Venus Retrograde: The 40-Day Descent
Hello Beautiful Souls,
I wanted to check in as we stand at the threshold of what I believe will be one of the most important Venus journeys we have experienced in years. Although Venus does not officially station retrograde until October 3, we have actually been inside this cycle since August 31, when Venus entered her pre-retrograde shadow.The shadow is where the story begins, and the relationships, conversations, desires, questions of worth and value, and even financial themes that have been surfacing since then may already be showing us what this journey is really about.
This cycle is especially significant because Venus returns to nearly the same area of the zodiac every eight years, creating the beautiful five-pointed Venus Star over time. The last Scorpio-Libra retrograde was in the fall of 2018, so take a moment and look back. Who were you then? What was happening in your relationships? What were you learning about love, intimacy, self-worth and what you truly valued? Who entered your life or left it? What began changing within you?
We aren’t going backward to repeat 2018. We are returning to this point on the Venus Star eight years further along the spiral, with an opportunity to see how much we have evolved. And there is so much more to this Venus cycle than the usual conversation about relationships and retrogrades. To understand what is really unfolding, we need to go deeper, beginning with Venus’s 40-day descent into the Underworld.
The 40-Day Descent
There is something fascinating about the fact that Venus spends approximately 40 days retrograde, because throughout sacred traditions the number 40 repeatedly appears during periods of profound transition. The rains of the Great Flood fell for 40 days and 40 nights. Moses spent 40 days on Mount Sinai, the Israelites wandered for 40 years in the wilderness, and Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness before beginning his ministry. Again and again, 40 marks a passage of testing, purification, surrender and preparation for what comes next.
This gives us a beautiful way to understand Venus retrograde. For approximately 40 days, Venus appears to reverse her movement through the zodiac, drawing our attention inward toward everything she represents: love, relationship, desire, intimacy, beauty, money, values and self-worth. Rather than seeing this as a time when relationships simply “go wrong,” we can see it as an invitation to examine our relationship to love itself. What do we value now? What have we outgrown? Where have we compromised ourselves to maintain connection? And what might love become if we were willing to release the old patterns through which we have known it?
The 40-day journey asks us not to rush toward answers, but to remain in that space between what was and what is becoming long enough for something deeper to reveal itself. And there is an ancient story connected to Venus that gives us a powerful map for understanding this descent: the journey of Inanna into the Underworld.
Inanna and the Descent of Venus
Long before Venus became the Roman goddess of love and beauty, the planet was associated in ancient Mesopotamia with Inanna, and later Ishtar, a goddess of love, sexuality, sovereignty and transformation. In one of her most enduring myths, Inanna voluntarily descends from the heavens into the Underworld, the realm of her sister Ereshkigal.
To enter, Inanna must pass through seven gates, surrendering a piece of her royal clothing and regalia at each one until she stands stripped of everything that identified her as the Queen of Heaven. This is what makes her story such a powerful mirror for Venus retrograde: the descent strips away the identities, attachments and protections we have built around what makes us feel worthy, desirable, secure and loved.
What remains when we can no longer depend upon being chosen, desired, needed or approved of to know our own value? Venus asks us to look beneath the roles we have played in relationship and discover who we are beneath everything we believed we needed in order to be loved.
At the bottom of the Underworld, Inanna encounters Ereshkigal, and the descent reaches its deepest point: Inanna must die before she can be reborn. Remarkably, we can see a similar death and rebirth reflected in the actual astronomical journey of Venus.
The Death and Rebirth of Venus
The mythology becomes even more powerful when we look at what Venus is actually doing in the sky. As retrograde Venus approaches the Sun, she disappears from the evening sky, hidden within the Sun’s light.
On October 24, Venus reaches her inferior conjunction with the Sun at 0° Scorpio, creating the Venus Star Point. Hidden from our sight within the Sun’s light, this is the symbolic death and rebirth of the cycle, when her identity as Evening Star is surrendered and a new Venus is seeded within the solar fire.
Then, around October 29–30, Venus begins to emerge from the Sun’s rays and becomes visible before dawn as the Morning Star. This is her return from the Underworld. And like Inanna, she does not return as the same Venus who descended. Something has been left behind, something has been reclaimed, and something that was waiting beneath the surface is ready to rise into the light.
Pluto: Guardian of the Underworld
As I shared in my previous Venus Retrograde blog, this journey is deeply intertwined with Pluto, and seen through the lens of Inanna’s descent, that takes on even greater meaning. Venus will square Pluto three times during this cycle, while the retrograde itself begins under a powerful Mars-Pluto opposition. We are entering the Underworld with its ruler standing at the gate.
The three Venus-Pluto squares can be understood as markers within the descent: first we see the pattern, then we are taken into its roots, and finally we are asked to transform it. Pluto exposes what has been hidden beneath our relationships: attachment, fear, control, power, sexuality, unspoken resentment, and the ways we may betray ourselves to preserve connection.
Yet every relationship we experience in the outer world also holds up a mirror to the relationship we have with ourselves. The love we seek, the boundaries we struggle to hold, the ways we abandon ourselves or close our hearts to protect ourselves all reveal something about our own inner relationship. So perhaps the deeper question of this Venus-Pluto journey is not only, Can the way we love survive the person we are becoming? It is also: Can our relationships evolve as our relationship with ourselves evolves?
The Sacred Mirror
Venus returns to Libra as we enter the Libra decan, the first approximately 700-year chapter of the Aquarian Age. But the deeper teaching of Libra is not simply relationship. It is the Sacred Mirror, awakening us to the remembrance that we are fractals of One Mind, One unified field of consciousness, and ultimately there is nothing truly outside of us.
As vibrational beings, what appears through our relationships becomes part of that mirror. The people and dynamics we attract can become the Holy Grail, the crucible, the alchemical cauldron revealing what our soul is ready to see, heal and transform. Instead of asking only, Why is this happening to me? the Sacred Mirror asks, What is this reflecting within me, and what is it asking me to become conscious of now?
This is the deeper invitation of Venus returning to Libra: to stop seeing the outer world as separate from our inner evolution and begin recognizing it as a sacred reflection through which consciousness awakens to itself.
The Journey Begins
As Venus begins her 40-day descent, pay attention to what the mirror is showing you. Notice what activates you, what keeps repeating, what you are being asked to release, and what is rising from within to be reclaimed. The Underworld journey is not a punishment; it is an initiation, stripping away what obscures the truth so that we can return with greater awareness of who we are.
Perhaps the greatest gift of this Venus cycle is the remembrance that the mirror is never separate from us. What we meet in the outer world can become the doorway inward, and what we transform within ourselves changes the consciousness we bring back into the world.
If you feel called to go deeper with this journey, I am opening space for Venus Transformation Readings. Together, we will explore where this Venus retrograde and Star Point are activating your chart, the deeper patterns being reflected back to you, and what your soul may be asking you to transform, reclaim and embody through this 40-day initiation.
For this Venus journey, I am offering 15% off your Venus Transformation Reading with code GIFT-15%. I would be honored to journey into the Underworld with you and discover what is waiting to be brought back into the light.
So much love,
Shannon 🌹