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.
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.