Echos of Job. Venus in Libra

Today, Venus revisits her UnderWorld StarPoint conjunction with the Sun at 29° Libra.

This conjunction happened on October 22 2022.

When Venus revisits such an important place on the zodiacal wheel we can look back and see if there are any echos…

Is something happening now, that echos what happened in October of last year?

Venus Star point came just Days before an Eclipse in Scorpio.

The Underworld themes were everywhere. We all felt a bit lost in a liminal space. I remember taking a poll… and everyone saying “yes me too”.

There are two ways to get to the Underworld. Taking ourselves. Or an outside event that precipitates descent.

Once there, The Underworld delivers a template of themes that are often the same.

One part of the Underworld experience is grappling with seeming injustice. Not necessarily the kind that comes from our justice system, though it can be that. No I’m talking about the pain of real injustice. Of someone accusing, lying, cheating, stealing, violence, death, or causing pain we seemingly do not “deserve”. It’s a legitimate location to grapple with.

How do we stay open in the face of it?

On October 22, 2022, I published a short essay on “The Suffering of Job”, and how that related to my life. I was deep in the throes of grieving my son.

This year, the grief is still here, yet the scale of loss and suffering has increased a million fold. I can find the archetype of Job everywhere. Men, Woman, and Children, who have known nothing but a life of hardship, pain and trauma. Yet we are astonishingly, witnessing their immense faith in the face of all of this destruction.

Again, in this moment, Justice delayed is in the News. Last year it was massive protests in Persia. This year, it’s a few states over. Yet the protests for freedom and justice are the same. A very Libran Theme.

The other day in a transmission I made about the current Venus/Pluto square, which echos last years Venus Star Point/Pluto Square, I spoke too a situation we’ve been moving through with my daughter, which again, is around this theme of justice.

I witnessed in her body, and in my response, something I hadn’t noticed before. The deep rage-filled impulse held inside of injustice. The way injustice holds a current of angry Eros, and vitality.

Because in order to uphold an unjust situation, we must negate a person or group’s humanity, in whole or in part. And being dehumanized elicits fire.

I noticed how the “not being seen”, “not being deserving of God’s protection”, part of injustice compelled me towards “righting the wrong”. And how that so easily overcame my senses of rationality. The calm sensibilities of Libra.

My son Tanner experienced a fiery response at the hands of an injustice. An echo that is coming through with the current situation with my daughter.

His injustice left him with the label of “bad kid”. Being mis-labeled as bad and wrong sent him into a type of madness.

On the collective level, to uphold any injustice necessitates that the Power responsible create another reality. Because people aren’t wired to stomach an injustice.

So a new reality gets spun, in an attempt to elicit consent. We are asked to enroll in the new story, the inversion that says the injustice is actually just.

We do this on a collective scale with propaganda. And we do it when we’ve suffered our own personal injustice, in order to, somehow, “move on”.

Though it may be human nature to delude ourselves into acquiescence; it rarely works well.

Because….

There is a thread of punishment inherent in every injustice. And people react in very funny ways when punished unjustly.

It’s an energy that erupts in an “up and out” trajectory. Along either, a Uranian/Promethean current, that moves us towards actual liberation. Or in a Dionysian current, that helps us forget.

Let’s look at the Story of Job. Satan and God together test one man with unendurable loss. I’ve always hated this story. And so did Carl Jung. Despite hating it, it holds universal themes. Anger at God. Injustice.

We begin the Book of Job with an angry God who knew no moderation. Had no concept of proportion. (Libra). God himself, is admittedly eaten up with Jealousy and Rage.

Archetypally…

People who must live long in truly unjust circumstances, become like Job. Long sufferers.

And the powerful force who delivers the injustice, is God.

In Jung’s book, “Answer to Job”

He says “in God, insight existed along with obtuseness, loving-kindness along with cruelty. Creative power along with destructiveness. Everything was there, and none of these qualities was an obstacle to the other.”

Jung thought a condition like this is only conceivable when there was either no reflecting consciousness, or when the capacity for reflection was feeble and a more or less adventitious phenomenon. Jung said a condition like this could only be considered as amoral.

This is the God/power who metes out injustice and punishment.

Jung goes on to say his book is in service to giving voice to the many who feel the way he does, to give expression to the “shattering emotion which the unvarnished spectacle of divine savagery and ruthlessness produces in us.”

Jung had no sympathy for a God/Power that was suffering or in discord. No compassion for a Deity/Power that was so unconscious, and thus so ineffectual morally.

He said, “instead this type of God/Power gives rise to an equally ill considered outburst of affect, and a smoldering resentment that may be compared to a slowly healing wound. And just as there is a tie between a wound and weapon, so does the affect correspond to the violence of the deed that did it.”

He did not believe we need entertain or “pass tests” from this type of God.

Which is important, because we often miss the full medicine of the Underworld by trying to look “Holy” on a journey through hell. Look up when we should be looking in.

So while we see this dynamic playing out in the collective now. Between the powerful and the punished. We should also be asking ourselves who we are in the face of unjust punishment.

Let me frame this question a bit better. Unjust does not need to mean a literal, court rendered injustice.

I can say that, on no uncertain terms, the loss of my son felt unjust. I was angry with God for a while. I felt this sense of being betrayed, then tested. Which meant I began my grief journey “trying to figure it out with the mind”.

Injustice can be anything that has happened to us, that we feel angry at God about. Any perceived punishment that feels wholly unfair.

I’m not suggesting that this is rational. But it is human.

And I’m not going to say now, how I’ve moved through this for myself. I will merely pose the inquiry… how do we meet this place within ourselves?

Do we allow the impulse of Prometheus or Dionysus to overtake us and go a bit mad and unconscious? (This may be the most sane)

Do we give it expression?

Do we try to rewrite it into a more palatable story “I learned a lesson from it, so it’s all ok”? (Bypassing?)

Do we try to behave better so we won’t be punished in the future?

Or do we let it burn us? Do we feel the pain of it all the way through until it’s alchemized?

Do we continue to have faith? And trust we are in the hands of God/Goddess no matter what?

Or Is it a combination of these things?

The invitation is simply to know who we are in this dimension of life. Not to fix or change anything. Simply to know ourselves better.

Art: Job by Leon Bonnat