There is a five-petaled star in the sky that it takes the Goddess of Love eight years to draw.
From our perspective here on Earth, Venus returns to retrograde five times during an approximately eight-year cycle. Connect those five points and a five-petaled star, rose, or pentagram emerges.
I have loved this pattern for years. But recently, while contemplating the completion of another Venus cycle, I saw something in it I had never quite seen before. The petals can also be imagined as five interconnected infinity symbols.
Five encounters between Venus, Earth, the Sun, and the continually changing lives we are living beneath them. Five recurrences. Five returns. And together, they make a five-pointed pentagram.
Perhaps this is one of the most beautiful things astrology can teach us about recurrence: Return does not require repetition. Venus comes again, but she does not find the same world. And she does not find the same you.
The Astrology of Again
We often talk about astrological cycles as though a planet returns and something from the past returns with it. Or a planet has a retrograde cycle, and something from before visits again. And it’s true that sometimes it does. An old relationship may reappear. A forgotten desire may stir. A question we thought we had answered may suddenly be sitting at the kitchen table again, having morning coffee with us.
But as we explored at the New Moon, again is not a simple word in a becoming cosmos.
When Venus returns to approximately the same region of the zodiac eight years later, the symbolic relationship may be familiar, but virtually everything participating in that relationship has changed. You have changed. The people you love have changed. Your body has changed. The Earth has changed. Every other planetary cycle has continued moving.
Even the meaning you are capable of making from an experience has changed because you have lived eight additional years since the last encounter.
Wow. Astrological recurrence preserves symbolic relationship without preserving sameness. That distinction fascinates me. Because it’s become clear to me a cycle is not simply something that repeats. Perhaps recurrence itself participates in our dance of becoming.
Venus Remembers
Venus is currently stationary about to begin her retrograde movement, beginning another forty-day journey through territory she has traveled before through 22 Libra to 8 Scorpio.
Astrologically, Venus speaks to relationship, value, attraction, pleasure, beauty, reciprocity, receptivity, and what we find worthy of our love and attention.
A Venus retrograde can therefore invite us to notice these dimensions of our lives. Certainly not because the heavens have issued an assignment and we had better complete our cosmic homework before Venus turns direct.
I like to think of retrogrades as an opportunity to engage my curiosity and contemplate. Because the person encountering this Venus retrograde is not the person who encountered the last one.
Eight years ago, Venus began this pentagram with a retrograde through this same Libra/Scorpio territory. Now, as the cycle completes, she returns to it. That gives us an unusual opportunity. We don't have to ask what happened eight years ago so that we can predict what will happen now. We can ask more interesting questions:
1. Who was I then, and who do I experience myself to be now? How have I grown?
2. What were the circumstances of my life then and what are they now?
3. What did I value then? Do I value differently now?
4. Have my preferences changed over these eight years?
5. Are there relationships in my life that are asking to be encountered differently?
6. Are there any pleasure I have forgotten to give myself?
7. Are there any relationships I’m engaging that are asking me to be someone other than myself?
Libra and Scorpio bring us into some of the most consequential territory of human relationship: meeting another, negotiating difference, exchanging what matters, becoming intimate, sharing power and vulnerability, discovering what is mine and yours and what we create between us.
The territory may be familiar. How wonderful that our relationship to it need not be.
Relationship Requires Difference
This idea has become especially alive for me lately. For much of my life, I understood interconnectedness intuitively. I sensed relationship everywhere: with people, animals, trees, stones, food, water, the planets, the living Earth.
But there is another dimension of relationship I have had to learn more slowly. Differentiation. To participate fully in relationship, I must be present as myself. That sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. Yet it wasn't for me.
There were years when I could enter a relational field and become so responsive to what was present there that I lost clarity about what belonged to me. Adaptation could masquerade as connection. Receptivity could become absorption. Belonging could quietly require disappearance.
There is no blame in seeing this now. Only tenderness. And gratitude for what experience has taught me. Because I understand something today that I could not have understood in quite this way eight years ago:
Differentiation makes relationship possible.
Unity does not require sameness. Love does not require self-erasure. Receptivity does not require unlimited permeability.
A sacred YES can contain a sacred No.
Our becoming more fully ourselves does not separate us from the whole. Most delightfully, maybe our individuation and differences are part of how the whole becomes capable of relationship.
Five Infinities Make a Pentagram
And so I return to that beautiful pattern Venus draws with Earth. Five returns. Five petals. Five interconnected infinity symbols. No single encounter makes the pentagram. It emerges through recurrence.
That possibility has become central to the book I am currently writing, Cycles of Becoming: Participatory Astrology.
I have become increasingly interested in astrology’s forecasting techniques not as systems for telling us what will happen, but as a way of noticing relationship unfolding through time. The chart can expand what we are able to notice. Then lived experience can expand what we understand the chart can mean.
We participate.
We observe.
We change.
And when the cycle returns, the one who meets it has already been shaped, in part, by every previous encounter. The recurrence participates in producing the new being who encounters the next recurrence. Suddenly, "Here we go again" becomes considerably more interesting. Because there is no just again.
Meeting Venus Differently
So as Venus stations and begins her retrograde journey, perhaps we don't need to try to predict what it means. Maybe we don't need to predict possible relationship changes, the lover who will return, the purchase we'll regret, or the revelation supposedly waiting behind the next celestial corner.
Perhaps we can simply become available. Not passively available. Not indiscriminately open. Differentiated and available. Present enough to notice what arises. Free enough to say yes. Free enough to say no. Curious enough to discover that something familiar may contain possibilities we could not perceive the last time we met it.
We might ask the Goddess of Love: What am I available to at this culminating cycle of eight years that I wasn’t available to before?
And then listen. Not only to your inner Venus. To yourself. To the people and creatures with whom you share your life. To your body. To the living Earth beneath your feet. To what delights you. To what repels you. To what has become newly possible.
Maybe Venus retrograde is reminding us that return is one of the ways a living cosmos moves forward. After all, Venus has been coming back for a very long time creating beautiful pentagrams in the sky, composed of five infinity symbols.
P.S. Just in case you love examples of how exquisite the Divine Design is, the Fibonacci sequence ties into the pentagram through the Golden Ratio which defines both the proportions of a regular five-pointed star and the orbital rhythm of Venus. The pentagram is the ultimate geometric expression of the Golden Ratio as well.
In other words, don’t ever underestimate the grace and beauty the Goddess of Love contributes to your personal dance of becoming!