Please note, all dates and times are calculated from the Swiss Ephemeris (tropical, geocentric). All times are Melbourne time (AEDT, UTC+11).
Welcome to Scorpio season! This one packs a punch, with Mercury retrograde through the depths of Scorpio… not to mention Venus completing the final petal of her eight-year rose. On 24 October, Venus met the Sun in the heart of her retrograde at 0° Scorpio, returning almost exactly to where she drew the first petal in October 2018. Since then she has traced her pentagram through Gemini, Capricorn, Leo and Aries, and now she has come home to Scorpio to close the flower. Each rose lands a few degrees behind the last, so this is one turn in a 1,200-year spiral, a slow backwards dance through the whole zodiac that no single lifetime ever sees complete. Whatever began for you in the autumn of 2018, especially in love, values, the body and what you’ll no longer trade your worth for, is now asking to be harvested, composted or consecrated before Venus stations direct on 14 November and begins a new rose.
I want to open November’s medical astrology reading with the Full Moon we have just moved through, at 2° Taurus on Monday 26 October at 3:12pm. Taurus is ruled by Venus, and with Venus retrograde in her own sign of Libra, and only two days after her meeting with the Sun, this Moon became a key chapter in the story we have been unpacking since the retrograde began on 3 October. That story reaches its turning point on 14 November, a BIG date, when Venus and Mercury both station direct, bringing renewal to the areas of our lives connected to love, creativity and wealth.
If you want to work with a Venus-ruled plant during this retrograde, my suggestion is rose, and my favourite of all the tinctures is the rose spagyric by ENKI Apothecary. Sit in silence and ritual with this medicine daily and let it work down into your heart, softening the places in the body that have hardened and need tending. It is also gorgeous paired with the Blue Lotus tincture in a warm mug of cacao. This combination has held me through some of the more turbulent transits lately, especially this Moon, which sat directly opposite my natal Mars. Collectively, the Moon was squaring Pluto in Aquarius, which asked for deeper shadow work before we could reach the gold. Many women I spoke with described intense rage over the weekend leading up to this Moon, and the Moon’s square to Pluto was a large part of that.
In the next section, I’ll walk you through what to expect in November and the medicines you can work with to use these transits for deeper evolution.
