On December 19, 2021, shortly before the Winter Solstice, Venus turns retrograde in Capricorn and moves backward until January 29, 2022. The planet Venus is named after the goddess of love and beauty. Mythologist Karl Kerényi says about Venus, as she emerged from the ocean, “From her very beginning she was awarded charge and office, amongst both gods and men, over the following: the whispering of maidens, laughter and hoaxes, sweet lust, love, and loving kindness.” Likewise, in astrology Venus has her Joy in the 5th House of love, playfulness, creativity, sex, and romance.
Capricorn is the serious, goal-oriented sign of responsibility, duty, obligation, and authority. Capricorn sits opposite the home-oriented sign of Cancer, and as such Capricorn takes us away from home, up and out into the world and into society. Symbolized by the goat climbing to the top of the mountain, one step at a time, Capricorn is resonant with the “upward mobility” of the structures of our society. Sometimes our professional and other obligations take us quite far from our home base.
When moving through Capricorn, Venus’ more playful, bubbly, and frothy nature can get a bit serious and heavy-handed. It’s not necessarily an easy combination. In Capricorn, Venus can feel a bit like Atlas, carrying the world – the symbolism, perhaps, of the huge shoulder pads of the 1980s, when women began climbing to higher positions in the professional world and in modern society. Responsibility before fun, work before play. Venus’ true nature gets a little shut out when she’s over-burdened by the railroad schedules and tight timekeeping of modern society. Keep going, says Capricorn, stick to the plan and you’ll make it to the top.
Going Back to the Sea
When a planet moves retrograde, it slows down and stops completely before beginning its backward motion. Venus retrograde in Capricorn is a time to slow down, stop, and look back, something the goat is naturally designed to do atop the rocky mountains of its tough terrain.
Curiously, if we look back to the original symbol of Capricorn, we see that it’s not actually a goat climbing a mountain at all, but rather a mer-goat, a goat with the tail of a fish, a sea creature, Capricorn the sea-goat. And if we look back to Venus’ origins, she is the goddess who emerges from the sea. Venus and Capricorn have something in common after all, and it’s pretty extraordinary.
“Mer” means ocean, or sea. From “mer” we get words like merge (to dip in, immerse, dive under), merit (worthiness, value, excellence), and mermaid (maid of the sea). The mermaid is the mythic siren, luring mortals out to the sea, and has been an iconic image on tavern signs since the Renaissance. The modern world merges Venus and Capricorn rather seamlessly by tagging Happy Hour to the tail-end of each workday.
The mer-goat comes from a time when time was not a straight line moving forward, and life was not a linear, frantic race to the top. Time was understood within the greater context of Eternity, and the past was understood as a foundation underneath us as much as something behind us. We see this latter notion in the image of Janus, the two-headed god of time who looks both forward and backward simultaneously. From Janus we get January, the Capricorn time when “last year” and “next year” sit back-to-back. Endings and beginnings exist side-by-side as cycles. One year ends, and another year begins. We can look at both at the same time. Capricorn, the time of the sea-goat, is a time of renewal.
Walt Disney had Venus in Capricorn (at 29 degrees, the tail-end of the sign, no less) and made his career by dipping into the imagination of fairy tales. His company released The Little Mermaid on November 17, 1989, when Venus, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were all conjunct in Capricorn. Interestingly, “...The Little Mermaid is given credit for breathing life back into the art of Disney animated feature films after a string of critical or commercial failures produced by Disney that dated back to the early 1970s. It also marked the start of the era known as the Disney Renaissance.” It was the first time Disney had animated a fairy tale since Sleeping Beauty in 1959. Returning to its roots, Disney found renewal (the meaning of “renaissance”). The sea that washes things away is the same sea that brings things back.
Frank Sinatra also had Venus in Capricorn, and when his career was in serious decline he was cast in the movie From Here to Eternity, which began the climb of his career again to new heights. Though he is not pictured in its iconic image of two lovers passionately making love as waves wash ashore all around them, the image speaks for itself.
Venus brings things together, and Venus in Capricorn suggests that what you love and what you do best go together, and that there is great merit (and great beauty) in this connection. It’s what might be called a “calling.” When Venus is retrograde in Capricorn, it’s like Venus is being called back to the sea as a reminder of this connection. Rather than being caught up in the external rules, roles, and responsibilities of society, there is always a deeper dream shimmering within each of us. The sea-goat keeps its tail in that ocean of dreams, and the path it climbs in life stays true to that dream. As bizarre as it might sound, during this Venus retrograde in Capricorn your greatest advocate might just be the voice of a little mermaid that beckons to be part of your world.
Venus-Pluto in Capricorn – Too Long You’ve Wandered in Winter
This Venus retrograde brings the goddess of love and beauty into conjunction with Pluto, lord of the Underworld. They first meet on December 11 (prior to the retrograde), again on December 25 (during the retrograde – Merry Christmas!), and finally on March 3, 2022 (weeks after turning direct).
Venus-Pluto moves the realm of relationships and love to extremes, brimming with the kind of over-sized, often-untidy passions that are difficult to discuss over a balanced brunch but find more authentic expression in the intense dramas of music, theatre, opera, and poetry. What can we glean from the creative imagination of Venus-Pluto people?
Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the Venus-Pluto musical The Phantom of the Opera, descending into the catacombs underneath a Paris opera house to explore the extremes of obsession, dejection, and rejection of love. Near the end of the show, Christine and the Phantom sing in a tense, soaring, no-holds-barred duet: “Past the point of no return, no going back now – our passion play has now at last begun! Past all thought of right or wrong, one final question: How long should we two wait before we’re one?”
Neil Tennant, as lead singer of Pet Shop Boys, born with Venus-Pluto in Leo, wrote the song “Love is a Catastrophe” when love had clearly hit the rockiest of rock bottoms: “...Love is a catastrophe! Look what it’s done to me: brought me down here so low, stranded, nowhere to go. Who issued the instruction for this mad act of destruction? An end to equilibrium. Fate laughs: Look what we’ve done to him!”
And the extraordinary poet Sandra Cisneros, in her “One Last Poem for Richard,” looks back on a past relationship: “Richard, it’s Christmas Eve again and old ghosts come back home. / I’m sitting by the Christmas tree / wondering where did we go wrong … / Okay, we didn’t work, and all / memories to tell the truth aren’t good.” Coming to terms with the past, she reflects, “Someday we’ll forget that great Brazil disaster. / I forget the reason, but I loved you once, / remember?”
While Venus-Pluto can push and pull love to its outermost edges – all-too-familiar tensions two years into a catastrophic global pandemic that has strained and stretched the best of us past the point of no return – the winter solstice theme of renewal remains more potent than ever. With Venus retrograding through the deepest depths and through the darkest dark of Capricorn at this time of year, it’s worth noting that catastrophe is never the whole story. When we find ourselves at a stopping point (aka “stationing”), when we can sink no lower, when a profound limit has been reached, it’s the point where catastrophe can reunite with its own partner, epistrophe.
See, if a catastrophe is, by definition, the downturn (“cata”) of events in the human world, an epistrophe is the upturn or re-turn (“epi”) of those events, those real-world disasters, back to the realm of the gods, a return to the archetypal realm, a return to imagination. Venus retrograde in Capricorn conjunct Pluto presents this point of epistrophe – like Disney dipping into mermaid myths, or like Janus reminding us that endings are also beginnings. Times of darkness are times of renewal, times for re-imagining what is possible, like we glimpse as Sandra Cisneros concludes her one last poem for Richard: “...Maybe in this season, drunk and sentimental, I’m willing to admit a part of me, crazed and kamikaze, ripe for anarchy, loves still.”
