This is the first post for paid subscribers. My goal is to create two to four posts a month, for paid subscribers only. Topics will vary, and how they tie to trauma, relating, and ancestral healing will be as multi-faceted as the reader wants them to be. I may not always draw direct connections and invite you to take what resonates and leave the rest. If you are interested in becoming a paid subscriber, there is a link below. I will always offer a short snippet of the longer piece for public viewing. (If you wish to become a paid subscriber, but are unable to afford the current monthly rate, please contact me directly and we’ll see what can be worked out).
Venus has been by my side since childhood, though I didn’t always recognize her. I was raised Catholic, and on both sides of my family Mother Mary was venerated, respected, prayed to, and called upon to intercede in various aspects of life. I’m a sextuple Libra (six placements in Libra, plus a few asteroids) and while my rising sign in Sagittarius, and therefore technically my ruling planet is Jupiter, I have always felt ruled by Venus, her moods, her retrogrades, her changes in season. At 14, when I first began my exploration and practice of Tarot, the Empress always spoke to me as “my card,” the archetype that I wanted to become and, in so many ways, the archetype I always was.
All this to say, while Venus, planet and goddess, have been by my side my whole life, guiding and directing me various ways, I intellectually and academically knew very little about her. It wasn’t until well into adulthood that I read any of her myths, or learned what, according to scholars, she represented for ancient Romans and other Meditteranean peoples. It wasn’t until adulthood that I learned of the connection between Mother Mary and Venus (and other goddesses), or how she, Venus, has been misunderstood as primarily a goddess of love, lust, and sex. How Venus was a “whore,” with many children by many fathers and a “cheater” due to her relationship with Mars while married to Vulcan. In many ways, according to the “scholars,” most of whom were men (and white men at that), Venus was reduced to being a slut, a sister to Lilith, a selfish female figure who needed to be controled and condemned. She is related to mostly through her male lovers, and not generally considered on her own, in her own autonomy and rite.
For me, Bettany Hughes describes her best : Venus is “the incarnation of fear as well as love, of pain as well as plearsure, of the agony and ecstasy of desire. Venus is in fact the summation of the varigated, complicated business of human-heartedness—-of our burning drive to engage with one another, both for good and for bad. She oversees the intensity of our passions and our relationships within, and beyond, our species.” Venus is the goddes of relationship - all of our relationships, including the ones we have with ourselves, with nature, with the world itself. She represents life and death. She represents quenching our own desires, and not being ashamed of doing so.
In adult life, I have grown my relationship with Venus both intentionally and coincidentally. As I said above, the Empress card of the tarot has always spoken to me. This card represents fertility, creativity, the nurturing mother. She is soft, sensuous, divine. She also has a strength to her, she has grown from the High Priestess, from a place of intuition, spirituality, deeping knowing, into the place of actually doing something with that deep, embodied knowing. Whenever the Empress shows up in a reading for me I always see it as a reminder of who and how I want to be in the world, and it almost always seems to show up at times when I have “lost my way” so to speak, when I have become too hard or logical or separate from nature, humanity, and myself. This card, the goddess, and the planet Venus are all one and the same for me - different depictions of this part of our humanity that has been lost due to oppression from white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. The part of us we have been told is weak, less than, wanting, and often wanton.
Venus can be a path back to our roots.