to emotional and creative freedom. Imagine how difficult it would be to manipulate and control people who were orgasmic -- a topic developed in the early 20th century by Dr. Wilhelm Reich.

Selfsex is the place where you can have no inhibitions and no consequences, such as pregnancy, divorce, STIs: it is entirely sex for its own sake. And if you admit to it, you admit to much else. That, and there is a world of nuance within the self-to-self relationship that I think we could all benefit from airing out in some form of open discussion. We might, for example, discover the vast common ground on which all sexes, genders and sexual orientations stand.

The Road to Androgyny

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin creates a fictional world where most people are ambisexual -- they can manifest as either sex when the time comes to reproduce. The author intended this as an experiment in subtracting from society all the usual issues of gender and seeing what was left.

How would you feel if, suddenly, everyone was androgynous and there was no polarity between the sexes? That's not quite the world we live in, though it would seem that many forces are pushing things in that direction.

This includes existing in an environment of endocrine disrupting chemicals, which tend to feminize men (reduced sperm counts, reduced penis size, testicular atrophy) and sicken women (endometriosis, breast cancer, ovarian cancer).

These chemicals are in every scrap of plastic, every bite of food and every breath of air, down to straws and stirrers. There are many ubiquitous (omnipresent) factors in our physical environment that are scrambling all of our natural hormonal and even sensory signals.

Several years ago, a study published in the journal Human Reproduction determined that there is a correlation between hormonal contraceptive use and interference with sense of smell, which is important in navigating the sexual realm and choosing appropriate sex partners. The same study noted that libido level is determined in both sexes by the presence of free testosterone, the presumably male sex hormone.

Because most of these endocrine-disrupting chemicals are "feminizing," they interfere with testosterone and may be messing with the desire nature of every person on the planet. Given the statistics on sexless marriages, the apparent global reduction of desire may not just be about stress; it could be a biological situation influenced by synthetic chemicals.

Scorpio and Death

Scorpio is the sign of both reproduction and mortality. It is now understood by evolutionary biologists that sexual reproduction and individual mortality are rooted in the same genetic scripting. In other words, species that reproduce sexually also die. You might say that sex is the reward for mortality. I cover that field in this article. We cannot really consider anything involving Scorpio without considering that it's the realm of both sex and death.

In esoteric studies, the concept of death is synonymous with the concept of change. We could also count sex as one of the most important agents of change in all of human experience. This genetic association with change and mortality might power all of the primal fear and negativity associated with sexuality.

In the 1940s, Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris designed their Death card, which depicts the double helix of DNA and humanity traveling down the spiral. The image of "death" is depicted in black, not the usual white you would expect to see used to illustrate a skeleton. The deck was finally published in 1968, 20+ years after its completion.

Without change, progress is impossible, and the resistance to change, progress and the mere consideration of death are the same thing.

It's fair to say that most people avoid the topic of death, to the point of rarely if ever talking about it, thinking about it, planning for it, or seeking some true, personal understanding. Typically, the only time there are actual confrontations are when it's right in our face.

Besides that, death is usually relegated to the realm of unspeakable inner fear of the unknown. The only palliative is religion, and it's not an especially honest or helpful one. Many cultures have a yearly ritual honoring both death and the ancestors.

Cultures with nature-based religion also celebrate Beltane at the opposite time of year. This is the celebration of fertility and eroticism as a way of assuring abundance. Yet we know that nature-based religions are not looked upon favorably by this thing we call patriarchy, and it seems time to have that discussion.

Giving sex and death a home in our awareness, and in the yearly cycle of life, would be an awakening. It is my observation that a significant part of the sexual and also financial crises of our society are rooted in struggles with both.

We might come up with a thousand reasons why we are all unequal, and why some people are seemingly more powerful, though we all face the same fate, and we all live on Earth with limited time. Were we to admit that fact, we might want to have more fun while we're here.

Venus retrograde in Scorpio begins Friday. I propose that this transit will bring up more questions than it does answers, though questions are an excellent place to begin to gain an understanding of our situation. The deepest of those questions will focus on self-awareness.

In this spirit, the first things to ask about Venus retrograde involve what you have not said or not acknowledged within your closest partnerships. Perhaps make a list. The first step here would be to admit them to yourself before you bring them into a conversation.

With love,

Beneath the Waves and Back: Venus Stations Retrograde

By Amanda Painter

On Friday, at 3:04 pm EDT (19:04:14 UTC), Venus stations retrograde in Scorpio. We're in one of those odd years when we get a series of 'personal planet' retrogrades in a row, sometimes overlapping each other. I think these years tend to have a distinct feel to them; I don't know about you, but a significant chunk of 2018 has felt a little bit like limbo, or like one long phase of inner processing, and it looks like that might continue almost through the end of the year.

Playa Brava, Culebra, Puerto Rico. Photo by Amanda Painter.

Mercury's three yearly retrogrades is a pretty familiar pattern. But this year, Mercury's second retrograde overlapped with the summer's Mars retrograde. And then later this fall, several hours after Venus stations direct on Nov. 16, Mercury will station retrograde the same day.

I mention this not to freak out or depress anybody, but rather so you can get oriented with an eye toward continued introspection. Yes, you will have to continue taking necessary action in your life; you might be in the process of making big changes and choices; exciting opportunities could come your way, as might frustrating challenges that you'll need to address.

As I understand it, these retrogrades are not about treading water so much as they are about seeking new levels of self-understanding, or reviewing what got you where you are so you can plot an informed course forward.

Yes, there are certain precautions and guidelines -- such as avoiding unnecessary large purchases while Mercury is retrograde, or not assuming that the new lover you hook up with during a Venus retrograde is 'The One'. But that's not the same as being too afraid to do what needs to be done.

So what's unique about the chart for Venus stationing retrograde tomorrow? For one thing, Venus will change apparent direction in close conjunction with a hypothetical point called Poseidon (the Greek version of Neptune; associated with enlightenment and illumination) and with the asteroid Persephone (the goddess brought to the underworld by Pluto to be his wife, resulting in the seasons as she makes her annual journey above ground and then back down again).

Right off the bat, we have a beautiful image of the inward journey of Venus through the emotional, sexual waters of Scorpio as being one of illuminating the depths of past relationships. It's not about reliving anything; rather, it's about shining a light beneath the waves from the safety of the present. No matter what comes up for you over the next few weeks and no matter who crosses your path, it's entirely up to you how you engage with it (or not) and what you learn from it. It could be as simple as, "Oh yeah -- I remember that; thank Goddess I'm in a better place now," or even, "There was a lot that was good in that relationship; I'd like to consciously manifest some of those qualities again."

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