Venus Conjunct Pluto as Mars Turns Retrograde: A Conflict on the Horizon

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Today we are going to take a look at Venus moving into the sign of Aquarius over the weekend, where she will immediately conjoin Pluto. Mars is also turning retrograde, which means that Venus is going right from its conjunction with Pluto into an opposition with Mars Retrograde. We're going to look at that little sequence of events. We're going to map out the timeline, and we're going to give you a sense of what you might expect from that total process—not just Venus conjoined Pluto, but Venus conjoined Pluto, moving into an opposition with Mars, who has just turned retrograde. What might that mean as a whole? That's our agenda for today.

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Alright, so on that note, let us shift our attention now to looking at this incredible sequence of events that is coming up. I’m just really fascinated by this. The more I’ve been looking at it, the more I’m like, "Wow, this is a really big event." So here we are, December 6, Friday. And what I want to draw our attention to is the fact that tomorrow, Saturday, December 7, you will see Venus conjoined Pluto. Now, you know Venus-Pluto conjunctions. We’ve done many videos in the past on my channel looking at Venus-Pluto, and you'll notice that there’s that stationing Mars in Leo opposite. So, this kind of moment of Venus-Pluto conjoining is followed very closely by the opposition between these planets. The retrograde of Mars happens over the weekend. From Saturday into Sunday, Mars turns retrograde quickly after that, by the middle of next week. Actually, if I give you the engagement range, it’s even earlier. It’s about Monday, and then we give it Wednesday into Thursday for the exact opposition. After that, a couple more degrees, all the way until Saturday, December 14, where the two planets are opposed and separating from that three-degree engagement range. So that is really significant.

Not only that, but if we continue this onward, we’re going to see that Pluto and Mars are then getting together in the opposition, which happens significantly later. Right? We’re looking at this as something that's happening around the beginning of the new year, so it's significantly after that, but Mars will engage with Pluto as well, and this is kind of part of that process. You could say at the same time, either way, what we’re concerned about this weekend is here we have tomorrow, the conjunction with Venus and Pluto, and then immediately after, the next week is all about the approaching opposition between Venus and Mars.

Venus and Mars' opposition brings many different things to the table. You're talking about, like, the lovers. And in some ways, the tension between the lovers—Venus and Mars—that is a quintessential part of their dance. These two planets are like, you know, it’s like the tango. There’s a constant push and pull between these quintessentially masculine, feminine, yin-yang type of energies that Mars and Venus represent. There are so many different ways of reading that tension, but when we get a conjunction to Pluto in Aquarius followed by an opposition to a Mars that is retrograde, we have some really interesting things to consider.

So what I would like to do for you today is give you five things to watch for, because, you know, I like my list of five. So here’s what I want to focus on. Number one: when we get Venus and Pluto together, as Pluto’s just ingressed into Aquarius, by the way, and we put them together in a sign that is related to the collective—a sign in Aquarius that relates to the larger humanitarian or social, cultural, collective level of our experience as human beings, the human family, the reality of life as a collective experience, a cultural experience, even on some levels ethnic or religious, anything that ties us to groups of people—really, excuse me.

And so we have this profound level at which a shift is taking place. Just starting to take place, it will unfold gradually, over 20 years within the domain of Aquarius. Almost immediately at the outset, Venus comes right in, conjoining Pluto and emphasizing the need for social, collective, cultural crisis, death, and rebirth. Now it’s a fast-moving transit. So is this the biggest deal in the world? Probably not. But will you see some pretty significant shifts? Potentially, yes. I would imagine that these shifts are probably the kinds that will take place in the workplace, in groups that you belong to, in social circles or networks that you belong to, among colleagues or other professionals, within a religious or spiritual community, or within a network of like-minded political people that you belong to. Whatever the case may be

, you're going to see that the relationships that you have that connect you to larger public, social, or societal domains are undergoing some form of change.

There’s some emphasis on crisis, transformation, death, regeneration—things that Venus contacting Pluto typically brings. But put that into an Aquarian container or context, and there could be some way that we feel we need to reinvent ourselves, artistically or aesthetically, or that we’re shifting our relationship to Venus, which may be described as the “pleasure body.” That’s a great metaphor for Venus. And they have to do with new ideas, new technologies. It would not be crazy to see someone going to a med spa with Venus conjoined Pluto in Aquarius. Let me go to a kind of little sanctuary, you know... I was—Ashley was telling me about this recently—like in ancient Greece, and I think not just in ancient Greece, but in different parts of the world, they had basically like... So, what's the word? "Convalescence"? I think that’s the word, but it’s basically like places where you would go to heal, eat warm food, you know, you take baths, you rest, and you let your body go from sick to neutral to like full cup again.

And Ashley was reading to me something about how much more normal this—the thought of needing to go to places like this when your spirit is low—was a vital part of, I think, it was ancient Greece. But anyway, you get the idea. And I mean, certainly we have little places of refuge like this in the world, but so often, what are we told? When you’re stressed out, you know, when you’re feeling empty, when life is dull, we’re told to reach for something that will give instant gratification or pleasure. For example, all the advertising that exists around food, much of which has additives and chemicals and is processed and perpetuates illness and dullness, not making you feel better, even though very quickly, the sugar makes you happy or whatever. You know, we all deal with this—being bombarded by this, having to contend with our desires for what will really nourish us versus what might be a temporary fix.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be puritanical. You know, there’s time for just saying “fuck it” and just having fun too. But I think that one thing that Venus and Pluto in Aquarius point to are shifts in how we are thinking about pleasure, happiness, wellness. Venus does not just represent things that are beautiful and enjoyable; she also has this association with cleanliness. For example, Venus was associated in the ancient world with the need to keep a standard of purity and cleanliness as well as beauty within a temple.

For example, temples should be beautiful, ornate, filled with flowers, fragrant incense, and yet they should also be very clean. That's Venus. Venus has this combination of beauty, enjoyment, and cleanliness. That's how you feel when you go to a, I don't know, one of those places where they've got the baths, the saunas. A couple of times a year, we try to go to this place in Minneapolis called, what is it called? The Watershed Spa. And they've just got a ton of baths, you know, different temperatures, cold plunges, saunas, and then this room that's just like quiet—you can lay down, and oh my God, just a couple of hours there, everything’s so clean and so enjoyable, and there's something very healing about that.

Well, I'm saying all of this because one thing that Venus and Pluto can represent is the need for a kind of regenerative healing experience that is beautiful, maybe a little scientific, maybe communal. So think about that energy from Venus Pluto—it's like she's getting some kind of recharge or shift in her thinking with respect to beauty, wellness, health, and community. Okay, those are all possibilities. We could also just see that there are tensions and the need for transformation within various social networks, groups, friendships, etc.

Now, number two on my list, and we're building toward that Mars Retrograde. So, as we go along, that Mars Retrograde is going to come into this list. There also may be a shift in thought, ideal, or belief, reflected by the Venus-Pluto conjunction. Venus-Pluto, in an air sign like Aquarius, has the power to shift our thinking. But what is that thinking informing in our relationships? The shift in thinking is somehow a relational shift in values.

This is what I need from a relationship. This is what I need socially. This is what I need from the culture or group I belong to. This is what this group, or this relationship, or this network does or does not fulfill. There may be a shift in relational philosophies or values reflected by the Venus-Pluto dynamic that then comes into immediate conflict within relationships—specific relationships, specific friendships, specific conflicts, or clashes of values or prioritization of values.

Because Venus then immediately goes into the opposition with Mars Retrograde in Leo. Well, it's fine that you believe that a group, or a relationship, or a collective should function in this particular way, but what about me? You know? What about my needs? What about my desires? What about my role or my personhood, right? Mars in Leo might feel like it has to advocate for a different individual need that somehow cuts against the grain of what some kind of group needs or wants or desires. So it's like my will versus the group or my will versus the needs of the relationship.

Even in couples, we often find that one person will be like, maybe we could do this, and it's some proposal of how two people could work together to create something or to get over a bad pattern. And the other person goes, "Yeah, well, you know, that's not what I want." Or that's, you know, somehow they might feel that it's an affront to their ego. There can be clashes that come up. Venus and Pluto together in an air sign, right as Pluto has ingress, feels like a bold new idea that Venus has immediately coming into some form of conflict, some crisis or tension, or battle—a bashing of heads, like a power struggle.

So, watch for that, because Venus may get really excited, but then immediately that excitement goes into this kind of oppositional tension with Mars Retrograde. And the Mars Retrograde could be intractable, or it could represent someone who is afraid that this new idea or thing will somehow transcend or limit them, you know, go beyond them, or make them irrelevant. There could be a fear of the loss of power or dignity in something that Venus is proposing, something that Mars feels potentially disempowered by.

Anyway, number three: Mars becoming disempowered in light of what Venus is bringing forth. Here's the other thing: Venus in Leo represents the kind of traditional "my will, my way, my power, my sovereignty, my light, my specialness, my post in life." That's kind of Mars in Leo. Mars Retrograde in Leo, opposite Venus, who's coming off from Pluto and Aquarius, might be about laying something down. Like, you know what? I can compromise. There's a very powerful way in which Mars Retrograde may actually make this opposition far less oppositional than it might otherwise seem.

And that's because a retrograde Mars might be a Mars who is willing to abdicate something—some power, some ability, some role, some need—and say, "You know what? Let's do the 'we' rather than the 'me.'" This is not easy for me to do, but you may find a kind of reluctant Mars gently or gradually laying down its arms, if you see what I mean. So, Mars becoming disempowered in light of what Venus brings forth might be a way of saying that Mars has to surrender something in light of what Venus brings forward.

Can Mars do that gracefully? Is Mars going to go down swinging? That remains to be seen. Every situation will be a little different.

We also have the possibility that Mars will be unwilling to compromise—that a retrograde Mars is sort of intractable and stubborn, clutching or clinging to power because it fears irrelevance or it fears that it's being undermined. There's always a tension between relational identification and individual identification, collective identification and personal identification, and that tension has to be held. It's not something that we resolve by deciding which one we are. It's something that we work the tension of throughout our whole lives.

For example, I said earlier, I'm someone who was born with the South Node in Aquarius on the Midheaven, North Node in Leo in the Fourth House. The tension that I've learned to hold between the collective and the personal in my work has been an ongoing process, such that now what I realize is that what's really important to me is that I create and hold a space that acknowledges our collective participation, but really focuses on the personal level at which we engage with that.

That's something that, you know, it might seem like I've chosen one side or the other, but for me, it's still a tension that I have to hold constantly. And that's probably also reflected in the fact that I've got the North Node in Leo. Right? Anyway, you'll listen to my talks with Ari for a little bit of the evolutionary take on the nodes, and that would make more sense for my chart. But anyhow, that tension has to be held, right?

Like, for example, in order to not have my head buried in the sand, I take in... People often ask me, who do you follow when it comes to the unpacking of mundane astrology? There are two places that I really enjoy, and I'll recommend them to you. I don't mind doing that. You may not share the same values that I do, and you may not like the channels that I like, but I really like Richard Tarnas' work. He is probably the main person that I turn to for meaningful unpacking of collective astrology, mundane astrology, world astrology. I love his work, Cosmos and Psyche, and I follow what he's saying about major cycles like Neptune-Saturn coming up or, you know, the Pluto-Saturn dynamic that happened back in, whatever it was, 2019-2020, early 2020.

I like Dan Waites. He came through Nightlight as a student. He's got the World Astrology Report. Love his approach. I find it very creative and interesting. He has a kind of journalistic objectivity in the way he presents that I find valuable. So, I have to hold the tension as someone who is an astrologer between the way in which I track and pay attention to astrology in the collective versus how I practice it personally.

Right? We always have to have a way in relationships. If you're married, if you have a partner, whatever the case may be, you have to hold the tension between being identified as a "we," as a unit, as a collective, and how do I honor, acknowledge, and hold the tension of being an individual, being a part, but being together.

In Bhakti Yoga, the great tension between Krishna and Radha is described as the tension, sort of metaphysically, as unity and separateness, as together and separate. That is one of the reasons that Krishna and Radha remain at the center of my heart. Even though I'm not part of the Bhakti Yoga community I was a part of, they are like avatars that live in my heart because the entire walk and path of devotion in life, as I understand it, through the Bhakti tradition, whatever way in which you relate to the Divine, has to do with the holding of the tension that we feel between being apart from the Divine and having a unique, autonomous sense of our own personal divinity and being unified in some way and completely together with our source—apartness and togetherness.

How do we hold that tension? One of the ways we hold that tension is through our aching, longing, romantic yearning, and devotion for the things we love and serve—for the jobs we hold, the people we love, the things we care for. We're devoted to them because we feel like we can't get close enough to them. Because our apartness is like a little bit of a sting or a bitterness that keeps driving the power of devotion in our lives. But at the exact same time, there's a way in which that apartness has to be held. If we yearn too much and lose the importance of that apartness and how it facilitates the yearning and the serving and the devotion itself, then we're not capable of devoting ourselves to the utmost.

Because we also

have to hold that apartness as a fundamental ingredient for the act of devotion. Right? So, these metaphysical tensions are felt by most people who have ever been. You know these things. I'm saying them maybe in a language that's like, whatever, philosophical. But you know these things. If you've ever been devoted to something outside of yourself, you know how hard it is to be so devoted, so in love with someone or something, and to simultaneously know that that love exists because you also work on that apartness. You hold it, you keep it.

You know it's important. You know the ache of that apartness is a part of the specialness of devotion. This is Mars opposite Venus. What are we devoted to? What does it require of us? Can we hold the tension between me and we? Can we hold the tension between giving other people space to be themselves while still remaining devoted to them and them to us?

These are deep questions that, in a sense, are at the heart of the potential conflict we see and the potential reasons why someone may or may not be willing to participate relationally or to give or compromise or mediate tensions. It's like, if you're so self-serving that all you think about is your own happiness, right? Well, we never really get to taste the most profound happiness because, according to most mystical traditions, the most profound happiness is found in taking the deepest pleasure in the other's happiness.

I put it like this because this is something that most people understand. You know, in the Kama Sutra it teaches this, many Taoist traditions teach this, and it's like you get something really special going on when there's a playful competition between how much pleasure you can give a partner, someone you love, and they're trying to please you more than you can please them. And there's like this playful pleasure prioritization of the other's happiness.

This is one of the ways that Krishna and Radha's relationship is described in some of the scriptures in the Bhakti Yoga tradition. It's like a playful competition of who can out-serve, out-love, and sort of out-pleasure the other. And when we take that orientation, rather than defending, protecting, preserving our own at all costs...

Of course, we need a willing participant, someone who takes the same approach with us, and that's where things often get complicated. But tensions like this between Venus and Mars can be like fundamental reminders of the fact that the best relationships... took a piece of fuzz in my mouth. The best relationships in life are the ones where there's this kind of "I see you and you see me, and I'm so interested in loving and serving you," and the other person looks at you that way. Game over, right? Those are our most profound friendships. Those are the most profound soul contracts we have, you know.

And they're the most profound because they model the kind of thing that's happening between the soul and God or divinity, whatever you want to call it. Alright.

Number five: an opportunity for the refinement of Mars, given the feedback of Venus. So, there's a way in which we cannot become everything we're capable of without the refining influence of other people. You know, there's a lot of value placed on sovereignty, that word, which I think is a very problematic word, and I've talked about that before. You get into my soapbox about sovereignty, I'll spare you.

But anyway, one of the things that comes up is people think, you know, the measure of my worth has to do with how independent I am, how autonomous I am, how empowered I am, how self-healed I am, and we forget that reality is a relational matrix. There is no, truly, no independence without simultaneous dependence. The two can't be separated, right? It's like the yin and yang, you know? They can't be pulled apart.

Anything we hope to become individually, in other words, is always coming in a social context, in a relational context, in an ecology of soul. And so, you know, Mars opposes Mars Retrograde, opposing Venus, there are so many ways in which we can only be refined when we set down the defense of ourself. I'm going to be an undefended self for a minute. Yeah, of course, you got to be careful who you open the gate to in that situation, but when you're with someone who loves you,

We have to imagine that other people can see us better than we can see ourselves at times, and that when we open ourselves and say, "You know what, I am open to your healing, refining influence. I am open to being persuaded to think about and do things differently because of you, and I can try things on that you suggest, and I am capable of doing that and then evaluating whether or not I think that was a good idea." But we don't. Often, we don't let ourselves get that far, right? Because we think to be open to any kind of influence whatsoever is too dangerous, and sometimes it is.

And again, you have to be selective and discerning, but opening ourselves to the influence of the other is one of the best ways to become more individual. Because really, in a relational reality, individuality is something shaped by intimacy. It's like I become more intimately myself because of the intimate influences that I have allowed to bring forth things from within.

You know, it's like if I develop intimacy with astrology, if I develop intimacy with an instrument or with people, or Hilda... You know, you can see her laying on the floor back there. Whatever I have allowed in, when I let those things come in—those spirits, those souls—they help bring out some of the most fundamental pieces of myself that I didn't even know were there or could be there. And so character is refined and shaped, individuality is refined or shaped through our ability to create and allow for intimacy, intimacy with not just people, but, you know, with an animate cosmos—with the wind and the water, with the weather and with moods and thoughts and with spirit.

Uh, you know, and with the things that we serve, the crafts we study, all of these things. So, we could see this opposition as an opportunity for us to be refined and shaped and more intimately distinguished as souls because of what we're allowing to influence us. I'm not going to see this as a threat. I'm going to see this as the gentle, refining influence of soul from without, coming to me from within.

So, let's leave it there for the day. Some good thoughts, I think, for us to ponder with Venus opposing Pluto and then running into the opposition with Mars next week. We'll look at this again next week for sure, but at least for now, you get some sense of the sequence that is unfolding, starting this weekend.

I hope this has been useful. After I sign off, you can learn more about rewards that are available when you support the channel. Remember, we're trying to get to 1937 backers by January 1. We are well on our way. Thank you for supporting this channel. If you value this work, if you find it something that you look forward to, if it's a part of what feeds your soul throughout your year, month by month, week by week, please consider supporting us. And thank you again. We'll see you guys next week. Bye-bye.