Venus/Pluto On: Love

In honor of the approaching square between Venus & Pluto, here is the crux of about 90% of the issues that Venus/Pluto peeps (Pluto in Libra generation, pay attention!) typically encounter in partnerships:

People with this energy signature present in their nativity (and it can come in many different forms – Venus in Scorpio, Pluto in Libra, Venus in aspect to Pluto, Venus in the 8th House, Pluto in the 7th House) tend to attract power struggles in relationships. This happens because deep down individuals with this energetic “stamp” often feel threatened by a loss of control in relationships and do not yet possess the insight to see that real intimacy entails placing total trust in your partner; thus making oneself scary-vulnerable and “naked” in every sense of the word.

Frequently this may be the result of some kind of trauma attached to the word “love”; perhaps on an instinctual level we’ve had reason not to feel safe enough to metaphorically “disrobe” like this because trust was violated somewhere along the way. So we then become determined to always make sure we have the upper hand/ace up our sleeve/dagger in our boot that will keep us from being totally disempowered in the event that things go bad. Consequently what can happen in such instances is a subconscious attraction toward relationships where we’re not equally matched with a partner, because on a superficial level our psyche thinks this will allow us to stay in power.

Now it doesn’t always manifest this way; sometimes we’re forced to confront this “power differential” theme in other ways. And the reverse can certainly be true where we may be magnetized toward relationships where we tend to give our power away to a Significant Other and become submissive rather than dominant. But unless we look deeper and leave no internal stone unturned in understanding the propensity for this kind of dynamic and healing it, eventually one or both of the parties comes to resent this and the relationship sours; resulting in a negative feedback loop that affirms our suspicions regarding vulnerability and validates a subconscious desire to gain or keep control/power. In situations where there has been a major trust violation that deeply affected our ability to “expose & disclose”, it can be scary for the psyche to feel like it risks being subsumed by another via intimacy.

But the Hi-Fi version of Venus/Pluto love is about viewing relationships on a more psychological level so we can become truly empowered. Every relationship, no matter how bad, puts us directly in contact with our own “Shadow” one way or the other via involvement with a Significant Other so we can heal any dysfunction within that leads to be attracted to partnerships with built-in power differentials. The x-ray vision this energetic combination affords one when it comes love and partnership is second to none – once we let our eyes adjust to the darkness, we can see the layered subtext going on behind the scenes to get to the bottom of the issue(s). It’s a complex process and there are hidden entanglements to tease out, but Venus/Pluto natives come factory-wired with invisible illuminated mining helmets precisely for this kind of job.

In healing, what we might aim for in the future is to be intimidated by a partner in a *good* way. I don’t mean creeped out, LOL – that kind of thing happens all the time when you’re a Venus/Pluto person. But finding someone who puts us in our un-comfort zone in a positive sense; who has gone just as deep (or deeper) into themselves and mined their own love life just as intensely for insights, self-healing, and personal transformation to gain profound acumen. This energy signature is about learning – on a soul-level – how to figure out the balance of power in close intimate relationships; neither hoarding it nor giving it all away. The trick is we have to share it.

03/19/2018

Venus In Taurus Trines Pluto In Capricorn

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It’s time to fertilize the roses; both literally & metaphorically! We have a lush Earth trine on our hands between Venus in Taurus and Pluto in Capricorn at the moment (perfecting on June 24th), and as a result many of us may be seeing green over the next few days. This energy is just perfect for magnetizing money your way – if you’re looking to invest, secure a loan or financial backing, or enter into any kind of “merger and acquisition” endeavor, consider this astro your green light! One thing we do need to be cautious of with this planetary alignment is not to flex the plastic on a spending spree, though – this vibe can make it easy to rack up debt on things like fine fashions, beauty treatments, or pretty much anything, really.

If you need a little energetic help drawing things to you on the material plane, augmenting your fiscal intent with help from the plant & mineral kingdoms in particular is the thing to do now – prosperity herbs like basil or mint in your wallet coupled with abundance stones like jade or peridot can help. If you’re kitchen witching, seeing as how it’s peak strawberry season in my part of the world, now would be a good time to prepare foods featuring this fruit paired up with real vanilla bean (the sticky black seed pod as opposed to commercial extracts). Once you’ve scraped the seeds out of the bean, simply toss the husk into your sugar jar/bowl and use the “marinated” crystals to subtly scent/flavor a rose petal or rose hip herbal tea – there’s nothing quite like ingesting your magick, is there?

In other areas, Venus in Taurus trine Pluto in Capricorn facilitates the hooking up of “power players” for mutual pleasure and/or profit – perhaps even both. Invest in each other because this is the kind of thing where together the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts; the true essence of “synergy”. Collaborate and pool resources, as this can facilitate an enriching union where both parties become key influencers & establish a prosperous and enduring legacy.

If you’re feeling tempted to energetically help this process along, I cannot emphasize enough that Step #1 is to always start out with an open, heart-centered, free-will based intention whenever it involves others. Intent to align with a partner for the above purposes is all fine and good so long as we state this must be in accordance with the Highest Good of All and let The Universe figure out the “who” and the “when” part – that’s when the magick happens; when we relinquish the prospect of total control and trust. You can design a ritual for this purpose and prepare a mojo bag or sachet to carry with you to help attract this connection – plants like rose, apple, cherry, avocado, peach, geranium, and daisy along with cardamom, mandrake, vanilla bean, damiana, orris root, and passion flower do the job nicely while stones such as magnetite, rose quartz, and malachite can also aid. Perhaps if the goal involves a business alliance, consider adding one of the aforementioned prosperity stones to your mojo bag.

06/21/2017

Venus In Taurus Trine Pluto In Capricorn

For those moments (i.e. NOW) when the astro has a modern-day “Orpheus & Eurydice” kind of feel and you need an appropriate melody: U2’s “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”

“All my life, I worshiped her
Her golden voice, her beauty’s beat
How she made us feel
How she made me real
And the ground beneath her feet
And the ground beneath her feet

And now I can’t be sure of anything
Black is white, and cold is heat
For what I worshiped stole my love away
It was the ground beneath her feet
It was the ground beneath her feet

Go lightly down your darkened way
Go lightly underground
I’ll be down there in another day
I won’t rest until you’re found…”

06/20/2017

Venus In Aries Square Pluto In Capricorn, Part 2

Building upon my last post regarding Venus in Aries square Pluto in Capricorn,

When you’re wondering what the counterpart male ”voice” of this energy might sound like and you get an answer in the form of another song:

 

“Come break me down
Bury me, bury me
I am finished with you

Look in my eyes
You’re killing me, killing me
All I wanted was you

I tried to be someone else
But nothing seemed to change
I know now, this is who I really am inside.
Finally found myself
Fighting for a chance…”

 

I am forever and always saying that ultimately we are our own lowest common denominator in relationships. Sometimes it takes the breakdown of a union to strip it all bare and put us in touch with our core Self, the Shadow within, and what it is that we truly want out of a partner/partnership. Nothing gives us potent clarity surrounding the Good, Bad, and the Ugly of our love nature quite like having to face ourselves in the mirror of relationship. Power/control dynamics, possessiveness, jealousy…if we don’t like what we see reflected back, it’s time to nut up, do something about it, and dig down deep to heal/transform the heart and provide a more psychologically constructive underpinning.

Sometimes we are tempted to simply kill time in a defunct, non-compatible relationship because underneath we are afraid to face devastation (whether this be material, psychological, etc). Over time, this eats away at a union from the inside – when we stay wrongly matched with someone *period* or for the particular place we are at in our psychological development, emptiness can set in during this long, slow, steady process of deterioration. This includes partnerships that may have had a lot of initial “spark” but that in the longer-term had little actual compatibility – hot sex is a poor stand-in for real intimacy. But when Venus in Aries squares Pluto, this provides  the impulse and the bravery to break new relationship ground – when we hit that “stick a fork in it; it’s done” point in a union, a post-mortem autopsy is always useful. Strip it all down and look at the roots – what was the “seed” that bore this “fruit”?

05/24/2017

Venus In Aries Square Pluto in Capricorn

NB: The literary voice I’ve adopted for this particular post is pointedly edgy – apologies in advance if you were looking for something fluffier and less gritty, but it’s important that I set the tone correctly in order to convey an accurate portrayal of a particular facet of this energy. Let’s set the stage then, shall we? Music please, maestro!


“Go on take everything, take everything, I want you to!
Go on take everything, take everything, I dare you to!

I told you from the start just how this would end;
When I get what I want, then I’ll never want it again…”

Venus in Aries squaring Pluto in Capricorn gives me the sense of a contentious divorce; people fighting over who gets what while pathologically trying to cling to tattered remnants of material security. Personally, I favor the Courtney Love approach above, as in “Go ahead and have it all” – this is a Spartan Venus we’re dealing with and as such sometimes the best “fuck you” isn’t hitting them in the wallet but proactively deciding for our own inner peace we don’t want the energy attached to their money or their things. It’s a “Get out of my life and take your shit with you!” kind of vibe; a purgative influence rather than one that chooses prolonged, messy, complicated (financial/material) entanglement.

Within the astrological community Venus/Pluto is all too often given the bad rap of being a “gold digger” or for being “vindictive in a divorce”. While this *can* be true in its Lo-Fi capacity, the higher functioning version wants nothing at all to do with “dirty money” or physical possessions that have any kind of bad energy attached to them and would much rather just do without. In an ugly relationship situation, the best cut Venus/Pluto can make is one that is as clean and virtuous as possible – nobody does a coup de grâce better than Hi-Fi Venus/Pluto. It’s a shame that in an astrological sense we so seldom see this pairing being given balanced credit for the kindness and fairness that it can also convey when dealing with endings and loss, and divorce is always a loss even in the best of circumstances. With Venus currently in Aries (the sign of Venus’s detriment), granted this will considerably less graceful than it would otherwise be, so in this particular instance the Courtney Love treatment does seem much more apropos.

05/23/2017

Venus, Inverted

In a moment of pure Venus Retrograde synchronicity, I recently heard about a new dating app that is turning traditional matchmaking on its head: Hater.  The basic premise is that it matches you with a partner based upon things you both can’t stand – its logo even features a little upside-down heart. How’s THAT for some Retrograde Venus vibes?!

I think this is an app that would probably most appeal to people with a strong Venus/Pluto or Venus/Mars energy signature, as these peeps generally don’t do milquetoast and like their partners ardent for better or worse.  The capacity to bond over mutual dislike for something/someone seems to be a baseline function of both energies, albeit with some very notable differences in expression.  Venus also does not function in typical “lovey-dovey” ways when wired into either of these energies; consider that she is in her detriment in Aries (Mars) and Scorpio (Pluto).

I can foresee this app being either really good or really bad – there’s not much room for in-between here, IMO.  The bad side: It can potentially turn the prospective relationship into a cesspool of negativity that winds up degrading into a bitchfest.  The basic principle of Venus is “like attracts like” – if this is allowed to go very low-vibration, it can certainly have the capacity to be draining for one or both parties.  If we want people to meet us with energy we like, wouldn’t it make more sense to bring our best to the table instead of our worst, then? Of course, this can also be quickly remedied as the app is intended just for making that initial connection.

The good: If you both have a strong aversion to the same types of things, well, there’s really not much to fight about, is there?   An app like this could weed out a lot of dealbreakers for people early on, and less conflict can have the ability to correlate to more harmony.

The other thing I am hoping is that it sticks to more meaningful questions as the major screeners, for example a “hate” on “Trump” or “Kids” getting a much higher point value than a “hate” on “Sleeping with a lot of pillows” (an actual metric).  Besides, I actually *like* sleeping with lots of pillows – it works out great if I were matched with a partner who only wants one; more for me!   😀

04/13/2017

Being Venus/Pluto

phoenixheartOne of the more difficult facets, I think, of being a Venus/Pluto native has to be the fact that there are so many layers to our love nature. A person or relationship that once suited us during a particular point in our emotional/psychological/spiritual development will often need to be molted over the course of our lives as our level of self-awareness intensifies and we gain insight into the very core of our love nature. As this happens, it can frequently mean that we have to let go of others, as love and loss are intrinsically linked with this pairing. This is the “curse” of Plutonic self-awareness, and even as we gain inner illumination it can make relationships incredibly difficult at times…especially when they have grown stagnant.

It is always sad whenever we love someone and they can’t or don’t want to develop a deeper connection, or practice the same level of insight into their inner workings to heal dysfunctional patterns of relating. But the only one we ever have control over is ourselves, and so we must honor where a loved one is at even as we grieve having to leave them behind while we move forward alone. Such is life with Pluto; its journeys often require isolation as we descend to the deepest reaches of our soul in order to heal and transform.

When the alternative means staying stuck in a non-functional union, it is so important to realize when we have indeed reached a relationship’s “expiration date”. Some simply don’t want to immerse themselves into a deeper level of relating and deal with all the intricacies this entails. Some are uncomfortable with the self-awareness that makes true intimacy possible in a relationship, because this would mean having to look at their shadow. Not everyone necessarily has the stomach for this, and this is something I’ve historically had a very difficult time relating to/accepting on a personal level – if there has been one constant in my life (a laughable concept if you only knew my history or my chart, LOL) it has been an unquenchable thirst to try and better myself and to transform all the psychological lead that I started out with in life into gold. Plutonians are all alchemists at their core, after all – this is the magick we possess. We’re happy to share it with you, but you have to be willing and able to get down to our level and become similarly enriched by all the psychological uncovering that happens during the process of relating.

09/20/2016

Venus/Pluto Thought Of The Day

We are only as beautiful as we are in our ugliest moments.

The true measure of beauty is nothing external; it is something found deep within our core and is determined by how gracefully and lovingly we handle ourselves when in the midst of messy, screwed-up scenarios where it would otherwise be all too easy to revert to a more base level of operating.  Can we override our more dysfunctional responses and connect with the love in our hearts by displaying softness and kindness in these kinds of situations?  Will we bring Beauty to bear when faced with The Beast?  This is the mark of true loveliness on a soul-level – everything else is superficial.

VenusPlutoSymbols

05/16/2016

Venus/Pluto Word Of The Day

Let’s have a little fun as a retrograding Venus in Leo contacts Pluto, shall we? For your entertainment, the definition of a Plutonic term from my own personal lexicon –

Necromance (n.):

1) A Lo-Fi expression of Venus/Pluto energy that results in a love affair with (metaphorical) Dead Things, including but not limited to:

A) romantic liaisons that have long past their expiration dates but that are permitted to linger on in some half-dead state due to an unwillingness to let go, stick a fork in it, and call it “done”.

OR

B) relationships that have long ago ended but that have, for some ungodly reason, been resurrected when they should have just been allowed to Rest In Peace.

Indulging a necromance can lead to necrophilia; a.k.a. the (possibly renewed) consummation of a sexual relationship with an Undead Party when one would be much better off …Read More…

Pluto Transits To Venus: Vulture Love!

Meet my new buddy, the Turkey Vulture!

Ever since this Pluto transit kicked in, I have experienced some pretty wild encounters on the Vulture Medicine front. One of the most memorable was the time I came upon a flock of about 20-25 ominously large Turkey Vultures perched upon the lower boughs of a decaying old sugar maple one evening during a run. They were probably only about 30 feet away from me and didn’t even startle as I passed…it was surreal and made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up in a combination of awe and also a vague sense of foreboding – I knew that life wasn’t likely to be the same after an encounter like that, as that’s some Big Medicine!

Vultures are an earthly manifestation of Plutonic energy, you see, and may appear to us at times when an old way of life is passing as harbingers of this transition. They are carrion feeders, so there is an element of learning how to spiritually sustain ourselves from the decay that surrounds us. Fortunately (LOL, that’s my gallows humor, folks!) I am well-versed in the practice of finding gold in the shadow…

So on a recent sunny summer day I …Read More…