The sun marks the season. We can tell it, we can sense it, all of us do. It’s something that’s intuitive to us. Libra begins with like a perfection in the state of balance and ends with a shift decidedly toward the dark.
We can sense this shift tangibly, even in the corporate world. By the end of the season, you’ll feel it energetically in your own projects at work, and team meetings take on a different quality. People look more inward, trying to find a sense of rest. The high energy of summer is over, and people are trying to figure out how to settle into a routine that will carry them through winter into spring. Oftentimes projects realign, reorient, reschedule, recalendar. People take stock of their backlogs.
You’re in a meeting with privileged information. There are layoffs coming for some of your friends, and you can’t tell them. You have to keep the secret, but you really want to get out there and gossip about it. That’s kind of like a negative example, but it could be a positive example: the boss announces the release of a fantastic product or service that you want to share, and you have too keep your mouth shut until the media blitz. That’s Mercury moving into Scorpio this Libra season: access to secrets, access to information, and not really being able to share those with others.
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The Last Wind
Mars is one of three personal planets on the move this Libra season. Mercury and Mars both make their moves in the first half of Libra: Mars shifting out of Cancer, a water sign, into Leo, a fire sign. That gives Mars more strength, a little bit of a kick, a little more drive. Kind of like the last wind. Some of the last summer energy might seem like it’s surging up before its gone. You might feel like getting out for the last of the outside activities, to see the last amount of sunlight before fall fully sets in. It’s like the zoomies at night, the way children get them, or my sister’s dog, or puppies.
I was watching Brandi Carlile at Stanford’s Frost Amphitheater. She talked about this being the end of her tour: an exhaustion that sets in, but right at the end, in the last week, a resurgence of energy comes in anyway, that’s kind of like Mars entering Leo during Libra season, a close to one kind of energy even as Mars picks up strength. You’ll feel it in your body and in your outlook toward your routines, your life, your activities.
The Sun Sets the Season
The personal planets carry the most consistently fluctuating influence on the quality of time: the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. Jupiter and Saturn move slowly enough that sometimes they don’t show a significant amount of change within a single month. Sometimes they do. Often it’s the personal planets, changing more frequently, that make the quality of time shift in noticeable ways.
The sun is the steady one. However long the sun takes to cross a sign is how long that zodiac month lasts, and the sun’s movement through each sign is an indicator and a measurement of the quality of light. Libra opens on the equinox, where the night and the day are again equal, and from there the sun proceeds to bring about a reduction in the light that’s available in the sky. You feel this reduction in your body, in a shift in the weather. It isn’t instantaneous. There’s still sort of a residual energy from the sun, but the shift starts here, and by the time Scorpio arrives, the scales will have tipped into the direction of darkness.
You’ll notice it if you’re paying attention. Something that maybe felt settled at the start of the season won’t feel the same by the end; it’ll have turned more internal. The garden shows it, and so does the kitchen, in the food you make and put up for later. Not everyone still cans, but if you do, this is when that starts to shift. It shows up on the laundry line too, if you hang wash out to dry, in how differently things dry.
The moon moves fastest of all of them, changing signs every couple of days. Month to month the pattern repeats in shape, though the specifics shift with whatever she’s connecting with along the way. I tend to cover the moon seperately, in her lunation cycle, from full moon to full moon, new moon to new moon, so I’ll park her here.
Mercury and the Secret It Doesn’t Want to Keep
Mercury governs Gemini, an air sign, and that’s its natural element: power and potency in air, an affinity with air through the movement of Mercury. Scorpio is water, and water tends to pull Mercury down and make it more introspective, a little more subdued, and that’s a quality Mercury struggles with a little bit. Mercury wants faster movement, and while movement is possible in water, its much slower. It’s like aqua ballet: dancers on a stage move fast through the air, but watch synchronized swimming at the Olympics and the movement through water is much slower. Mercury can’t move as quickly either.
There’s a piercing quality to Scorpio, the same one associated with Mars, a piercing quality like piercing secrets. Mercury likes secrets, but Mercury also likes to share secrets. Mercury’s not a holder of secrets. Often the mercurial qualities within you have to sit with your secrets much longer then you’d want to.
I’m saving Venus for last, because I think she’s maybe the one I want to focus on.
Venus and the Secret Worth Going Under For
Venus rules Libra, so with the sun in Libra, Venus rules the sun too. She’s already in Scorpio, going retrograde as an evening-star. Her retrograde motion starts turning her from an evening star into a morning star, and starting that process in Scorpio speaks to secrets again, bringing in the mercurial qualities we just talked about.
I’ve been writing several posts about secrets and esoteric knowledge, already drafted and being finalized, coming to Find Your Nova in the coming weeks. You can look forward to that.
When Venus submerges into Scorpio, these are occult secrets: secrets of the soul, secrets of time itself. Moving from direct motion into retrograde in Scorpio is a move toward inner discovery, an inner pathway of the spiritual self, looking for the inner qualities that feel nourishing and elusive. These are the secrets of Venus in Scorpio. Venus in Scorpio isn’t the megalomaniac, maniacal approach to power. It’s the power to uncover the inner parts of yourself that are restorative.
There’s a poison that comes with Scorpio, and Venus retrograde is about using that poison as medicine. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that phrase before: poison is medicine. But often medicine is poisonous. Antibiotics are toxic by their very nature. The right amount is medicine; too much is poison. Venus retrograde in Scorpio is about finding how to access the poison within you and within your life: anger, fear, ignorance, some of your deep personal toxins. Or you look out at your communities, your states, your nations, the online and real-world communities you’re in. What is the toxic zeitgeist? What’s filling it with anger, animosity, fear? What are people afraid of? What are people getting upset over? Those emotions, when they overtake you, can be a problem, but if you become aware of them, you can turn that energy inward: into your own behavior, into an analysis of who you are and why you do what you do, into how you contribute to that zeitgeist or work to mitigate it. Venus retrograde is moving into a pacification of the deeper, darker, inner poisons that you have within you.
Venus retrograde is associated with times like Ramadan, a time to fast, to go inward, and with the Christian tradition of Jesus in the wilderness. It’s an inwardly oriented period, one spent striving for that inner peace, and starting it in Scorpio turns that inner gaze on your own toxins, your own negativity.
You don’t want to let the negativity out, and you don’t want to turn it against yourself either. You want to take the energy that’s behind the negativity, not the negativity itself. That energy has a piercing, discerning quality, and you want to direct it inward, so you can bring about your own inner transformation and help bring peace and joy toward others.
By the time she moves back into her morning star phase, she’ll carry a significant amount of energetic power and qualities from this inner shift. It represents about 40 days: Venus retrograde, a stretch of time to spend with yourself, to pacify some of those deeper internal states.
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