On October 3, Venus turns retrograde in Scorpio. On the night of October 23, she meets the Sun at 0°45′ Scorpio: the last Venus Star Point in Scorpio in a cycle that began in 1926. Two days later, Venus returns home, back into Libra.
Scorpio takes us beneath the surface, into sex, death, power, the unconscious, the taboo. Not the realms we usually associate with Venus: beauty, pleasure, harmony, relationship.
So, what might Scorpio have to teach us about love?
It reminds me of the story of Eros & Psyche.
Eros and Psyche
Psyche was so beautiful that people traveled to see her. They left offerings and worshiped her instead of Venus. Everyone looked at her. No one came close enough to see her. Her sisters married kings. Psyche remained alone: a mortal woman treated like a goddess, placed so high no one dared ask for her hand.
Venus, furious at being displaced, sends her son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with something monstrous. An oracle tells Psyche’s father to dress her as if for her funeral and leave her on a mountaintop for a terrible bridegroom.
But when Eros sees Psyche, he pricks himself with his own arrow. The god of desire is caught by desire. He takes her as his wife, but comes to her only in darkness. She can hear him, touch him, sleep beside him, love him. But, she must not see him.
What becomes possible in the dark? What remains impossible there?
Her sisters plant doubt: perhaps her unseen husband is the monster the oracle foretold. Eros warns her not to listen.
When does doubt destroy trust, and when does it protect us from blind trust?
One night Psyche lights a lamp. She sees not a monster but a god. A drop of hot oil wakes him. She had promised never to look. Hurt and betrayed, Eros leaves.
Was seeing him a betrayal? Or the moment a real relationship became possible?
What happens when my need to know you meets your need not to be seen?
And how does seeing change the one who sees, the one who is seen, and what lives between them?
Seeing ends what they had. Without it, what comes next could never happen.
Psyche wanders in search of Eros. She asks Ceres for help, then Juno. Neither will intervene. At last she goes to the one she most fears: Venus herself.
Venus sets impossible tasks. Sort a mountain of mixed grain. Gather wool from ferocious golden rams. Fill a flask from unreachable waters. And finally: descend into the underworld and bring back something from Persephone.
Do we volunteer?
What do you love enough that you would walk into Hades for it?
Psyche does not do this by will alone. She despairs. More than once, she considers death.
And help arrives. Ants sort the grain. A reed teaches her how to approach the rams. An eagle carries the water. A tower tells her how to go down and come back.
She completes the tasks, and then curiosity takes her again. She opens the box she was told not to open and falls into a deathlike sleep.
This time, Eros does not leave.
He gathers the sleep back into the box, wakes her, and goes to Jupiter on behalf of their union. Psyche set out to find Eros. In the end, he comes to find her.
Relationship requires both.
Psyche is given the cup of immortality. Their child is named Pleasure. Neither of them is who they were at the beginning. They have seen more of one another now: desire, doubt, fear, limitation, courage, vulnerability ... and still, they choose each other.
Perhaps this is what Venus is asking as she moves backward from Scorpio toward Libra, from Mars’s house toward her own.
Not only: Who or what do I love?
But: What does love ask of me?
And...
- Where am I armored?
- Where am I still fighting for love, or fighting not to need it?
- What must be seen?
- What must I relinquish?
- And what do I want enough to let the encounter change me?
These are the questions we’ll be exploring in Eros & Psyche, a six-week experiential journey with this myth. Not to study the story, but to let its questions meet our own lives.
We’ll begin soon, near the Star Point.
If these questions are alive in you, reply “Eros and Psyche,” and I’ll send you the invitation.
With love,
Meghna
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