Venus square Ceres: Can you offer nourishment?

Today Venus enters Capricorn at 3:43 am EST. Venus is not at its most expressive in Capricorn, which is ruled by Saturn (making this yet another event with a strong Saturn signature this week). Love and related emotions tend to be rather guarded or reserved with this placement. Immediately upon ingressing Capricorn, however, this more self-contained Venus gets challenged.

Simplified chart section for Venus ingressing Capricorn, square Ceres in Libra (exact tomorrow). Also shown is Pluto in Capricorn, which Venus will conjoin next week; and Saturn, the Sun, lunar North Node and Mercury in Scorpio. View glyph key here.
Simplified chart section for Venus ingressing Capricorn, square Ceres in Libra (exact tomorrow). Also shown is Pluto in Cap, which Venus conjoins next week; and Saturn, the Sun, lunar North Node and Mercury in Scorpio. View glyph key here.

There’s another side to this, though — in Vedic astrology, Venus and Saturn are great friends, joined by their shared rulership of Libra. So Venus has a point of affinity with Capricorn.

As well, Venus is an earthy planet, also associated with Taurus. So with Venus in Capricorn, we may get the pretense of restraint or conservatism which conceals a wild side just below the surface.

The challenge comes from minor planet Ceres, which entered Libra Sunday. This puts Ceres (grain, agriculture, nourishment and all the emotional connotations thereof) on a mission of social and relational justice and balance, in a sign ruled by Venus.

Ceres is also about the emotional politics between mothers and daughters. These placements put Venus and Ceres into a square aspect with each other from the first degrees of cardinal signs: the Aries Point, where personal and political/collective issues intersect.

Consider this bit of news from yesterday’s Democracy Now! broadcast:

A leaked draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next report warns climate change could reduce crop production by 2 percent each decade for the rest of the century, driving up prices and plunging millions more into hunger and starvation. It is the first time the IPCC has issued a dire warning on global warming’s threat to the world’s food supply.

That is Ceres on the Aries Point via Libra in a nutshell: a warning that we each need to keep our collective food source (the Earth) foremost in our personal consciousness as a motivator to act in protecting it. Ceres in Libra seems to say, ‘If I get fed, everyone else needs to get fed, too.” It’s an ‘all for one and one for all’ kind of situation.

So what happens when Venus in Capricorn, brings a “fear of giving too much of oneself” (to quote Isabel Hickey) up against the imperative to make sure that all of us, in all our relationships, are fully nourished? Relationships need to be reciprocally nourishing, emotionally speaking, to be viable long-term. That asks us to be vulnerable and open, not walled off or unnecessarily cautious. A lot of people have been burned badly in this department, and feel an understandable need to protect themselves from more hurt.

In the context of the recent eclipses (which may have shaken some things loose or opened some doorways) and Mercury retrograde in Scorpio (reacquainting us with our sexual history) Venus square Ceres looks like a question (or a few):

Can you feel your own foundations and sense of balance enough not to be afraid to give of yourself (in healthy, balanced ways), and to express love and empathy? Can you receive the same when it’s offered?

Are you willing to put energy toward finding solutions for ‘shortages’, whether in terms of world food supplies, or love in your personal relationships? Are there similarities in your attitudes toward both?

If you’re not actually starving (for affection, for food, for emotional or literal nourishment) are you willing to share what you have with those who are in some way? Even if you feel you’re lacking, you may discover how much you have by offering yourself to others.

Venus will station retrograde in Capricorn starting Dec. 21 (the solstice) for about a month and a half. Perhaps she has something to teach us about using solid structures to guide, but not necessarily limit, love.

Additional research/writing by Eric Francis

4 thoughts on “Venus square Ceres: Can you offer nourishment?”

  1. wandering_yeti, I second your remarks about the necessary future of food. I am a gardener who is contemplating eventually taking the vegetarian path, both for ethical reasons & health reasons. I read the entire label of a package of “chicken cutlets” (quick ‘n’ easy dinner!) & it was disgusting – & that’s just the very long list that the “manufacturer” was required by law to list!

    Real food is hard to come by these days, unless we grow it or know a safe, honest organic source. You are more than right that we don’t need all that corn! It’s in almost everything, especially as high-fructose syrup, & it’s making people sick & obese. I agree – if we stay on that trajectory, then what some call “near term extinction” is a real probability.

    Talking of gardening, teaching it, sharing produce & seeds, are among the most useful aspects of nourishment that I can offer others.

  2. That brings me to the food level: the current estimates don’t account for permaculture. Yes, if we keep doing things the hard way, the way we know as agriculture then we’re fucked. If we do it the energy efficient way, well no we can’t have as much corn, but who needs all this corn anyway? Again if we pine for the outlandishly unhealthy diets we’ve become used to we’ll go extinct, but if we learn to cultivate food forests again we might just make it to the next level of our evolution. That’s my hypothesis anyway. It also seems to be what I’m getting from the tree folk.

  3. Guide but not limit: exactly the struggle I’ve been in since the turn of the century when my prog. Venus back paddled into Capricorn. My internal judgments piled up on top of my inspiration and I stopped composing music and stopped surrendering to love. I’ve seen pictures of goats in impossibly steep positions on cliffs. Reminds me of my relationship to all things Venus since then. No money, no woman, no music.

    No worries…as prog Venus stopped on my nadir I began practicing again, even though I was living in a tent and had lost my sparkling home studio. No worries: a wanderer can carry a guitar, the instrument par excellence of vagabonds for centuries. The whole retro path of Venus in Capricorn in my 2ndary prog level felt like a bunch of false starts. Goats can eat anything, munching on the stubby plants on cliff faces, munching the blackberry vines whether they have berries on them or not: maybe it would have gone faster with fewer false starts if I’d just focused on guitar. I made the mistake of trying to bring back the Aquarian feast of gadgets and over and over again I got stuck in a quagmire until the station direct when I got over it and just focused on what was available at hand. So what if all I have is a guitar: that’s enough, and in fact it’s not only enough it’s the necessary simplification for me to focus my craft on a small enough point to cultivate a breakthrough. A goat pining for sweet berries in the dark of winter might starve to death where a goat unafraid of simple food might just make it through to see the Spring.

  4. Well said Amanda! Having two daughters in their budding young
    Adulthood, I so want to give them a crash course in life!(my oldest 26,my youngest 21)
    Both young mothers of two little boys that I would go to the ends
    Of the earth to protect. Its a big bad world we live in and could only pray
    All those hours put in as their mother,will come to fruition. Its not easy
    To let go and let God…( He that began a good work)

    Peace,

    Patricia Louise Mettler

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