Today, Venus in Leo exacted a square to Uranus in Taurus.  The ‘Star of Aphrodite’ in all her copper-mirrored splendor has a demonstrative flair in Leo — one of fine features, flushed cheeks, cunning charisma and debonair dances.  It is a Venus sign which knows its worth, and whose libidinal energy often derives from the receiving and exchange of attention itself.  Life is performance, and the audience’s eyes become a lovedrug.

Leo’s solar sense of ‘divine birthright’ and empowered agency is well on display when Venus traverses the sign, and when square to Uranus, the unpredictable might ensue.  Sometimes called ‘the Breaker’ by scholar Richard Tarnas, the planet Uranus is known for its ‘big disruptor energy.’  Electrifying ‘aha!’ moments, wall-rattling chaos, and a liberation frequency are often the effects of its transits.

While the Breaker can certainly leave devastation in its wake, it is not one of the ‘malefic’ planets, holding, say, the heat and cutting of Mars, the leaden obstacles and negation of Saturn, or the shame-excising pressure cooker of ‘third death planet’ Pluto.  While progressive leaps and shock upsets are part and parcel with aspects involving the astrological Uranus, its transits do not typically carry with them the sense of malaise that Mars, Saturn or Pluto might.  With Uranus transits, there is often simply life before the transit, and life after.

Venus rules over desire, love, relationships, sexuality, grace, harmony, art, and beauty as both aesthetic and principle of peace.  Uranus rules over egoic liberty, change, disruption, freedom, liberation, rebellion, revelation and chaos.  It also has an association with technology and innovation.  When we combine these archetypal agencies, it’s possible that one might experience: progress, breakthrough, or surprising news surrounding the arts and patrons thereof, shakeups in social harmony on individual and collective levels, breakthroughs or breakups in relationship, and the kind of ‘high octane’ output that uranian transits are known for… raucous winds that blow things about without much sense of ‘karmic distribution’ in terms of the result.

For example, car accidents happen — they aren’t often perceived as a matter of ‘I deserved this’ like outcomes worked across longer arcs of deliberation and decision-making might be, or intense engagements with another by way of intention.  Uranus doesn’t carry with it a mood of moral discretion.  Lives change in the blink of an eye; misunderstandings and fractured sight of one another can shape huge narrative arcs as dust settles and life is simply never the same again.  For having an 84-year orbit around the Sun, with roughly seven years spent in each sign, Uranus’ transits can happen like a sudden storm that seizes one arena of life and departs as quickly as it came.

The (90°) square, that presently between Venus in Leo and Uranus in Taurus, is an aspect which often conjures tensions or situations which arise by no fault of one party or another, as the astrologer Bernadette Brady emphasized in her work ‘Predictive Astrology.’  Whereas the (180°) opposition, the ‘staring contest’ as Steven Forrest put it, is a proper crisis of integration, the other malefic or more difficult of the traditional Ptolemaic aspects is the (90°) square, which Forrest described as ‘an ambush.’  It is, like its angle, a t-bone at an intersection of life energies which can grow to harmonize / heal through the crisis, or crumble under the fleeting pressure of impact.

One might be experiencing the effects of this transit in areas of love, relationship, family, social circles, work, artistic endeavors, sociopolitics, with many other possible contexts for expression — some wholly positive, involving breakthrough or sudden forging of new ground.  Yet there may be a sense that these energies are seizing upon us in a way that will leave things undesirably different in complexion than they were previously, and that despite Uranus’ chaotic indiscretion, we may internalize something like responsibility in the wake of these changes, whether positive or negative.

Venus formed this aspect to Uranus from the third decan of Leo, called ‘Valour’ in The Book of Thoth, with Uranus in the third decan of Taurus called ‘Failure’ in the same.  ‘Valour’ is a place of striving, whether or not one is victorious in hitting the mark, and ‘Failure’ is a place of concern as to whether one’s sown seeds will bear the fruits planned upon.  There is perhaps an element here of trying our best, yet coming up against circumstances which derail one’s greatest aspirations and efforts.

As per the nature of the (90°) square, it’s possible that such experiences of worry, failure, or being knocked off course are runoff or byproduct of circumstances that no party involved had much control over.  These things can sometimes bring more pain than willful wrongdoing, because one feels as though they never had a say.  And yet, Uranus aspects don’t always linger a valence of sorrow the way the death planets do.  When it wreaks chaos rather than lightning progress, people remark of its whirlwind’s effects, ‘that’s life’, and as such it is the furthest planet from the Sun one can live for a full revolution thereof.

The astrologer Elodie St. Onge-Aubut observes of August’s astrology that the mutable t-square happening this month “could mean having to contend with unforeseen factors leading to improvisation, bifurcation, plot-twists, change in fortune, synchronistic happenings, and generalized busyness.”  While these are classical hallmarks of the mutable signs — Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces — which restlessly integrate and disseminate the lessons of the seasons in a movement-prone mode that runs high risk of overstimulation, the element of change and changes in fortune which characterize them is also one shared by the planet Uranus, whom Venus just earlier squared as we know.

Elodie goes on to say her “personal sense is that some of the tension on an individual level could relate to the topics of the house where Sagittarius is located in your birth chart, since Sagittarius is the missing leg in the mutable t-square” taking place this month.  Gemini, Virgo and Pisces already have company, so it is likely that the hope, belief and faith of Sagittarius (with a sprinkle of ‘delulu’) is being tested especially.  Saturn, the planet of grief, is a year and a half into the sign of the Fish at 18° Pisces,  with Jupiter at 14° Gemini approaching an engagement by square. Mars will eventually join, and we have Mercury in its exaltation of Virgo already in the mix, yet soon to go retrograde.  When Venus enters Virgo, sign of her fall, hours after the New Moon in Leo on Sunday, we will be looking at a rather different astrological landscape as the mutable drama marinates.

In an era of manic hustle culture, and large swaths of society feeling the squeeze, we deserve the time and space to acknowledge suffering, to bear witness to it, and to feel our grief in real, visceral ways.  Such things are pushed out of sight too often, whether by prescriptions or relentless pursuit of pleasure, by inflicting pain on others or seeking to preserve the ephemeral nature of youth.

The art of grieving is a long-carved work, and yet amorphous the same… occupying ever new spaces, holding others and ourselves through new losses, and inhabiting the changing riptide scenes of life, death, and that which follows this threshold.  Our capacity for grief is a mirror of our capacity for joy, and must be cultivated as delicately as one might seek to play about in these pastures as we visit, only for a time.

Some themes and dynamics to feel around for…

*desire meets the unexpected
*love meets surprise
*proud struts and missed steps
*the goddess refuses to be chained
*the feminine resists boundaries or being boxed in
*matters of gender and sexuality being discussed in lively ways
*progress, breakthrough, or news related to the arts
*shakeups in social harmony on individual and collective levels
*relationships experiencing strain for which there is none to blame or forgive; conversely, relational landscapes suddenly changing for the better
*breakthroughs or breakups in romantic relationship; the need for reconciliation
*‘high octane’ happenings
*plot-twists and changes of fortune
*raucous winds that blow things about, without the feeling of fair ‘karmic distribution’ in terms of result
*overstimulation and overwhelm being reckoned with, perhaps eased as a byproduct of unforeseen circumstances
*poking holes in our own optimism
*”where is the ocean floor” as Diana Rose Harper put it re: Saturn in Pisces… what is my capacity for grief?
*an electrifying sense that, despite it all, one has the ability to overcome

There is much more I could add to this list, but it is my hope that these are things you have gathered from the paragraphs preceding, and from whatever my words may have stirred within you, perhaps reflecting back events in your own life.  I will return with a writing for the New Moon in Leo over the weekend.

Swim well stargazers ~

—A.B.