How to Navigate Descent With Venus

HOW TO NAVIGATE DESCENT WITH VENUS

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. – Gospel of Thomas

Priestesses, oracles, healers, midwives, and women who live in relationship to the land, have long had a special relationship with the Planet Venus. Today, I want to look at how we harness Venus’ cycle to help bring us into a deeper relationship with the mystery. And ultimately into a deeper connection with the truth.

You may be asking yourself what unique “women’s wisdom” does Venus hold aside from the archetypal understanding of being the Goddess of Love and Beauty? Because for many women, that is as deep as the relationship with Venus goes.

But I assert that together with her Dark Sister, Eris-kagel she is the Goddess in all of her emanations. Dark and Light. Immanent and Transcendent. She has the ability to transform and transmute, to unfold and evolve, to embody any face of the Goddess along this infinite cycle.

Venus holds the keys to the mysteries of life, death, and rebirth. The edges, and threshold places, that many never dare to go. She symbolizes the fractal nature of reality.

Her Cycle acts as the “heart beat of the cosmos”, the interfacing time clock that bridges the Earth’s Relationship to the ALL- She reminds us that time unfolds in “Cycles within cycles”.

The unfoldment of time as a cyclical, non-linear device is a uniquely Feminine and Ancient outlook.

It’s my belief that Venus not only initiates us into deeper levels of the mystery. But deeper levels of self awareness, or something we might call “gnosis”. She is our connection to Sophianic Wisdom, and the inherent universal cycle of entropy and syntropy. Growth and Decay. There is something “toroidal” or “Tree of Life” -like - that begins to emerge when we integrate her cycle into our waking life. The constant descent and resurrection.

Each unique Venus Cycle points to one area or subject of our holographic reality. In Leo she focuses on “self as creative project”. Of allowing life to penetrate us, so the very essence of who we are can come forward and be witnessed. She is also asking to recommit to our walk with stepping into greater consciousness.

In part, the conciousness that Venus naturally seeds within us is one part growing into the Overtone of her cycle. And one part, the awareness of impermanence. So while we are always developing new aspects of “self”. We are simultaneously merging with the organic changing nature of reality.

The earth is always in some state of fallenness, dissolution, and decay. Everything in time ends, everything is subject to entropy. Every form that has been manifest, eventually disappears. And because of this everything is subject to distortion. All things are in a state of flux. Nothing is static. So when we create a life that is constantly seeking validation of its “okness” in the external world, we have a difficult time with the concept of impermanence. It means we are never safe. Instead, with Venus, we shift our focus to the inner indestructible pearl of soul essence… and we learn that we can be with change in all its many forms.

Death and decay are a normal, and healthy part of evolution. With a healthy embodied approach we see our place and role in the cosmos in a more truthful light. We know we are here to do our piece of the work, in our corner of the world. To contribute to the evolution of a much greater story, and cycle.

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The Story of Inanna's Descent to the Underworld is a Venus Star Story.

Essentially, it is a Heroine’s Journey. A journey towards immanence, and embracing our naked humanity. It is a cyclical curriculum around that centers on the sacred dance of the chalice and the blade.

I also think it’s important to note that Inanna willingly agrees to go to the underworld. There was not an external force that pulled her under. This has been another huge Venus lesson for me. If I allow myself to go down when the first note of descent is strummed, I do not get violently pulled underneath. (not that life doesn’t ever pull us under violently. But there is something around practicing a willing underworld journey again and again, that helps prepare us for the sudden, unexpected ones)

For Inanna, in order to descend, she passes through seven gates, and at each gate is met by a gate guardian who asks her to remove one vestment of her royal ME, or her royal garments. The ME are tools of power and authority. Something that she believes helps her do her job as the Queen of Heaven and Earth to the fullest. So for Inanna, it is a real sacrifice to willingly part with these vestiges that aid her in maintaining order and control. They are part of her identity structure. Part of how she ensures her safety, and her right to rule. Who would she be without them?

In willingly entering the Underworld, she is entering the unknown, sacrificing her ability dominate life at her pleasure.

This part of her story symbolizes the loss of control. A powerful initiation for anyone. Who are we when we aren’t able to control the outcome of our lives? When our will is no longer effective to create the life we want?

I want to stop here and discuss how I see the energetics of the descent cycle in modern life. For me, I envision the gates to the underworld much as one might envision approaching an old water well. Wells, which are governed by the Feminine create a fantastic analogy for a descent journey.

If someone were to throw me into a well, and I wasn’t willing to venture there, I might throw all my extremities to the side to avoid hitting the “rock bottom”. I’d jutt my arms and legs towards the walls, splayed out, grasping to secure myself, just above the bottom of its seawood filled swamp, with tendrils that may wrap around my legs and arms to pull me under. Then I’d have to focus all my energy on this static position, to hold myself just above metaphorical submersion. I’d be stuck here, with no real way to shimmy back up. I’d have to use all my strength just to hold me up. In other words, the only way out is down and through.

I believe this vision of getting stuck in a well, overlays nicely onto the energetic components of life in consensus reality. We put into place a multitude of measures in order to avoid the murky darkness. We’ve painted the underworld, as a place of grief, hysteria, madness, depression, insanity, keening, total disoreintation, death, murder, blood, sex, and destruction, an area of life to be avoided at all costs. Even up to the point in which we might employ pharmaceuticals to keep us locked just above the entrance to the River Styx.

But Venus is here to demonstrate a different energetic cycle. One in which we willingly relinquish our vestments of power and control. And instead enter the underworld willingly. We tuck in our extremities and dive head first when we hear the call. And what we find here is a realm of deep nourishment. A realm of soul making, that reconnects us to life.

When in the underworld unconsciously, we may find that total disillusionment sets in. We may rage at our lack of power, our inability to will the world into existence.

The more we fight. The darker it becomes.

The conscious Underworld is different. We are bowed low before Erishkagel, the Queen of Death. Inanna’s Dark Sister. To face all that we detested about ourselves, the ways we’ve betrayed and abused ourselves. The ways we’ve deluded ourselves…all that is unreal, or untrue. All of the masks we still wear begin to melt off of our face, old identities die, and we see the way in which our vestments had distorted reality. Gripping, control, safety = ultimate illusions.

Then, just when we can smell the loamy earth of her throne room floor, we are slayed. Hung on a meat hook. Totally surrendered to the greater story that wants to live through us. In this part of Inanna’s story she has a few allies (I like to think they are part of her sisterhood, or brotherhood) that come to her aid and sprinkle her for sixty days and nights with the water and bread of life. Nourishing her back life. (This is why the work is done in community) Only this time, this new life is in alignment with the truth. The distorted mirror that has fogged her inner vision is wiped clean. Clarity sets in.

I wrote a piece last year meditating on the Venus in Capricorn Cycle, the skeleton, and the relationship between the carcass and the Vulture. Divine Harmony, another fabulous astrologer, and devotee of the Feminine commented “ the latin name of a vulture is, cathartes aura- the golden purifier. She eats death to purify life (and back in the days made it so less bacteria was circulated in the environment because of the unique way her digestive system works). In Egypt vultures were seen as the Great Primordial Mother and were thought to only be female- and to give birth by parthenogenesis.” I loved her vivid description of eating death, to purify life. It’s a fantastic analogy for what descent and underworld experiences are.

In that short piece, I was also meditating on the desire we all have to call in a “New Earth” reality right now. How close it feels.

And yet for me, Venus and the accompanying astrology are still pointing to our place in the birth canal. Still in the midst of the contractions, and struggle. Instead of looking towards the future, and jumping ahead in the timeline, I think she is asking us to do the work of picking every last scrap off of the bones. To eat, digest, alchemize, and fully transmute the story we are currently in before moving on to the sparkly paradise of a new world.

Our relationship to time is often like that. Feeling the discomfort of the moment, and instead energetically leaning forward, grabbing onto the future. The mind, almost in a stance of reaching, grasping for the next thing to end the discomfort of now.

There are a few keys indicated for a successful Venus in Leo Descent Journey. The first; Because the Sun is the symbol of emergence, the challenge is to get and stay present, and love our lives and place in the story as it is now. Without additions or subtractions. Without gripping onto what is known, and turning away from the unknown. We are human, and we have to love the body, and the experience of being human as it is now. It’s a part of why we all came here.

So, instead of leaning forward energetically, in a stance of doing, sit back, and root down. Into the soil.

The second key is to go willingly, consciously, and be surrendered to the process of being pulled under.

Underworld. We begin May 11th. More information here. https://www.redmoonrevival.org/underworldsessions-1

Art Psychogenesis by Daniel Mirante