By Len Wallick
Venus is up to speed with direct apparent motion of just over a degree a day. Tomorrow it enters Sagittarius. That has been a long time coming. It is consistent with this: the lesser benefic has been a trail blazer and trend setter since at least the 2010 Vernal Equinox. This ingress echoes and anticipates some of the dominant trends in our current astrology.
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Venus first made its way into Scorpio, the immediately previous sign, as the second week of September was getting under way. That’s a long time ago, a quarter of a year. It was still the so-called Evening Star in the west at sunset. It had not yet attained its greatest brilliancy for the tenure in that part of the sky. It was a month away from a second conjunction with Mars, the first having been in Libra in August, concurrent with the greatest eastern elongation of 2010. Jupiter had just returned to Pisces and Pluto was still in retrograde.
Normally the bright one would have made its way through nearly four signs since the Scorpio ingress. Alas, this planet was due for a change of pace. Shortly after the second Mars conjunction, Venus stationed for a rare retrograde of its own that revisited Libra, one of the two signs it rules. That was about the time the cardinal T-square began to unwind as Saturn (also in Libra, where it is exalted) exceeded the degree of the lunar North node in Capricorn.
So it was that Venus, as it exists inside us, began an inward journey to balance and ruminate on the long and merry chase of Mars and the auspicious. This time corresponded with its disappearance from the western sky and a transit across the face of the Sun before reappearing, astonishingly large and bright, just before dawn late last year. Not that it has ever been out of touch. That would be out of character. Indeed, even in the anaretic chrysalis of its final stages of the transformational transit through Scorpio, it was on the spot to trine the last of three Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions. It thus lent a lubricating fluidity to what could easily have been a disruptive aspect of epic proportions.