Venus Transits the Sun

 An actual 2004 photo of Venus transiting the Sun

photo credit: Jan Herold

I got yet another email today about the upcoming Venus-Sun transit. People seem to be very into it.

Is it because NASA's gotten all excited about it?

LINK to NASA: “The 2012 Transit of Venus”

Or is it yet another manifestation of Venus retrograde?

This being the third or fourth email I've gotten asking about this, I thought I’d post a little info on the subject.

First of all, "shockingly"…NASA is absolutely, positively right – Venus will indeed transit the Sun on June 5th. (And yes, I’m being sarcastic about that ‘shockingly’ thing. NASA is pretty much the holy grail on such subjects.)(Or at least the temple mount.)

But astrology isn’t astronomy. So astrologers are going to see this whole event differently. And as we start into that 'differently' concept, the biggest part of same would involve the ‘orb of influence.’

What's an 'orb of influence'? Way back when (just after BCE turned into CE), the one and only Claudius Ptolemy was a Greek living in Egypt. Egypt being one of the hotbeds of astrology in that day and age, Ptolemy got into the swing of Things Astral and in time established a set of concepts about how far apart celestial bodies could be and still be said to have an 'influence' on each other's energetics.

 A Baroque artist's rendering of Claudius Ptolemaeus,

 known to us as Ptolemy (born 90 CE, died c. 168 CE)

This orb concept applies to this Venus-transiting-the-Sun thing precisely because Venus will enter the orb of the Sun’s influence on June 2nd and will leave it on June 9th, perfecting the conjunction (as NASA says) on June 5th.

In case you're wondering, yes - I know this blog is posting a few days in advance. Part one, I was asked by a number of readers to post in advance of astro-events so you-all could be ready to use the information 'on the day.'

Ask and ye shall receive! That makes perfect sense to me, and I'm doing what I can to help out there.

Part two! We're heading towards a June 4th lunar eclipse - in which this Venus transit is a backdrop. The next post will be on Neptune's station (which is also on the 4th) ...and then will come the lunar eclipse post.

In other words, it's a busy time and it seems logical to post this Venus/Sun thing first.
  

Getting back to the meat of the thing, let's remember that all this is happening with Venus in retrograde. So from the astrological perspective, no matter what else gets said about this Sun/Venus transit, it’s about us – the internal 'us-dealing with-us' stuff.

This is how I put it to an email friend: ‘This is not a major transit; particularly as Venus is retrograde it is unlikely this will be about something happening in your world. Yet to the extent that what we learn about the world is valuable, to that extent it's a meaningful occurrence.’

In fact, there’s a lot of statistical astro-study which has been done in particular on planets in conjunction with the Sun. Some use the rather poetic if dastardly sounding phrase ‘burned by the Sun’ in reference to same and there’s a special term (Kazimi) which refers to planets within 1.5 degrees of the Sun.

Before you panic, it’s not all drastic and bad news here. Planets which are Kazimi (conjunctions to the Sun) tend to exhibit a ‘fusion of influences’ which can be very good or not good, depending on how you use them. (The tendencies for that we’d read through sign and house placement, etcetera, etcetera.) What is lacking however, is a sense of perspective.

Think of it this way: the Sun represents consciousness. Therefore anything too close to our consciousness is not something we can consciously have any real perspective on. It’s just ‘part of us’ and our nature.

That’s what this Venus conjunction to the Sun will act like. So with that said, the real challenges here come from Venus being retrograde and the modifying factors hanging around in the zodiacal neighborhood at the time of this transit.

The retrograde part I’ve summarized above. To that I’d add the fact that some of us are feeling this Venus retrograde far more personally than others. Are you one of them? That we’d see (astrologically) by where this retrograde falls in your chart. Venus went retrograde at 23 Gemini. It will end it’s retrograde (on June 27th) at 7 Gemini. Anyone whose chart emphasizes either of these two degrees is really going to be ‘feeling’ this retrograde – and those with a natal chart which emphasizes both ends of this retrograde spectrum are really going to be going through something - though it doesn’t have to be all bad, to be sure. (And I say that as someone with both ends of the retrograde active in my chart.)

Yes, you will feel ‘cut off’ from some thing(s). But if you turn from what you want to what you can do about putting yourself in a better place in your own life, this becomes an empowering time. That's what the retrograde is for. Life gives us moments and (yes, months) when life so doesn't work that we're forced to think things over. Or when things become sufficiently unappealing that we take a step back and consider what to do.

Okay…enough about that – except to add that if you’re a Sun sign Gemini, Taurus or Libra (Taurus and Libra being signs ruled by Venus), this retrograde has your name on it. Maybe in bas relief. You’re really, really, really likely to think it’s about ‘them’ and the world. “It” (your life) isn’t about ‘them’ or the world…it’s about how you live your life and what you make of your abilities, talents and personal values.

So as Venus comes into this period of solar transitizing, whassup asteroidally? Or TNO-ishly? Or planetarilly? Even fixed star-ishly?

Venus comes into standard orb with the Sun at 12 Gemini and Venus at 17 Gemini (retrograde) with Venus conjunct Rigel and just having opposed Ixion.

Ah yes, my buddy Ixion. The ‘how can I undo myself by doing it wrong yet again?’ Plutino.

 The fall of Ixion by Cornelius van Haerlem

What this says is that June 1st will have a ‘here we go again’ note to it…or that we will be considering how many times we’ve done the same thing and not gotten the result we want or need. Ixion in this equation says we really, REALLY don’t want to think that it’s about something we’re doing or how we’re doing it or our out-and-out lack of humility and sense of boundaries, ethics and such…but with Venus retrograde, that would be the point of recognition.

No, this doesn’t mean you’re all wrong. What it means is that you have some tweaking to do, and that the first thing on your metaphysical list like as not has to do with not thinking of yourself as deserving the right to do, have or be ‘that’ (or be in, or have that situation, that title, that leeway, that attitude…something!).

If you want to catch up on the Ixion Thing, here’s a link to an entire article posted here at astroPPM on the subject:

LINK TO ARTICLE ON IXION

Fixed star Rigel is known as ‘the Teacher.’ That Venus comes into conjunction with Rigel (in Gemini) just after opposing Ixion is the very essence of learning (Rigel) a lesson (Gemini) about what will and won’t work for us (Venus retrograde). With the Sun at 12 Gemini, to that we add a quality of ‘so hopeful’ or ‘so disappointed’ which is particularly suggestive of having hurried to do something which didn’t pan out as you wanted it to because you didn’t go step-by-step-by-step, minding all the rules, dotting all the ‘I’s and crossing all the ‘t’s.

That there’s a lunar eclipse on June 4th will tend to exacerbate everything going on. The eclipse will have its own effects (and get it’s own post!) but the emotive ‘multiplicity’ factor here – for many – is likely to feel burdensome in a ‘what now?’ and ‘don’t I have enough to contend with?’ sort of way.

The Venus-Sun conjunction occurs at 15 Gemini with TNO Chaos in attendance and Rigel still at 17 Gemini, Tantalus at 10 Gemini and Mars getting into the act, squaring from 16 Virgo conjunct (trumpets, please…) Medea.

What this amounts to is what may be a (TNO Chaos) endless set of choices: we can work towards (Mars) what we want or our desired aims, and to the extent that we maintain our moral perspectives (Medea in Virgo) all will be okay although…we do have to be aware of ourselves and our effect on people (Sun/Venus-Tantalus-Rigel). Ignorance on our part (Rigel) or any tendency to do what we want because we think we can get away with it (Tantalus) is going to prove poisonous and activate Medea’s ‘self-undoing’ quotient.

 Medea by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys (1868)

As a degree, 15 Gemini brings in issues of sensitivity and over-stimulation. Poets and musicians and people like that have natural creative outlets for this kind of energy, but the rest of us? Not so much. This sensitivity being universal, you may manifest it, those you deal with may be all touchy and squicky (that would be ‘ikky’ plus ‘squeamish’ put together: squicky)…or the situation may provoke reactions.

This transit ends on June 9th with the Sun and Venus pulling away from each other as Venus retrogrades into 13 Gemini (conjunct Tantalus) as the Sun heads through 18 Gemini.

The combination here is ‘too smart for your own good’…in particular when it comes to someone or something you love, or trying to reconcile multiple things you want to think you value equally.

Where errors have been made, those errors show up now. It’s not that everything’s lost…it’s just that your may have outsmarted yourself.

Fortunately for you, there’s still more Venus retrograde to come. Between now and July 15 (which happens to be the date Mercury will go retrograde) you have an opportunity to work out with yourself what really matters to you…or not.

 

Whatever happens, the whole of this astrological amalgam is all about learning from what happens.

And again – it does also depend on where this falls in your personal natal chart. My friend who wrote me this morning as Atropos (endings) natally influencing this degree of transiting conjunction. So I said this to him… ‘it suggest your stopping (Atropos) and learn better (Rigel) about something. Or perhaps you will end something (or how you have been doing something) because you have learned something. Or you merely may have figured out (learned) that your efforts are going nowhere and cease putting energy in that given direction.’

Learning to ‘conjugate’ in astrology from the me to you to situation to taking in to feeling about others is a skill each of us develops over time as we come to recognize that while it’s our life…we are also important to the whole of life. And that metaphysically, what happens to us in life is all about what we need to learn.

And that, my friends is a really important thing to think about, especially when you get to really big questions like ‘why do bad things happen to good people?’