Venus Squares Pluto — Love, Death and the Soul

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Today we're going to take a look at Venus moving into the sign of Scorpio, making an immediate square to Pluto in the sign of Aquarius. Anytime Venus and Pluto get together, its headlines in the astrological world Venus Pluto contacts are pretty intense, dramatic. They can be very erotic and creative.

I'm going to give you a list today of five things to watch for, and we're going to dive deep and consider this from the perspective of the soul. I'm going to share with you some ideas that I hope will be thought provoking and really give us a slightly different way of thinking about Venus Pluto, in addition to all of the normal ways that we're used to thinking about Venus and Pluto, like drama or death and rebirth and love and relationships.

That's like, you know, everyone know, if you know anything about astrology, you're probably you've probably heard that before, but I hope today will go a little bit deeper. So anyway, that's our agenda for today.

Before we get into it, remember to like and subscribe. Turn on the notification bell for updates, so that you know when we have new episodes or when I'm doing a live stream. Subscribe if you haven't yet. It takes a second, and it really helps us grow. We really appreciate it.

You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on my website, which is Nightlight astrology.com, I'm breaking up promotions into parts these days and seeing how that works to just kind of decongest the front end of our sessions.

If you go up to the Courses page, click on first year course. We are almost ready to begin the next ancient astrology for the modern mystic program. It starts on November 15. It is not too late to register. At the end of today's content, you'll find an informational video telling you everything you need to know about the program.

Check out the need based tuition option. If you're someone who'd like to take the program, but you have to work within a fixed or limited income or exchange rates are high in another country. Please do check this out. It's at the bottom of the first year course page. You'll see the tuition assistance button. Apply now tell us your situation. You can pick within a sliding scale the tuition rate that works for you.

We try to make sure that no one's priced out of studying astrology. That's really important to us. It's 30 courses on the year. Everything's live, but also recorded, so you can attend the live webinars, or you can follow along at your own pace. And again, at the end of today's content, I'll tell you more about that.

All right. On that note, let's shift our attention to the real time clock. We're gonna yesterday, we introduced Venus and Scorpio, and I think today, we'll continue on some of the same notes by by way of the Venus Pluto square.

So the Venus Pluto square, you know, follows in sort of similarly dramatic fashion. You can see Venus moving into the square. This is Thursday, November 6. Today. The Ingress occurs yesterday. We prepped for it by talking about Venus and Scorpio. If you missed that episode, go back. Episode, go back and check it out.

But anyway, we're going to speed this up by a day. We'll see that the square comes through tomorrow, Friday, November 7. If we give it three degrees of separation, get it to about Monday, November 10. And so I would say you could anything we're talking about today, you will especially notice tomorrow, Friday, but then you could notice it Saturday the eighth. So Friday the seventh, Saturday the eighth, maybe a little bit this evening even. So that would be the broad range in which I would expect to see the effects manifesting.

So today, what I want to do is, I, you know, when we talk about Venus and Pluto, the low hanging fruit for this kind of transit is always the same drama in love and relationships, death and rebirth, a Plutonian word in love and relationships, inflection moments in relationships where you go deeper or you get out unexpected betrayals in relationships, greater depth and intimacy in relationships, these are the kinds of things that we commonly see when Venus and Pluto get together,

Intense transformation in friendships around things like women, sisters, daughters, lovers, sex. Sometimes, you know, there'll be Venusian things related to beauty or art or creativity that come up with Pluto. They can be intense, creative, transformational, and a little bit extra, because that's what Pluto does when it gets in contact, when it gets in touch with Venus.

Today, I want to talk about Venus, squaring Pluto from the perspective of the soul. I think what I what, what I mean by that is, let's consider what reality is, or what it looks like from the perspective of the soul, because we all have a spirit, soul from the perspective of the spirituality that ancient astrologers held that's moving lifetime through lifetime, our birth chart in this lifetime, our body, our psychology in this lifetime, are just one iteration of the soul's identity.

It's had others before, and it will have more to come. Com. That's the basic belief that astrologers in the east and west adopt when considering the information in a birth chart. So if we start from what is a Venus Pluto square within this lifetime, this body, this ego, the stories that I'm involved with right now, that's where I think those traditional interpretations about change in relationships makes a ton of sense.

But if we consider the soul's perspective, an immortal, spiritual being that is journeying and going through a process of enlightenment as it travels, I think some of the some of the similar, simple, similar topics, take on a much deeper and richer metaphysical quality or meaning. So that's the idea behind this list today, and I hope you'll find it useful.

All right. Well, number one, the soul. In when Venus and Pluto get together, I think we are reminded that the soul is a a witness, and the soul needs to be witnessed. Let's get into this at a little deeper level. The word witness is actually fundamental to the language of ancient Greek astrology. The word epi materia, which is a word that is used when talking about aspects, implies a witnessing from one planet to another.

When two planets are contacting one another through an aspect like a Trine or a square, the planets are said to be bearing witness to each other. And as they bear witness to each other, they're witnessing on a symbolic archetypal level, is bearing witness to something about the nature of the soul as it exists in this body in this lifetime.

And so even the fact that astrology begins with asking, Who is this soul, and the immediate response from the heavens, from the perspective of the birth chart, is a collection of gods and goddesses bearing witness, testifying to something about the nature of this living being in this lifetime, is that that's remarkable. It suggests that we're not automatons. We are only known by virtue of what other people see in us and say about us, and so that gives us the premise of a that gives us a starting point of a relational Cosmos, that we are embedded in a living animal, and we're part of the living animal, but it's also bigger than us, that simultaneous oneness and manyness is a paradox that is not meant to be solved.

It's not like a math problem that's meant to be solved. It's an experience that's meant to be lived. And the the experience is talked about in many ways, but one of the perennial ways of describing this experience is the experience of love and of witnessing that loving each other means bearing witness to one another and seeing each other at significantly deeper and deeper levels, which is to say a soul level.

Have you ever felt like someone has seen your soul has looked into you and really seen you, when people really see us. And I'm not talking about see, you know, like sometimes people see us and then they criticize us. There's, is there anything more painful than that? But I mean, have you ever felt like someone held space for you as a soul and saw you and acknowledged you, or pointed something out, or just said, Hey, as I look so deeply into you. Here's what I see.

I don't think there's anything that it's like an itch that nothing else can scratch. You know, it's like an itch that only can be scratched through someone sitting and seeing us in a way that we can't see ourselves. You know, we have mirrors, we've discovered that there are certain kinds of surfaces that reflect in a certain way. So we can actually see what we look like. I'm sitting in front of a camera, and I can see what I look like on the screen if I look over at it.

But prior to all that, all requires a technology that all requires some constructing something so that that kind of vision can be made available to us. Well, the basic technology of witnessing and mirroring are other living beings. And what's so interesting is that living beings by witnessing other people, holding space for other people, seeing other people, seeing the soul seeing something that's deep and real and substantive.

It's that act of witnessing that paradoxically facilitates a growing ability to see ourselves as a very similar statement. You know that love thy neighbor, treat other people as you want to be treated you. Can't tell that. Your brain can't tell the difference between, you know, sort of giving a hug and getting a hug when you're embracing someone, when we bear witness to other people and really see their soul behind the mask, behind the events and activities. It's really special.

I would say my capacity to do this has grown because I have the privilege of reading charts for other people, and so I get to bear witness to their lives and their stories, and as I'm doing so, there will be this really special moment. Doesn't happen all the time. In fact, it's like a game of hide and seek. You never know when you're going to find the soul, but sometimes it just it pops out and all of a sudden you go, wow, there. That's that this is a little spark of conscious eternity in a in a body sitting in front of me.

What a what a beautiful living being this is. And it's not that I say that necessarily to my clients, you know, but in the way that when that kind of recognition emerges, and someone can feel that they're being seen in that way. I don't think there's any greater compliment that we look for or that we can give or receive.

Now, the reason that I'm saying all of this is because when Venus and Pluto get in touch, we become sometimes painfully aware of the difference between a superficial ornamentation or presentation of ourselves and the soul level of ourselves, and we become aware of it often by virtue of feedback that we receive in relationships.

Maybe that feedback comes in the form of someone telling us they don't feel like we're being authentic or real or honest or truthful. Maybe it comes because we are being honest and real and truthful, and someone says, Thank you. I really appreciate it. Or it's painful for someone else to see or experience us being really honest, but it's also cathartic and healing for that honesty to come forth, but the soul comes to know itself by being seen deeply, authentically, substantively and in being seen by others, we also grow our capacity to see other people there's it's the most remarkable thing, but as a parent, I grow In my capacity to be seen as a person by my kids and not just dad, although I always play that archetypal role of father in almost exact parallel to the ability that I have to listen, be present and see them like I can tell you right now

When my my, we were, I'll just give you example. I was walking to school with my daughter this morning. She's got some songs she really likes. It's, it's like, k pop and Bruno Mars, and I think it's called, like, a P, T or something like that. It's a silly song. I don't, I don't get it. It's not my kind of jam. But she really likes it. And she was and she was saying that, you know something about how it the abbreviation for apt is like apartment.

And she was saying, Do you think it'd be silly if I started referring to apartments as apts or applets or something like that. I don't know. It's just some some some phrasing from the song. You know, she's like, if I started referring to apartments like the song does. Do you think that that would be really silly or stupid? And I could tell, I could just feel that what she really wanted me to say was, no, of course not. That's kind of fun. Do you think it's fun?

And I just looked at her, and I was like, It's fun, right? And she just exploded with a big smile, and, like, hugged me so big, and she was like, I think so too. And in that, in that, that's what I mean when I talk about seeing one another. It's not necessarily like it doesn't have to be some profound I see your soul. You know, when we really see someone, it's it's like we we have a way of recognizing and celebrating something about who they are, what they're thinking or where they're at, or what they're processing.

And you can just see people light up inside when you really take a moment to feel where they're coming from and just be like I see you, some of the most powerful moments of transformation, of death and rebirth of healing happen when we witness I want to show you something. There is a super famous image from Alex Gray, who's like a psychedelic artist, and I've had the opportunity of speaking with him on several occasions at different events.

Is when I was in Ayahuasca world regularly. Here's a painting that he did that shows this is like a psychedelic experience, but you can see all the eyes, all of the eyes. And I think I'm not I'm not alone when I say that, I think this image is perennial within mystical experiences. This is the soul. This is an, I mean, not the soul literally, but it's like an image of the soul. The soul is like a tapestry of a million eyes, and it only comes to see itself by virtue of what it sees with authenticity and love, the act of seeing other people in authenticity and love allows the soul to be seen in the same way.

If we want to be seen, we have to see. If we want to be witnessed, we have to witness. This is the most profound act of healing transformation love and really, every relationship at its core is about this. So consider this as Venus and Pluto get together right now. Who are you witnessing? How are you witnessing? Where would you like to be witnessed? Give it if you want to get it all right.

Number two, Soul medicine is bittersweet. So the word bitter, etymologically, is also, I think, very interesting. It obviously it means having a harsh taste, sharp. Cutting can be like angry, full of animosity, cruel, but the word bitter also has a relationship to the word bite. That's interesting. One of the things that I love about that word bitter in sort of historical herbal medicine context, is that bitters are often used to combat inflammation.

And if we think of inflammation also as just inflation, as something getting too big or bloated or, you know, haughty or even arrogant, something bitter will often happen, something cutting or biting to bring that inflation down to earth. Venus in Scorpio is a Venus that is in Mars, sign and square to Pluto, there will often be very bitter moments. But those bitter moments are not just poisonous cruel.

There can be a real shadow, of course, to Venus Pluto, where cruelty or anger or hostility in relationships comes forth. Of course, that's a shadow, you could say. But there's also something about bitterness in love and relationships that allows for excessive inflation or ego to just be like drained out, so sometimes we need a little bitter medicine.

Now, the word bittersweet is also has a long history as a taste in culinary arts and in herbal medicine and different medicinal healing modalities. Bittersweet medicine is Venus Pluto medicine, where there is something sweet or beautiful or aromatic or tasty or desirable, but it's paired with just a little bit of bite because there's something medicinal in it, you need something alongside of it that makes it palatable.

So bittersweet tastes in ancient medicine are off. Often. Ways of making more palatable something bitter or biting that will also heal. If you think about Venus and Pluto from the level of the Soul, sometimes we need just a little something painful but good, something healing but difficult. When it comes to Venus and Pluto will often be paired with just enough beauty, sensuality, desire, harmony, good fortune, just enough to make the transformation more palatable, to make the healing easier to receive or go through.

So most of the time, Soul medicine, historically, like the kind of thing that's good for the soul that is healing for a soul a soul that is sick. What does it mean for a soul to be sick? Often it means for a soul to not be seen, or for a soul to not be taking the time to see and bear witness to other souls. That's how we get soul sick. It's by coming out of love.

And what is love? It's seeing each other, and when we see each other with it from the heart with with love, because there's nothing better. When you fall out of that space, you get soul sick, and therefore we often need bittersweet experiences that pull us back to love. But sometimes there's no way of getting us back to love without a little bit of pain or hurt involved, because we're sick and we have to purge. We have to remove a toxin, bitter, sweet. Medicines, or Venus Pluto medicines, all right.

Number three, the soul lives and loves toward death. We think, from the heroic, sunny day, upper world perspective, that life is about purpose, accomplishment, growth, consciousness, understanding, victories, achievements, belief, empowerment. These are all sunny day world kinds of things, but from the nocturnal space, which is the space of the soul, every life is a process of death.

There's not one perspective that's right or wrong, but they're like inverse perspectives, the underworld experience of the immortal, eternal soul that travels lifetime to lifetime through the portals of death. Right? Death takes us to the next birth. The birth then pushes us gently down the stream until we reach another death that takes us to the next birth.

So, from the standpoint of the ongoing river of the soul's trans migratory journey, the soul is here, in a sense, to do everything it's doing within the context of the way that it will have to let go again. It's a tricky thing to think about, but it's kind of like saying rather than thinking about, what can you accomplish in this lifetime? It's like asking the question, what will it mean to die well in this lifetime, to love well and to die well, to love deeply, profoundly, ourselves, life, others with a close like a there's like a close proximity of consciousness to the reality of death.

What does it mean to live with an awareness of your death? How does that change how you live and how you love, if you think about the purpose of this life being the way that you die, and that's by the way, that isn't that is a huge part of how death is handled, through the soul's journey, through the in the Bardos, In, you know, in Buddhism, or the trans migratory process that begins as you age and start to leave the world behind in the later stage of life in the ashram system of India, like so many different traditions, have a way of thinking about the progression of life being more and less and less about

What you do while you're here and what you accomplish, maybe more of a first half of life, Sunny part of life, the nocturnal, the evening stage of life is about, how do I die? Well, a Venus Pluto moment can be a moment where you think to yourself, my relationships, my loves, my desires, my attractions, my values. Are they in touch with the question of how I want to die, how I want to leave this world someday? That's a it's a different perspective. It's a sole perspective, though, all right, number four, beauty and hypocrisy.

I am really excited to talk about this. Just see if I can. I gotta get my notes. Where are my notes? Give me just I'm going to pause and find my notes here. Okay, back. I want to talk about beauty and hypocrisy, which is another set of themes that come up quite frequently under Venus Pluto transits. Now, mostly in my experience, I'm thinking about Pluto transiting someone's natal Venus in their birth chart, and what I've seen in many readings.

But I think it's appropriate now as a way of thinking about it as well. Even if it's a faster moving transit, right, it's still applicable. Beauty. What I want to say is that beauty, as we the way that the soul experiences beauty, defines beauty, pursues beauty, is rarely innocent. And by innocent, I mean it doesn't it? It's more. It's it's very complex. So if we think about innocence or naivete, like beauty is not just a simple topic, it's very complicated. It's very soulful, it's very deep.

We claim to value authenticity, yet very often we end up desiring what we are told to desire, meaning the way that different cultures shape and define beauty. We are then told that's what's beautiful, and this is what you ought to be attracted to. And often, we then have an. Operating sense of what is funny or what is smart or what is beautiful or what is accomplished. And broadly speaking, this starts to there's like socially accepted ways of thinking about what's attractive or beautiful or desirable, etc.

However, what starts to happen, inevitably, it just like has to happen, is that there starts to be a tension between the public ideals that we sort of conform to and private attractions that actually move us but aren't necessarily collectively agreed upon or Yeah, so it's there's a there's a way that beauty has to work through the tension, or even hypocrisy that exists between how beauty is collectively defined and sort of loosely agreed upon.

Everyone sort of participates in various consensus levels of what is beautiful or attractive or good, or, you know, etc, like there's a socially defined Venus that we all sort of participate in. But then there will have to be some way that we more privately or secretly define what we find valuable or attractive or creative. And of course, we have rebels who will flaunt that. I don't agree with the consensus. I am a rebel. I have my own way of defining what's beautiful.

And so some people will take that tension and just they will. They'll be like, you know, punk rockers about it, and very external and overt about resisting social and collective values, or, you know, what's beautiful, and so forth. But a lot of us, a lot of us are not, are not like overt punk rockers, like like that. We're not overt rebels. We find it a very risky proposition to be that rebellious, even though we may really admire people who are like, I love Bjork. I'm not Bjork. Look at me. I've got a fucking zip up on

So, so anyway, the hypocrisy, though, isn't a flaw. That's the point. It's a human contradiction that creates friction, and that friction becomes a spark of of like intimate, private, secret sort of hypocritical beauty. I'm calling it hypocritical to be provocative, but it is sort of hypocritical. I say, Well, this is all you know. Like, for example, I like to think of myself as you know, avant garde artistically, and I'm doing astrology, which is sort of provocative, and I'm into mysticism and psychedelics and all of this stuff, and yet again, to just be super silly and funny, like, look, I'm wearing a I'm wearing a Lululemon fucking zip up.

So that's the contrary, like all of us have to participate in that weird, contradictory hypocrisy when it comes to beauty and taste and so forth. But what I'm trying to say is that there's actually, there's nothing wrong with that. There's something about that tension that allows for this kind of secret, private it's almost like some things can't be as interesting and complex and beautiful and desirable, if it weren't for that tension and that feeling of being being a walking contradiction and being a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to how we define beauty and enjoyment or pleasure or art or whatever

taste is personal and transgressive, Our tastes are socially policed, and we all allow ourselves to be sort of socially policed. We buy into it because we want to belong, or it's stressful not to or, you know it, or we don't think that much even about it. Yet what really touches us or excites us will often deviate from social cords. It's idiosyncratic, it's emotional, sometimes it's shameful, and to admit our personal taste is to risk social disapproval, disapproval, but it's that risk that we like and we enjoy that and we will often carry that risk privately or with only a few people, where we admit, oh, actually, I have This transgressive taste. I don't really care what these people say about this. I find that ugly, and I find this over here attractive, but I only tell Karen at coffee, you know, I only tell John, and I only talk about it at the gym, you know.

So, intimacy is an esthetic act. It's about being seen in ways that defy public presentation. It goes back to the soul as witness. It's as though we dress ourselves up in things that are socially approved of specifically so that we can. Play hide and seek and just wait to see. Does anyone really see me? Does anyone really does? Can anyone penetrate my Lulu Lemon? Can anyone see me? So we have to play this game of hide and seek.

So beauty, hypocrisy, conformity, resistant conformity, those tensions are a vital part of how the soul looks for and defines beauty, pleasure, enjoyment, all of which are byproducts of it being itself and getting to know itself, part of how it's seen and sees. Finally, we are moths to flames. Point number five here that I want to talk about is simple. We like to fly toward things that will burn us, that are bright and interesting and passionate and desirable and intense, and we know there is something that may consume us or or burn us, but remember that the soul is an eternal being.

What? What is destruction? What is chaos? What is death? Really? From the perspective of an eternal or immortal soul, we think to ourselves, gosh, the taste I have in men, I'm so self destructive and sure, on one level that might be true, but on another level, is it possible? I mean, I don't know. I don't have the answers. But is it possible? From the standpoint of 30,000 lifetimes on planet Earth, let's just say that at least four or five of them chasing toxic jimmies is part of how your soul reminds itself that there's nothing fucking at stake. There's nothing to sweat over.

And so yeah, a couple of a couple of rounds on the Wheel of Fortune where you fly like a moth into the flame might just be loosening you up a little bit. Now, I don't know that's that might that's very romantic of me. And, oh, this is fun, but you get what I mean we I mean the soul is attracted to things that burn and because there's something about death that is that puts us more closely in touch with what's real.

It's the same tension that exists between social acceptance and private deviance. It's like there's something the soul needs to do. There's things that we need to do for the sake of love, beauty, depth, intimacy, that have to be like, just don't, don't hold on so much. It's that life is not so precious. It is, but it's, it's, it happens to be so precious that it's precious beyond whether you live or die in in a linear, temporary, temporary body. It's actually precious beyond what, like any kind of consequence.

There's nothing you could do to not be a part of the eternal heart and beauty of reality. There's nothing you could do to get away from that. So don't stress. And you know, if you need to fly into a few flames like that, might be part of it. Now, I'm not. I'm not advocating for being destructive or harsh or cruel or I'm not, you know, it's not supposed to be like a nihilistic perspective. It's supposed to be one that allows us to shake off the taboos that we're confronted with when Venus and Pluto get together.

It's okay to just be an intense soul that needs to remind itself that living deeply is always in and through death. Okay? Well, I hope that this was jarring and thought provoking and all this stuff, all the good things after I sign off. There's an informational video about the year one program. If you want to come to Nightlight, become a moth to the flame of learning ancient astrology, let this beautiful, sacred language consume your heart and soul, transform you from the inside out.

That is what happens to many people who come study with us. It's what's happened to me. That's why I'm here. That's why I do this for a living. That's why I love it, and that's why I keep coming on here, running my damn mouth. So that's it. I hope you're having a good day. We'll see you again soon. Bye, everyone.