Venus as Evening Star is Squaring Uranus – What to Watch For!

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology Happy Friday everybody. Today Venus appearing as the Evening Star is now squaring Uranus, and in a sense completing a full circle that began with the disappearance of Venus under eclipse season and under the banner of the Jupiter Uranus conjunction in Taurus.

So, I feel like this is sort of like a full-circle moment. At least, that's how I see it. So, we're going to talk today about five radical ideas that Venus and Uranus may present us with right now. She kind of completes this circuit of activity that she's been on and appears as the Evening Star this week and squares Uranus in her home sign of Taurus. So that is our agenda for today.

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In September, I'm doing a talk on Venus's 12 Love Languages, looking at Venus through the signs, and really trying to understand what our Venus placement is telling us and what kind of story is told through the placement of Venus in our charts. And then in October, I'm doing a talk on the myth of astrological compatibility, what everybody gets wrong about the astrology of relationships.

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All right, let's put the real-time clock up and take a look at what is happening today. We've got the here it is. So you can see here. Oops. Where are we? Here we go. There we are. Now. We can see here that Venus is the sign of Leo. This would have taken place last night, the past couple of days through today, and then separated over the weekend. So you may have been feeling this transit building already over the past couple of days, like July 30 through August 2. On any of these days this week, you would have been starting to feel this transit building, especially as Venus appeared as the evening star at the end of July. And then Venus squares Uranus today, that's August 2 Friday. And then, if we move this forward just a touch, you'll see that within three degrees, we have the separation by Sunday.

So that's kind of the range, and it's still active at the time of the New Moon on Sunday, and Leo is as well. So, in a sense, the New Moon is sort of doubling down on things. And we will be looking at that New Moon on Monday.

So, along with Mercury's retrograde, let's back it up with just a touch. So Venus appearing as the Evening Star and squaring Uranus in Taurus at the beginning of the week, we talked about Venus-Uranus, and sort of zoomed out and looked at the big picture of where Venus has been. And the fact that Venus is appearing and hitting this moment, and I sort of contextualized it and offered some delineations I want to present us today with five radical Venus Uranus ideas that we might consider, or, you know, meditate on right now, maybe some of these are applicable and be one of them is applicable for you more than another or maybe they all have something to say right now.

Maybe none of them, maybe there's a totally different direction in which Venus and Uranus are going to take you right now, especially if they have some strong aspects in your birth chart. And that's cool, too. At the very least, this will also be valuable for you in terms of developing an understanding of these two planets in archetypal combination.

So number one, beauty is as valuable as virtue. There is an old idea that we have, and I think I don't know where it came from originally. I would guess in the West, probably the Christian worldview on some level, not to put anything on trial right now or anything like that, but that morality is a subject higher and more important than aesthetics or beauty. It is always the case, right? That, like whether you're a good person or not, is more important than, let's say, how beautiful a piece of art is, or, you know, concerns with morality are usually placed like in a hierarchy above concerns or interest in beauty.

Beauty, in this sense, is always being put into the context of things that are materialistic or potentially more like; there's more shallowness, or somehow more, there's something more problematic and material and superficial about concerns with beauty. And put up on a pedestal are like, you know, all of our concerns with the right thing, the virtuous thing, the good thing, the moral thing, the just thing, etc. And what if the radical idea is that they are not better or worse than one another, beauty versus, let's say, virtue, very Venus, Jupiter, by the way? Rather, they have equally important but very different things to say that might even be complimentary. In the ancient world, for example, the earliest astrologers participated in a worldview that saw beauty, truth, and justice or goodness as virtues, as all wrapped up in one another.

So there's a way in which, for example, something like music and the musical scale is intelligent. It there's a kind of logos, there's a, there's a sensibility to it like in, when you study music, there's an intellectual way in which it makes sense. It's like a language that is sensible and intelligible. But at the exact same time, it also is beautiful. At the exact same time, there's something about that which is true and beautiful and also considered good. So the good, the true, and the beautiful are all sort of interwoven in the ancient world. And I think we lose that sense of things sometimes because we do tend to split things along, like, beauty is concerned with beauty are superficial and temporary. Concerns with goodness are of a higher order.

Now, let's give an example of where that might actually be applicable. When we're being told by, you know, like advertising, or there's just a sort of culture of consumerism and so forth, that, that you're not good enough, the way you are, you need to be more beautiful, you need to look a certain way your body needs to look a certain way, you need to have certain things you need to wear certain things, you need to have a certain wealth or status. And when we're being fed that kind of stuff all the time, I think one of the most important ways that we push back against that is to say, it's my character, and the quality of my heart and my consciousness that matter, not these superficial concerns. Yes, right.

So we can all agree; I think most of us would probably agree with that. And we've maybe at some point had to. We've needed that message, maybe because we've been judging ourselves very superficially, like just my body type. Look a certain way, or what have you?

On the other hand, it goes too far, if we don't have some color in our lives, you know, like, as much as it matters to be like a good person or to feel that our value is somehow just inherent in our being. There's also a fundamental need to be an aesthetic creature that displays itself as animals and nature display themselves; they show the colors they show, their plumage, they, they have their spots or their stripes. So, each of us has a need to experience ourselves as an aesthetic being, in other words, as a being of beauty in a world that is quite clearly beautiful and displaying itself. How do we do that without, you know, beauty becoming something that is vain or something that is actually harming us in some ways because it's superficial? But I think the radical idea to consider is your concerns with beauty, your investment in a romantic, beautiful sense of who you are, and the need to live a creative life that displays itself in beautiful form. This is just as important as it's no more or less important than anything else, especially thinking that you can live a life and be good but not experience beauty. And that would be enough. I don't think it would. I don't think most civilizations from all around the world have ever believed that just acting and doing the right thing is enough to feel satisfied in life. I mean, for some people, maybe it is, but I feel like there is a reason that we need to lay in the sun and take in nature and feel sensually gratified. There's a reason that we explore and experiment with how we look, tattoos, the way our bodies look in the foods we eat, and the love we make. And I think that sometimes we need a reminder that we polarize things, you know, it's like, we've gone so far as to, as to say that, you know, like, like any concern at like, sometimes we think to ourselves any concern with, with beauty with what I find attractive and unattractive, ugly versus beautiful, my tastes, my style, that all of these things are superficial, and all I should really worry about is the quality of my character or something like that. I can't think of anyone that I've ever known, that I've really liked, who doesn't have a kind of flair, you know, a peacock plumage of their own. So let's push on this idea that beauty and a romantic sensual investment in life are not as important and valuable as our concerns with goodness, justice, and virtue. And those things have to go together. Somehow, we have to tap into both sides of ourselves. That's a radical Venus Uranus kind of idea, but reinvention isn't about getting better. Here is something that I've noticed. A lot of the times when clients have come in over the years, and they've been going through a Uranus-Venus dynamic, like Uranus transiting Uranus and sending their natal Venus, for example, is the most common, any kind of aspect. There will be a great evolution in terms of the Venusian dimension of life. That could be really personal if Venus is in your first house or your ascendant ruler, or it could have to do with revolutions in taste style, creativity, romance, love, sexuality, friendships, and relationships in general. The need to reinvent or create, like a revolution with respect to these Venusian topics, is paramount when Uranus transits Venus in the natal chart. But often, what I try to help people with is this very common idea that these moments of revolution mean that you're getting better. That's a problematic thing. I've noticed better. You know, it's like, what's what like would put, let's put it this way when a like when, when an animal goes through, like a molting period, I guess what it's called, are like shedding or sloughing off the skin. Do we say, Oh yeah, good, good that you're doing that, you're getting better? Or do when, like, I was thinking about it like this, when you know those insects and reptiles that can change the color of their skin, depending on their skin when they're in different environments to blend in, or to camouflage or whatever do we say is that transformation that just occurred indicates that you're a better lizard, you know. So, my very simple point is that we adapt and change, and we evolve, and the word evolve means something like unfolding. And so frequently, we put a linear and hierarchical sense. We bring a sense of something hierarchical and progressive and linear into the idea of evolution or revolution, going from ignorant to enlightened or going from basic to more sophisticated or, you know, going from ugly to beautiful or something like that. So, we then place this value on me, which makes me a better or more valuable person. A radical Venus Uranus idea is that shifting and changing and evolving and revolutionizing is about exploration and experimentation. And what happens when I wear this metaphorical outfit into the world? What kind of feedback do I get? How do people look at me and experience hands me? What kind of interactions do I have? Who do I get to become? What part of myself do I get to explore? There's so much more freedom and flexibility in that way of looking at it. I think then, when we can only ever think of evolution as progress from ignorance to enlightenment, of course, there is a sense in which things can and do progress along hierarchies of ignorance to enlightenment or of, you know, relatively little virtue to more virtue or something like that. But I feel like we don't take the idea of freedom far enough when it comes to transits to Uranus.

We frequently think of Uranus as a revolutionary, and in our, like, I would say, our sort of social-historical context, revolution is often involved in moments of societal progress, morality, etc. And that's legitimate, right? But we don't fully appreciate, within the scope of eternity, that revolution is often nothing more than sloughing off of skin, which is a natural, kind of archetypal stage of life that doesn't need to have or like be placed into a value hierarchy. You changed, beautiful, interesting, what will happen, right? It doesn't often need to be more than that. So reinvention, reinventing yourself, can be about exploration, not becoming better, or being pure or closer to some end goal or something like that.

Number three, truth is found in following creative impulses. Similar idea. We often have questions in life, about life, about ourselves, about why things are happening, about why we're here. And the questions that we have, unfortunately, we often go looking for intellectual answers to, it's like, we have a question. And then, we search for an ideology.

Or we search for a dogma or a doctrine or an explanation. And I think there's a place for that, don't get me wrong, because astrology has been one of the answers. For me, I am a kind of intellectual. It's a paradigm and a language, and it's like a kind of religious or spiritual tradition that has served as a kind of answer to questions for me. And so I don't have any problem with that kind of searching for truth and finding it in intellectual ways or in finding explanations or systems or paradigms.

However, there is also Venus Uranus, who has an idea about how truth may be found. The radical idea here is that if you listen and follow creative impulses, which rarely give you a sense ahead of time of where everything will go exactly in the same way that when you're improvising on an instrument, you don't know exactly where you're going. But you're following something. And you're following an impulse, and you're following a thread. You're flitting about, like a bird, but an animal in imagery today. And when you follow that impulse, before you know it, answers have come through the experience of creativity, of following a creative impulse, and all of a sudden, answers come. And sometimes, the answers come in ways that aren't intellectual. They're just the kind of knowing that will disseminate or crystallize over time. But there's a radical idea, really: rather than seeking intellectual or paradigmatic or systematic explanations to answer your questions, listen and follow creative impulses. And when we follow them and let them unfold, then the creative impulse, which is the impulse toward embodied sensual experience, that's a Venusian thing, will become the means by which we arrive at truth, which is a way of saying that it's not just that truth is beautiful. Right? It's not just that truth leads us to a real understanding of beauty, which is why, at certain periods of time, historically, art has followed that formula, and you've seen like, beauty should follow from a virtuous idea about what's worth painting or what's worth displaying, and art in the beauty is somehow emanating from a morally pure idea that leads the production of the art.

The opposite idea would be that you follow the impulse of centrally embodied creative, spontaneous beauty and that it leads you to an understanding of truth, which is like moving in the opposite door action. So, let's risk the idea that you can find truth through creativity as much as you will ever need to place creativity below truth. Hope that makes sense.

Number four, freedom is found in space, not action. I think it's funny that, and I do this myself all the time; I never mean to, like, I never mean when I make, like, certain points, they're almost always because I recognize this point from my own experience, right? I think it's funny, though, that we constantly think about freedom in terms of will. That's crazy. If you really spend time thinking about it, There is nothing that, in a sense, binds us into storylines and outcomes and fated sequences of events more than the exercise of will.

It's such a funny thing that we think of freedom in terms of the ability to exercise our will. But the truth is that as soon as you exercise, your will meet to you are, you're inserting, it's like you're putting a boat into a little river, like a small little like a kid's boat in the for the bathtub, you're putting a boat, like on the river. And immediately, okay, you've chosen to put the boat on the river. But now it is captured by all of the currents of life, and it is now bound up in them. You know, so your freedom to choose to put the boat into the current is there.

But in a sense, Indian astrologers, by the way, and the progenitors of karmic science have said this for a long time. In a sense, there's nothing more delusional than thinking that freedom is found through the exercise of your will. Because as soon as you exercise your will, you're putting into a world that is bound by laws. And that is bound by sequences of events that will block the choice and the action into an entire web of other choices that will then dictate the way that things happen.

It's like, Yes, you are participating in reality, but don't think that your will, the exercising of your will, is somehow going into a space that's not going to immediately bind it up in other things. It's funny. And so one of the ways that a lot of mystics in different traditions have talked about the actual definition of freedom is not so much what you are free to do, or what you are free to act on, or what you are free to insert into the river, right? Rather, it's about your ability to create space and try to create a relative amount of space and distance and separation from the constant need to act.

In other words, there's something about acting itself that is willing and acting itself that is bound, not free. And so a radical Venus-Uranus idea is that your happiness may lie in creating more space. And that space is less about what you do and more about the quality of your being. This is why I find a very simple example of this, which would be when people feel that they need to feel less cluttered and freer mentally and emotionally and to feel more serenity in their lives. Because we're all flowing down this river, right?

Let's say, like, I've got to clean out my house, or I've got to purge my closet, or I've got to purge my garage because we see an intimate association with creating space. And sort of taking more things out of the river that we're moving down, it's like the more things I have to manage, and that are all circulating around me, the less spacious this journey feels, you know. And that's not so much about what you do as much as it is creating space around you to have to manage and do less.

So, you're still in life, we're still acting, we're still agents, we still have participation. But it's amazing to me how frequently we think we get to freedom through doing things that will somehow lead to a condition of freedom in the future when actually a lot of it is found by eliminating things and creating space around us now.

You know, but we're all we're all caught up in that. And I think part of that comes from I think of my grandparents. And my grandpa was like a, you know, Depression-era kid. And his idea was, you work really hard, and you keep sort of chopping wood and carrying water, and then you get to retirement. You know, it's like a very American thing, I think. And you get to retirement, and then you have this spaciousness.

You know what? He could not stop working when he got through retirement because he never learned. I mean, I'm not kidding you, my dad; I remember my dad and my mom when I was a kid, lamenting the fact that we would go on vacation to visit my grandparents in retirement, and my grandpa would be out on his tractor all day long working on the land because he didn't know how to stop.

There are many ways of finding freedom, don't get me wrong, but one of them is found in creating space, not in doing something that we believe, like some exercise of our free will, that we believe will lead to freedom in the future. I mean, that flies in the face of another myth that I'm certainly bought into, which is that, you know, you try to create freedom through success, like enough success will lead you to some state where, like, the world is your oyster, you can just do whatever you want. I find myself constantly having to tell myself that's not true. You know? So, freedom is found in creating space, not in doing things that will lead to freedom in the future. I think that's a pretty radical idea. Not saying the opposite can't be true.

So remember, these are all just like meditations, and explorations are not. I'm not trying to indoctrinate anyone. Freedom means fewer labels or labels loosely held. I have noticed time and again with Uranus and Venus that people will say, like, Okay, let me think of a good example. Okay, let's just use the idea of someone who decides they're going to wear, they're going to wear all tie-dye. So they say now I'm a tie-dye person. And I'm thinking of this because under the Uranus Venus transit last year, I sort of wore more tie dye because it actually started indoctrinating me into the cult of the Grateful Dead. And I've had a lot of fun; I've mounted a tie dye where now I've worn more tie dye.

In fact, just for you guys, one day soon, I'll wear tie-dye as I record. Anyhow, let's just say that someone says, Now I'm a tie-dye wearer. And someone gets really, really identified with this. Now, don't get me wrong, I believe that there are many. There are many categories that we like, and we have different casts of characters; for example, I would call myself an astrologer because that's a big part of who I am. Or I would call myself a Minnesotan, or like a Vikings fan, or, I don't know, some of the other things that define me, like being a dad, or a dog owner, or whatever.

And I'm not against labels, right? Because they're real. And anyone who says they aren't is just unaware of how important and weighty and significant labels are, especially when we have a world that will mistreat people based on labels, right? Prejudice, racism. We marginalize people based on the labels that we give them, right? So there's a very, very real way in which we experience ourselves every day in terms of the various categories of identity. So they're real, and they're not; you can't just discard them at the same time. I think that there is something to be said when thinking about ourselves. I'm going to find some level of my value or significance because now I am identifying as a tie-dye, where you know, and I don't think it's wrong to have labels any more.

Any labels that we give ourselves or identity categories that we fall into, or don't fall into, or whatever. But I wonder all the time, I wonder about how we hold these things loosely enough so that we don't lose track of the soul. The soul that, as Heraclitus said, and you've heard me quote many times before, is explored forever to a depth beyond report. The soul likes to play hide and seek; if you try to define the soul as a tie-dye-wearing astrologer who is a part of the cult of the Grateful Dead, who likes Jeep Wranglers, who you know, who's a dad, whatever. The more that I try to pin the soul down, the more it will resist and hide and create unconscious circumstances by means of which we can deconstruct the literalness of those categories to get back to the depth and mystery of being.

There is a way in which we can see each other that respects and loves and admires and takes very seriously the various costumes that we wear, the various identity categories that we define ourselves by and experience life through, while also seeing the soul and not losing track of the fact that we've lived many lifetimes there are more to live.

There are identity categories that we live by and define our lives by in certain seasons, and then we'll slough them off and maybe try another one. So freedom might mean, for some of us, shedding identifiers; even if they're there, it's not so much that you shed them or say that they're unreal as much as it is that you don't take them as seriously or that you don't let them become a sort of Saturnian prison. Even if we're quite impressed with the identity categories that we have, it's like, how do we hold them loosely enough so that we're still a soul, so that we still primarily keep coming back to ourselves in the meditation of our heart, as a soul. That's really important.

It's important that we stay in touch with that, you know, even as we also honor and acknowledge the very human reality of all of the identity categories that we hold and live through. So it's a tension that we have to hold; I think it's not an easy one to hold. And so, but a radical idea is that freedom might mean holding, learning to hold these things more loosely, and or using fewer labels and getting more in touch with the sort of utter mysteriousness of our being.

So, meditations for the day are as Venus squares Uranus. I hope you find them useful and engaging. Take what works, leave what doesn't. As always, I really enjoy hanging out with all of you and hope you have a great weekend. We'll see you again next week. Bye.