Dancing in the Dark

by Eric Francis Coppolino and photographs by Eric Francis Coppolino, September 30, 2010

The astrology we’ve experienced this year has picked up the world and spun it on its finger, leaving most of us feeling a bit dizzy. The biggest news events—the earthquake in Haiti at the beginning of the year, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the midterm elections, and the sluggish (some would say nonexistent) economic recovery all fit the same basic astrological picture of issues that are larger than life.

It’s been astrology on the largest possible scale, involving numerous outer-planet alignments and focused on the Aries Point—the first degree of the zodiac, which has a curious magnifying effect I’ve described in many recent editions. The feeling is confrontational. It’s the sense of everything about the world being at the edge of an abyss, and by default, we’re there too. I think that most of us cope by keeping our heads out of big-world stuff and focusing on our personal lives to the best extent we can. Who knows, maybe it’s true—if you feel okay, then everything with the world is going to be fine.

The astrology of midautumn has a different emotional tone than anything we’ve experienced for a while, because it involves Venus retrograde. Venus is a planet associated with our feelings, our values, relationships, and sexuality. It’s an inner planet, closer to the Sun than is the Earth. Retrograde motion is an illusion created when a planet is close to our own. Venus is about to pass between the Sun and the Earth, creating this effect. Venus is retrograde least of all the planets, just eight percent of the time—six weeks out of every eighteen months. Compare that to Mercury, which is retrograde for three weeks three or four times a year, or to Pluto, retrograde five out of twelve months.

Venus is now in Scorpio, and the retrograde begins in that sign on October 8, one day after a stunning Libra New Moon. I’ll come back to that New Moon in a moment—it has a message for us connected to Venus retrograde.

In traditional astrology, Venus is the ruler of two signs, Taurus and Libra. When a planet is placed in a sign opposite the sign it rules, that’s a condition called detriment. It’s a harsh word, I know; many of us have natal planets that are in their detriment (Mercury is one of mine) and we may wonder what to do with them. Old rules of astrology need to be translated carefully into our modern context, but there is always a good translation, and by good, I mean the ancient scholars who gave us our astrology wanted us to notice something that was relevant now, even if the rule we’re applying is 2,000 years old. In astrology, “good” means useful.