Venus goes Retrograde from Dec 21, 2013 until Jan 30, 2014.
Have you ever been stopped at a light or in a parking spot and all of a sudden you notice the cars beside you moving; but then you look up and realize, it’s not them who is moving, you have forgotten to put your foot on the brake and actually it’s you that is moving? Okay, maybe you need to be a manual transmission driver to have this experience, but basically this is what is happening with Venus Retrograde, which starts today. Venus looks like it is moving backwards, but in fact, it is the movement of the Earth and the distance of Venus that gives it the optical illusion like it is going backwards. Nonetheless, the experience still has an impact on our consciousness much like what happens when your car is rolling. We get a little disoriented and need to take some time to evaluate what is happening. Venus is about love and money, so Venus retrogrades will have us doing a reassessment on these topics.
Venus is doing its thing in Capricorn. With Venus in Capricorn, love is about money and status. We may fear rejection and for that reason we may try to control, project a good image or try to prove how worthy we are of love by accomplishing. On the financial front, Venus in Capricorn can be good for business, but again fears can send us into materialism and status seeking. With the retrograde, all of these issues will come up within our relationships for re-evaluation.
A couple of days ago, I was shopping and the salesman, sizing me up, realized that I was likely single, asked me if he could ask me a question about single women. “Sure,” I said. He asked why women these days only want men who have money. These days? Was this not an age-old problem? Somehow the two are always intimately intertwined and this is why I believe Venus represents both love and money. In the days of old, the man earned the money, the woman stayed home and without access to the financial power of earning her own money, of course she made sure her Love also had a well-lined pocket. But since the World Wars, which let’s face it, is really quite recent, women’s role in the workplace has completely and totally changed, so has her economic power and her dependence on men. Love is being redefined, but nobody seems to realize it. Men are confused about what women want and so are women!
My parents had an old eight-track tape player in the car when I was a kid, and my mother used to kill a Dennis Brown tape “money in my pocket, but I just can’t get no love”. I think this retrograde period will have us really assessing what we are building our love and commitment on. Women are singing about being independent women and men are singing about loving the independent woman. But if the currency of love is no longer tied to money, what is it tied to? Does love have a new motivator? This is the question for Venus Rx in Capricorn. The question the sales guy asked had clear cut reasons in the past. The fact that a woman wanted a man in the past for financial security was something that made him feel needed, secure and counted on. Now it just seems to make him feel used. The financial reasons for love have changed; but have we psychologically caught up? And has our relationship dynamics caught up? Why do men still feel women want them for money? And do women want their cake and eat it too?
Even the concept of economics seems to be changing. Business is not just about how much money you’ve made, but also how much impact you’ve had on the environment and on social good. In other words, how much love does your business seem to have? Is your business just about money and the bottom line? Venus Rx in Capricorn will also have us reassess our ideas of financial and economic currency. It will be particularly transformative for both love and money because as Venus started its shadow into the retrograde close to Pluto (the planet of transformation) in Capricorn and at the end of the retrograde cycle it will be right beside Pluto again before it moves forward. Also, Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, which has been linked to karmic situations, so we may find that we are working though some karma or what feels like it during this period.