The Week Above - October 21st-28th 2018

The Week Above is a weekly astrological "weather report" detailing the major planetary configurations for the week ahead. All times given are in Eastern Time. There will be references to your birth chart and your Sun, Moon, and Rising signs throughout. If you aren't sure of what that means, check out Astrodienst for free online chart drawings, and Cups & Crowns for the basics of how to understand a drawn chart.

If you enjoy my writing and find it valuable, consider supporting me on Patreon. Future posts will feature horoscopes for all twelve signs if certain goals are met.

The Sun enters Scorpio - October 23rd

It’s officially Scorpio season.

Scorpio is the sign of the things kept hidden in the dark, the things most folks would rather avoid. Shame, fear, taboos, insecurities, skeletons in your closet, monsters under your bed, societally unacceptable forms of sexuality… All of it belongs to Scorpio.

It’s the perfect time for Halloween.

Venus has been in Scorpio for a little while now, and the Sun joins her this week, adding his expressive, bold voice to her subtle, insouciant one. It’s a masc-femme combo in a sign that has moments of combining masc and femme in odd ways.

It’s also a sign ruled by Mars, planet of aggression and war. But Scorpio approaches these things from behind, and gets at its enemies where they’re most sensitive and least expect it.

Therefore the ego expression and will to create this month are colored in ghoulish shades of black, orange, and purple, taking on the underworld and underbelly tones of the Scorpion during the Sun’s time there, lasting until November 22nd.

Expect your will to be seen in the world to take on a more martial, cunning, genderblended tone this month if that will to be seen is core to who you are. I’d recommend taking the Scorpion’s method to any fights you get into over your right to exist as a sovereign soul, and fight from the shadows until it’s safe to come out into the light.

It is notable that upon moving into Scorpio, the Sun immediately runs into an opposition with Uranus. Uranus provides an electric jolt, and a startled scorpion is prone to sting on instinct. Tread lightly among the vengeful, and expect stories in the news of sudden acts of retaliation against perceived threats.

This transit will affect you most if your Sun, Moon, or Ascendant is in Leo, or if you were born on the New Moon or at dawn; or if you are a performer or otherwise prone to being in the spotlight.

Full Moon in Taurus - October 24th

It is difficult to feel nurtured and held when the ground you stand on is unstable.

It is not easy to feel safe without a solid hand to hold.

Taurus moons are supposed to give us that stability, that earthiness, that nurturance. But this one is right up against Uranus, planet of sudden shocks to systems. It’s trying to find stability, but the earth is moving underneath it.

The Sun, whose opposition to the Moon makes her Full, is close to Venus, deep in the retrograde underworld. The love that we need to feel nurtured may have a bitter taste this moon.

So what do we do about it?

There is stability to be found in instability. There is medicine to be made from bitter herbs. There is love to be found in the unlikeliest of places, and indeed, this Full Moon will bring all sorts of things out from hiding, especially love you never knew was there before. Take a light into the back of the closet, and you may violently sneeze at the dust and cough from the cobwebs, but there’s a good chance your grandmother’s ring is hiding back there too.

So take heart that there is love to be found and love to be shown which never wound have come out from hiding if the moment wasn’t bringing things out of the dark.

Shake things up. Discover an unexpected self-care routine. Find comfort in feeling uncomfortable. Learn to dance on moving ground. It’s a paradox, but so are all the best truths about life.

This transit will affect us all, on some level or another, but particularly those whose Sun, Moon, or Rising sign is Scorpio, Taurus, or Cancer.

Venus Cazimi in Scorpio - October 26th

In her retrograde journey to the underworld, the center point, the darkest time, is as Venus comes to conjoin the Sun. And then, at the very center, the very Heart of the Sun, she burns bright and burns hot and burns with the Sacred Fire, the Queen of Heaven earning her crown.

Whatever themes have been coming up for you this month around love, worth, self-love, self-worth, relating, partnering, money, and desire, they reach an action point this week. No longer is it time to talk about it or process it. Now you have reached the moment of taking action on these issues. Change has gotta come. Change has been eager to come. And now, finally, is the moment when something finally gives, and you can move onward from here.

But first you gotta go deep, deal with the issue at hand, feel it in your bones, in your soul. Let this Long Halloween reach a climax. The days leading up to Halloween will involve cleaning up from the climax, and with November begins the time of basking in the afterglow.

So let yourself be transformed by love, by desire. Let yourself learn these most important lessons of the retrograde cycle.

It can only get more beautiful from here.

Venus Retrograde in Scorpio and Libra 2018: A Haunted Heart

The heart remembers.

The heart remembers the girl who kissed you in second grade. The heart remembers the boy who told you you weren’t pretty when you were twelve. The heart remembers every love and every crush, requited or not.

The heart carries these memories with it everywhere you go—of pain, love, ecstasy, grief, communion and abandonment. The heart knows things the mind has forgotten.

Sometimes this is a good thing: You remember moments of joy in times of sorrow and love in times of loneliness. Other times it is the opposite, and the heart becomes heavy with its burdens.

Your heart is full of ghosts.

On October 5th, 2018, Venus—planet of love, beauty, value, and worth—stations retrograde in the tropical sign of Scorpio.

She remains in the Scorpion’s subterranean waters until Halloween, when she returns to the sign of Libra, a much happier home for her.

Consider this a month-long Halloween for your heart.

Love is kind, love is warm, love is gentle. But love is often accompanied by pain, and that pain compounds and weakens when it is not dealt with appropriately. Venus’s retrograde through Scorpio will take us on a journey into the underworld of what we love and what we value, and remind us of what loves or once loved us. That can mean exes popping up out of the woodwork, or discovering a family photo album in the attic, or remembering why you stopped painting so vividly you have no choice but to pick up a canvas and brush once again.

When you deal with the darkness in your heart, when you acknowledge the pain and do what it takes to move through it to the other side, you find that it is full of light as well. And that by scraping out the encrusted justifications and coping narratives from around those wounds, you create a great deal of room for love and light and all that is beautiful and holy.

So don’t be afraid of the ghosts haunting your heart. We all have them. And when, instead of trying to banish them with holy water and banging of pots and pans, you offer them tea and conversation and help them find the solace to move on… You are likely to discover that the mysterious film on the mirrors has disappeared, and the furniture stops rearranging itself behind your back.

After All Hallows’ Eve things get much less spooky. Venus’s retrograde through Libra from October 31st until November 16th takes us out of the haunted mansion and into the temple of beauty where we may find ourselves better able to integrate the lessons of Venus’s time in Scorpio. We can find ourselves letting all the love and light in that there is, shocked by how much room we have for it in our hearts now that we’ve cleared out all the clutter.

November 16th, Venus stations direct in Libra, and the heart is moving forward from there, newly birthed and cleaned of all its gunk.

If you enjoy my writing and find it valuable, consider supporting me on Patreon. Between this posting and October 5th, I will be posting brief horoscopes for all twelves signs in a Patrons-only post, telling you what to expect from this time of Venus’s retrograde. I am also available for readings.