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I am teaching a course for Synchronicity University on Inanna and the Venus cycle. Inanna, if you don’t know, is an ancient Sumerian goddess and is also the Sumerian name for the planet Venus. I’m going to go through the cultural components of the Inanna myth, and we’ll be using image, music and story narative in the first class.
In the second class, we’ll talk about the Venus cycle from a synodic perspective, as Venus goes through her cycle with the Sun; in the third, the archetypal myth of descent and what that narrative of descent means across cultures around the world; and in the fourth, modern renditions of the descent narrative as they play out in literature and in cinema. In the fifth class, we’ll talk about several deceased people who are public and well known, and how their Venus placements can be understood through this narrative of descent. Hopefully, if you come to the class, you’ll leave with an understanding of how to synthesize all this information about the myth and the culture and the art into a narrative around how Venus works in your own chart.
Right now Venus is in retrograde, and the class talks about the retrograde cycle and its mythological connection, and how we can interpret it in our lives. It’s very timely. You may have heard about it on Chani Nicholas’s podcast, where she recently covered the cycle of Inanna, and there’s a lot of this information in the zeitgeist right now.
I’ve been working on the class for a while. It is a culmination of probably three or four years of work, collecting information, gathering images, snippets of things, and putting them together into some writing, some poetry, some into this class. I’m excited to be delivering it finally, and I hope you’ll join me.
You can see my full interview with Nadiya Shah on the Synchronicity WebTV channel, and an excerpt of it on Nadiya’s channel. You can check us out on Synchronicity University’s Instagram and on my Instagram. If you go to my website, ryan-hunt.com, and sign up for my newsletter, you’ll get information on what’s coming up.
In the sky
Adapted from my Craft of Moon video
We have the Moon coming into a superior square with the Sun. The superior square in traditional astrology is known as the aspect of decimation. In modern language, we might think of that as being about destruction, but anciently it was more about extraction. How do you extract something from the land? What is the Moon trying to extract from the Sun? The Sun does not like to have things extracted from it, so this is a place of tension.
This is where the solar principles of identity, how we assert ourselves in the world, our aspirations and our goals, what we think of as our life path, are going to be in tension with our resources: our money and our health, our clothes and our food, and the way that we communicate. The Moon is a great communicator, and how do we comunicate with these things? This happens every month, so you might notice something similar when the Moon moves into her third quarter.
But what is significant this time around is the co-presence of Mars and Jupiter and the south node, all in Leo, while Venus and Mercury are both in retrograde. Opposite the Moon in Leo is Pluto in Aquarius. The Moon is making this opposition with Pluto and the square with the Sun, connecting Mars and Jupiter and Venus on her way back to her new moon conjunction with the Sun.
This is happening right before the U.S. election, and we’ve had several elections around the world. There’s tension in the world and in the air around ideals and aspirations for individuals, collectives of people, communities, countries, and nations in response to their own resources. Mars and Jupiter are involved in this dynamic, expecially in the U.S., because the U.S. chart with Sagittarius rising puts Scorpio in the 12th house, where it’s dealing with secrets and the hidden enemy. In that chart, the Moon and Mars and Jupiter are in the 9th house of law, philosophy, education, idealism, religion and spirituality. We see this tension with these different parts of our social construct in the United States and in the world at large, where other elections have taken place in Brazil and Israel. Brazil’s runoff on Oct. 25 returned Lula for a fourth term, and his opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, is seeking to annul the result. Israel voted on Oct. 27, with exit polls showing no clear winner and official results expected later this week.
One of the things I noticed is that there seems to be, on social media and on Threads and Instagram and all over the place, this zietgeist of angst and of criticism and critiquing. Sometimes I’ve even seen flamboyant displays of negativity. I don’t know if we’re at the peak of it, but the cycle I’m looking at now started in July, and it’s been ramping up and ramping up. I think it probably does have to do with the political cycle. But it also has to do with the cycle of light and how light is perceived in the world around us.
I’m not trying to say bad things are filling the world. The tension is taking place in the world, and we can see it in our own lives. Our resources individually, our pocketbooks, are being hit right now, our health is under attack by all kinds of disease or illness. Wealth and money, prosperity. How we have our resources around our home.
Sometimes our physical surroundings feel at odds with the way we are trying to navigate ourselves in the world. It can feel like this body is a burden. Our clothes, our car: we have to clean things all the time. We have to organize and sort through stuff. All of this tangable stuff of life has to get dealt with, and sometimes it feels like it’s in the way.
When we experience this tension in our lives between our resources and our life purpose, if we are aware of it, if we come into it in a place of knowing, then we can meet the situation with equanimity, with a mind that allows us to understand these oppositional forces and what these square forces are trying to teach us. This is an opportunity for us to learn how we connect with ourselves and how we express ourselves in the world in a way that helps to mitigate and to releive the forces of tension. It’s up to each one of us individually to determine how we do that and to meet the challenges of our individual lives in a way that allows us to connect with others in a positive way.
Venus is the planet of beauty and aesthetics, yes. She’s also the planet of love and affection, yes. She’s also the planet of values and morals and ideals. With Venus in retrograde, this is a time for us to be looking inward at all those parts of ourselves, reflecting on how our physical presence in the world is manifested, how our life-path is being manifested, and figuring out how we bring them out into the world, how we magnetize what we’re looking for to enter into our lives and teach us what we need to learn.
The fact that Venus is in retrograde during this Moon square to the Sun, with Mars and Jupiter engaged there and moving toward their own squares to the Sun later this month, makes this a big moment for us to find ways to bring our Mars energy, connect it with our Venus energy, and find our desire and find ways to go out and manifest what we’re trying to accomplish.
Venus will finish her retrograde in the middle of November and come out of her retrograde shadow in the middle of December. Mars goes into retrograde in January. By the time Mars comes out of retrograde early next year, at the start of April, the world will be ready to experience what you have to bring to it. You will be ready to experience what the world is going to deliver to you. This is a time for us all to prepare for that.
That’s the big thing that’s coming up, so if you’re interested, please jump on over to Synchronicity University and sign up for the Inanna and the Venus cycle class. It starts this coming Wednesday, so there’s still time to get in on that. The class meets live on Zoom for five Wednesdays at 1 p.m. Pacific (4 p.m. Eastern), through Wednesday, Dec. 2. You can also sign up for my newsletter at ryan-hunt.com.
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