You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board.
— Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions (from “People Get Ready”)
Venus blows a sweet sextile from Gemini to Uranus on its Aries ride shortly after 10:30 pm EDT Wednesday. The Venus-Aries sextile will close a tight cycle of aspects that follow the culmination of tomorrow’s Capricorn Full Moon. Besides Venus and Uranus, the round-robin of conversation will include Mercury and two centaur objects with a connection implied by name, Okyrhoe and Chariklo. The day-long sequence of alternating contacts concluding with the Venus-Uranus sextile symbolizes a message of collaboration that transcends its parts. We speak of nothing less than a genetic purpose for each of us in all of us, and a legacy of need for all of us in each of us.
Venus is in direct motion, on its third pass through Gemini’s heart. That is to say, Venus is in the echo (or ‘shadow’) phase following its retrograde. Wednesday’s sextile to Uranus connects the Venus retrograde cycle to the current continuum of Uranus-Pluto square aspects.
In a word, the subject matter of the Venus retrograde cycle has been connection. Since Venus entered its first echo phase (passing the point where it would eventually resume direct motion) on April 11, we have seen an astonishing series of historical and astrological events. On the astrology side, Venus led the highlights, passing across the Sun’s visage for the last time in this century while in the process of moving from one horizon to the other. A solar eclipse on May 20 looked for all the world like a hole in the Sun. The lunar eclipse that followed on June 3 felt like all the world suspended between proximity and infinity.
The Venus retrograde cycle has also borne witness to a heaping handful of major celestial objects changing direction (including the Sun, which stops moving north at its rising and setting and begins moving south at the Cancer solstice). Most auspiciously, Uranus and Pluto have recently crossed the line into a three year continuum of exact squares, which represents the inner circle of an era in the process of defining itself.