On Transiting Venus in Pisces
Venus in Pisces is a beautiful time to get into art.
Venus as a planet is one of my favorites to think about. It shows up in so many different ways, is so much more complex than given credit for. Planet of love, pleasure, desire, connection, art. All of this is true. But Venus is more than that. I think desire is more than that.
Venus rules Libra and Taurus. Libra and Taurus have a beneficial relationship to Sagittarius and Pisces respectively, signs ruled by Jupiter. Jupiter in those signs can be about the freedom that comes from letting yourself learn from things, from learning and sharing what you’ve learned. Mutable signs like to take things in, digest them, and disseminate whatever they comes away with that they think is useful. Venus makes this sharing sweeter.
Dr. Olomi has an episode on his Patreon about Venus in Medieval Islamic astrology. He discusses the myth of Zuhara (Venus) and how two angels questioned God’s love of humans despite their flaws. The two angels were made human, so they would learn the difficulty of faith when one has free will. Zuhara was a beautiful woman who yearned for their knowledge, while the two angels-made-men yearned for her. They taught her all they knew, and God ascended her to the heavens for her knowledge. Olomi says this myth links desire for wisdom with the desire for another; “learning is erotic.”
Anne Carson isn’t an astrologer, but she wrote a lyrical essay on the nature of erotic love in Ancient Greek poetry called Eros: The Bittersweet. One of my favorite quotes from it is this:
I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like an electrification in them. They are not like anything else, but they are like each other. How?
She doesn’t have a publicly available birth time (oh how I would love to know it!) but she was born on the day the Sun passes from Gemini into Cancer. I hope she’s a Gemini. Taurus, ruled by Venus, shares the Earth element with Virgo; Libra with Gemini. Gemini and Virgo are both ruled by Mercury.
Venus and Jupiter are linked in the desire for knowledge and wisdom; Venus and Mercury linked in the desire for more information. This is because Venus likes to know. Taurus will know every single nuance of flavor in their favorite dish and that is exactly why they will go back to it without question. Venus will appreciate the beauty it loves by getting to know it more. Libra asks questions like “what do you think?” and “do you like this?” not just because people like to be asked about themselves (Libra knows this), but first and foremost because they want to know. To love something is to know it well. Flirting is a way of teaching people who we are and learning who others are.
I don’t think Pisces is a sign that we go to for Mercury-flavored information, though. It opposes Virgo. Pisces loves a little feeling-logic. It knows the rhythms of the tides just as well as Cancer, perhaps even more; the Moon controls them, but Pisces lives in them. Pisces’ feeling-logic is susceptible to romance as a baseline; Venus loves to be in these waters.
Maha Maamoun is an Egyptian visual artist; in her 2013 piece “Shooting Stars Remind Me of Eavesdroppers” she shows us a scene of a park. The park is beautiful, and the conversations all humans have are heard intermingled with a central conversation between two lovers. Here, we see what is meant by both Olomi and Carson.
One of my favorite exchanges in it is this:
The man says to the woman, But what if I like to eavesdrop? Because honestly I would rather eavesdrop on you than listen to you directly. And she says to him, What?? Why? You don't trust me? It's not about trust... I just think that what you say when you are away from me could be more interesting. Don't you think? That's strange. Am I supposed to feel flattered now that you only want to eavesdrop on me? Yes! It means I only want to listen to you intimately. Oh, how poetic. And how would you do that?
This is what it means to have Jupiter and Venus mingling. This is what it means to exalt Venus. Here, the two lovers playfully distance themselves and come together. When he asks her what if he likes to eavesdrop, he is asking if she would accept his playful intrusion. When he articulates a desire to know what she says when she is away from him, he is reaching towards her intimately in that imagined distance. When she asks him how he would do that, she is inviting him to learn how to try.
All of this, interspersed with the conversations and sounds of humanity; laughter, screams of children, elderly voices reminiscing or calling out to aforementioned children. We see various couples, but we never see their faces. Pisces doesn’t have to see them to know; the wisdom they have to share is about the human condition. This conversation between these two lovers is a conversation between all lovers, this park full of voices we would know, or would have, or will have.
Pisces is really good at relating to the human condition. They have this ability to witness or imagine a scenario and figure out what that would feel like for them. They’re not always right, but Pisces likes to do this a lot. It makes them compassionate. The other thing about Pisces, though, is that it focuses a lot on the images, or the impressions of what it dreams about. It focuses on this image and it feels itself in the scenario so vividly it sometimes begins to feel and act like it is feeling those feelings.
Pisces is associated with dreams, diurnal ones included. Pisces learns a lot through dreams; they’re a way to process feelings. Art and dreams both operate on feeling-logic. What matters about them, beyond the experience, is the emotional quality of it. Dreams can sometimes tell us more about our feelings on a given situation. Art can communicate the emotional quality of an experience; movies, songs, paintings, pictures, poems, what have you. Art and dreams are about experiences or events, sure, but they’re mostly about the feelings or the ideas. Art is an externalized processing of feeling.
It doesn’t matter if something is not chronological, nonsensical, or far in time or place. Pisces is about the feelings. Pisces has a lot to say on the different layers of feeling at work at any given moment, or in any given scenario. Pisces will go through something and know that other people have also gone through it, and it’ll apply that to the way it interacts with other people. Pisces loves to discover new feelings, or new circumstances in which to feel feelings. Pisces is preoccupied with the human condition.
Venus also represents art. So much of art is devoted to the feelings and experiences that fall under the umbrella of ‘love,’ or more aptly, erotic desire. Love and art are key ways we learn about the experiences of others. Both give us more context for our own experiences. All of this helps us learn about the experiences all people have in common.
Pisces is found in the charts of actors because Pisces, in my experience, has this really great ability to contextualize different scales of experience. Pisces will see something 1,000 miles away and it can react as if it’s there. Jupiter doesn’t go half-measure; Pisces is not limited in the compassion it has to offer. Art serves the same function; humans make art to communicate how they feel about the world around them. We love to make meaning.
What makes this Venus transit special is that it will go retrograde back into Pisces in the Spring. Venus retrograde has long been associated with the myth of Innana’s descent into the underworld. This is where we find Venus’ association with justice. In Eavesdroppers, the premise is that shooting stars are a sign that an eavesdropper has been barred from listening. The man romanticizing his intrusiveness is brought about in the context of a threat to eavesdroppers. This premise is key to the video; the intrusion is acceptable if it is playful and consensual, teasingly advertised and accepted beforehand. Genuine invasion carries the threat of consequence; the threat of retribution. Venus has a long history as both goddess of love and goddess of justice.
I think that’s part of why I’m focused on art with this particular Venus in Pisces transit. It’s really important considering the context we find ourselves in.
Venus is associated with women, queer people, and artists (among many other things.) These are groups that are constantly being attacked, not afforded protection, and taken advantage of. These groups in particular have contributed so much to art that articulates the universal human condition.
I think we honor Venus in Pisces when we use art to articulate a better, more beautiful world. We have to figure out how to get there, but we need art to make us hopeful. We need art to continue to humanize each other, and to bridge gaps. We need to consider how we can foster genuine equity and kindness by addressing the harm being done to our world and to each other.
All of this is very Venusian, but this transit does make it easier for me to be hopeful. When Venus is here, Pisces communicates Venus through every possible medium. It effortlessly disperses a feeling of basic pleasure. Everything is romantic, and romance teaches us something.
Music enriches the air with sound and feeling, poets and singers put pleasure to words and melody. Film can put to sight and sound the emotional quality of a story someone wanted to tell, memories that aren’t real or that we weren’t there for. Pictures, in their blurry, manipulated, imperfect way, capture a moment in time not unlike a birth chart is the sky at someone’s birth, reverberating across the lifespan.
Pisces is adept at navigating the emotional landscapes it finds itself in. Art can help us show off that landscape. Venus here makes all of these things feel compassionate, beautiful, and impactful. It makes it easier to be hopeful in an uncertain future that we’re trying to make better. There’s a lot left to do, a lot left to plan, but Venus will be in Pisces for a long time this year. Longer than usual.
If Venus is just as much about justice and wisdom as it is about pleasure, how can we use art to bring them closer together? Love, pleasure, and desire cannot flourish the way they should if people are deprived of opportunities, or the means to meet their needs. Pleasure does not bloom in the wake of violence. When we talk about how we make and consume art, there are so many moving parts to that: ongoing genocide, invasion, economy, climate, technology, language and exposure. How do we make art that reflects where we want things to go? How do we contribute to the collective dreams we want to realize? How do we best learn from each other, through our art and our expression and our ability to empathize? How do we go from art to concrete education and action?
I don’t think Pisces is where we go to for planning. But I think Venus in Pisces is important. I think Venus in Pisces is a time for us to access our dreams and our visions, expand our emotional capacity, and dream the world as we want it to be. I think Saturn in Aries and Jupiter in Cancer later this year will have something to say for how we can bring it into being, but Venus in Pisces feels like a reminder that this is a time to let it gestate. Right now, we learn by flirting with possibilities and committing to swim in one direction with our goals.
For my part, I'm diving back into poetry. I want to get back to reading fiction, but so far I’ve been revisiting poetry I love and delving into new poetry I have yet to meet. I want to write more so I can see other writers’ fingerprints in my words just after I’ve read them. I’m letting the words of others reach me more romantically because I want to learn from them. Here are some of my current favorites. At the end, I include another link to Eavesdroppers.
Lucille Clifton’s,
the earth is a living thing
is a black shambling bear ruffling its wild back and tossing mountains into the sea
is a black hawk circling the burying ground circling the bones picked clean and discarded
is a fish black blind in the belly of water is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal is a black and living thing is a favorite child of the universe feel her rolling her hand in its kinky hair feel her brushing it clean
[from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, Edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser, Foreword by Toni Morrison, Afterword by Keving Young, BOA Editions, Rochester, NY, 2012, p. 436]
https://poets.org/poem/earth-living-thing
Maggie Smith’s,
Good Bones
Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.
[Maggie Smith, Good Bones, first published in Waxwing Magazine, Issue IX Summer 2016]
https://waxwingmag.org/items/Issue9/28_Smith-Good-Bones.php
Shooting Stars Remind me of Eavesdroppers (2013) - Maha Maamoun