Venus Morning Star

Art by Jake Badderley

Though Venus may have been out of sight since she slipped back across the border into Pisces, her retrograde influence has been working steadily below ground. In the darkest recesses of our hearts and its deepest hidden chambers, tendrils like acrid smoke seeping into the locked boxes stacked behind the thumping.

Revelation doesn't always arrive like lightning. Sometimes it creeps in once it's already dark, awareness dawning like a spectre whose presence raises hairs on the back of our necks. Dawning realisation trickles like icy water through lives and livers, teeth grit or gnash or chatter. Truth has roared out of the well within and her echo won't stop ringing, shifting the frequency of life.

Venus in the liquid cocoon of her underworld is a potent alchemist. This portion of her retrograde, as she took her leave and disappeared from our evening skies entirely just after her cazimi and before the Aries eclipse shook our worlds, is the fertile darkness at its centre. Values shift and reform. Realisation reckons with the silence. Love reasserts her due.

Now Venus brings the light, returning from the far west to make morning and tow in the dawn. As close as she can whisper to us in her orbit, a new star point etched in the codex she traces through our lives. Now concluding the previous nineteen month cycle, she will pause for your epiphany as the phoenix in her outstretched hand still sputters to life.

In Aries she demanded reciprocity and served notice to all that could not return her favour. In Pisces stitching heart to spirit anew, threads shimmering with reckoning and soul deep revolution. Don't look away from what the light reveals now, everywhere you are brave enough to look. A week and change until she re-emerges from retrograde and nothing will ever be the same.

The phoenix must burn to emerge
~ Janet Fitch


Words c. Kerrie Basha 2025