Venus Retrograde Conjoins Saturn — When What We Love Passes Away

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/]. Today we're going to take a look at Venus retrograde in Pisces, conjoining Saturn in Pisces, which is something that's really going on the entirety of this week, as Venus is slowing down to station and turn direct in very close proximity to Saturn in Pisces.

So this is a dynamic that, although it has technically already perfected, is still very much at play for the rest of the week, and so we're going to look at it today. We're going to explore one of the classic themes related to Venus and Saturn, which has to do with the death or ending of key relationships in our lives.

But we are going to pull value out of that idea or that image of a relationship ending and talk about it metaphorically and spiritually and psychologically. Because although there's a very real way in which Venus-Saturn contacts can correlate with the endings of relationships, there's a lot more at play than just that literal idea.

So hopefully looking at this today will give us some depth as we experience this transit for the rest of the week, some deeper perspective. So anyway, before we get into it, remember to like and subscribe, share your comments and reflections. If you have them, it is always good to hear from you and to hear your stories.

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I'll be showing you all of that starting next week. So on that note, let us turn our attention now to the real-time clock, and let's take a look at our Venus-Saturn conjunction. Here we go.

So as you can see here, this is Tuesday morning. Venus and Saturn are separating through Venus's retrograde. They're still at the same degree as we start the day. And what I want to show you is what happens as the week goes on.

So we get into Wednesday, they're just a less than a degree apart. Get to Thursday, they're still about a degree apart. Friday, they're still about a degree apart. Then Saturday, Venus is stationing to turn direct, at which point Venus will be, you know, just about a little less than two degrees off from Saturn.

And then Venus, in direct motion, will catch up with Saturn again around April 22, 23rd, you know, 24th, 25th—see how they're traveling together, really, without Venus gaining that three degrees of separation until May 1. So that means that we are in a period of Venus-Saturn, a meaningful period of the expression of the Venus-Saturn dynamic until the end of the month.

So to me, that means that it's a good transit for us to reflect on, even though they technically conjoined yesterday, they're very much dancing together for the remainder of this entire month of April. So why not take a deeper look at it?

And one of the textbook things—like line one A in every astrology cookbook for Venus-Saturn—will be, you know, divorce or breakups or the end of a relationship or the termination of a contract. The reason for that is that Saturn is one of the natural significators of death, of impermanence, of winter, of darkness, the end of a day when the sun sets—also often associated with Saturn.

So because Saturn has this kind of baked-in meaning of endings, of reaching the limit or expiration, of old age and the natural process of diminishment or entropy, decay—we put Venus with Saturn in any dynamic conjunction, square, oppositions being the loudest usually, and you get the love that dies. Venus, the love or the relationship, all Venusian signatures that reach a point of ending.

So could this week literally bring us the end of certain kinds of relationships in any area of life? Of course. Of course it could. But let's unpack this at a deeper level. I think that we miss so much in astrology when we only operate at the most literal level of archetypal expression. So let's unpack this.

Here's five things to watch for that play on the idea of a love dying. How—how are—let's think of Venus right now as our values, as what we are attracted to, what we desire, what we appreciate, what we love, what we enjoy, what we like—all things that Venus represents.

Venus is sort of like the thumbs-up button in life. I like this kind of food, I like this kind of art. Purple on my wall is one of my favorite colors. I appreciate this type of film or this type of music. I like to make love in this particular way. I'm attracted to this particular kind of person. All values, but values connected to what we desire, what we love, what we appreciate, what we enjoy, what we find pleasing.

So that's one way—important way—of qualifying Venus here for our talk today. Another way of thinking about Venus is in terms of not just a relationship itself, but it has to do with what we find most pleasing or satisfying about relationships.

For example, is it a value of yours to be in relationship with someone who really likes to talk about intellectual things or likes to talk about the news or really enjoys sports or the arts, or someone who really appreciates yoga or spirituality or astrology, whatever the case might be?

Venus is not just your boyfriend or your girlfriend or your partner. But Venus is also saying something about what we need or want or desire that constitutes the pleasure of a relationship—that makes it worth having. Well, this is—I need this kind of relationship because this is what I enjoy. This is what brings me happiness. Okay.

The other thing that is true in our lives—if you think about it, I don't know anyone for whom this isn't true, but you tell me if I'm wrong—is that our desires, our values, and how we define pleasure changes. It evolves. When I was a kid, I hated olives. Now I really enjoy them. You know, my daughters—several years ago, hated mushrooms. Now they're open to them. You know what I mean?

There is an evolution taking place in our life with respect to our taste, our interest, our values, our aesthetics. I didn't always like the color purple. Now I love it. That is a true fact about my life. In fact. So anyway, the reason that I say this is because I think that one of the ways that we mark the seasons of our life—you know, there's the Gregorian calendar, you know, there's the solar calendar, there's the astrology.

There's all these calendars. There's ways of keeping time, but I think one of the ways that we keep time is in terms of our interests, our values, our pleasures, our tastes. This right now, you know, would be the season of purple in my life, because I've come to love purple so much in the last four or five years. It's weird. It's like all of a sudden I just love purple.

But we're not always conscious of the way in which we mark the calendars of our psychic lives, of the life of the soul, in terms of the change of values and tastes and interests and appreciations that we have. So Venus-Saturn contacts, in addition to bringing the death of a relationship, can also be about the death of certain kinds of values and the passing away of certain kinds of tastes and interests, as well as the establishment or clarification of new values, new tastes, new interests.

Not all of which mean, by the way, that a relationship literally has to die. Sometimes relationships just need to accommodate new tastes, new values, new desires, new interests. Insofar as a relationship can morph and evolve to accommodate the changing landscape of a couple's or different people's desires and interests, it is often a sign of that relationship's maturity—which, not surprisingly, is also a designation given to Saturn: maturation, the kind of veteran depth of wisdom and experience that comes with time.

All Saturnian significations—when Venus and Saturn get together, sometimes our tastes evolve, and relationships accommodate the depth and growth and maturity of our values. So it doesn't always literally mean that a relationship passes away.

The other thing I'm reminded of when I think of Venus and Saturn—there's a story that I remember from my childhood, and one that I've told to my own kids, which is The Velveteen Rabbit. You guys, I'm sure you all remember this story, right?

Basically, the rabbit is beloved by this—it's a stuffy, you know, it's a—and my younger daughter has a bunny stuffy that we had make a cameo on my channel not long ago. But anyway, this stuffy is loved and loved and loved and loved. And then, you know, finally, the rabbit dies, you know, but then, in a very magical twist of fate, the bunny goes from a stuffed bunny to a real bunny because it has been loved to the point of becoming real.

And yet, the transition from being a beloved thing—but a play toy—to a real bunny is death—that the ending of the sort of imaginary or imaginal, or the—you know, there's a bridge that the bunny has to cross in order to achieve becoming a real bunny, and it's death.

This is, of course, a story that is echoed in springtime. The rabbit, obviously, is like an emblem of spring. We have Easter, you know, all this—there's amazing, interesting, you know, quote-unquote pagan correlations with spring that, you know, we can talk about, or the Christian Easter, or whatever.

But this idea of resurrection is also a key part of what Saturn designates. Remember that Saturn's natural opposite—which we've talked about recently on my channel—is the Sun or the Moon, but the signs of Saturn are opposite the signs of the lights. The lights represent life. Their signs are placed at the beginning of spring and the middle of summer. Zodiacally speaking, they represent life and light.

Saturn signs are placed at the beginning and middle of winter, the place of death. But the idea for ancients is that this oppositional-like tandem are embedded in one another, and so death is within the constant wheel of life. Death is just a portal or a bridge to a new kind of life.

Death is an ending, but it's an ending that makes something new, or that makes something go from one form to another, just like the bunny goes from being a stuffy to a real bunny—death ferries the bunny through a transition, and that transition is one that deepens and strengthens and makes something—you know, there's that word maturation.

There's a kind of initiation across the threshold of Saturn that takes place where something goes from, you know, ideal to real, or imagined to real, something like that. Not surprisingly, Saturn is sometimes said to be the reality principle. But what does that really mean?

I think one of the things we overlook about Saturn is not so much that Saturn lacks imagination, as much as it is that Saturn is a part of the process of things going from imaginal or rooted in fantasy to becoming materialized. And for most of us, that can be—that's a dream come true.

We don't think of Saturn as a, you know, a bestower of blessings, or some planet that makes dreams come true. But insofar as death and age and the process of time make things deeper and realer for us, Saturn is a bestower of blessings, because Saturn makes things real in time through the process of death, through the process of aging and maturation.

So that's also important, because we talk about, you know, a love or a relationship passing away or dying—one thing we miss is that it is often when a relationship dies—and let's say you have to let go of one literally—the next relationship is often a major blessing.

And we'll say, you know, I think of my wife and I—we were both in relationships we thought we were going to—someone who we thought we might marry, and then those relationships fell apart, and the very next person we met was each other. A lot of relationships happen like that, where the previous relationship taught you so many things that make the next love substantive and real.

And not that the previous love was a fiction or something. But there's a process of maturation that involves pain and suffering and depth and difficulty and loss and expirations and endings that often is somehow necessary—there's another Saturn word, necessity—for the sake of something more substantive, more mature, more full-bodied, to emerge in time.

This is also why we—most of us—embrace paradigms of spiritual growth that involve many lifetimes. What is meant by that? Many deaths, right? Many deaths, many deaths, of who and what we were trying to create. Every one of us is trying to create something with our life, with our sense of self that will die someday, and the soul—from I think most of us probably believe this—the soul will go on.

And as it goes on, the forms it takes, the projects of love that the soul continues to experience, become more real to us. We become more real. We start stepping into the light of full consciousness, illumination, and are able to experience reality—you know, reality as opposed to limited or partial understandings.

There's that dichotomy between the Sun and Saturn as ignorance versus illumination, but they're a necessary part of one another. So let's now look—five things to watch for when it comes to how our love, our values, our tastes, our interests, are made real by Saturn.

One—I've already alluded to this, but it's pain and suffering. I know that people, when they hear the words pain and suffering, think that immediately—like that's a negative thing to have to think about. I don't see it that way personally. Maybe it's because of the serious amount of time I've spent studying Taoism, yoga philosophy, Buddhist philosophy.

I don't know one spiritual tradition on the planet that doesn't tell us that pain and suffering are the means by which a spiritual life exists and moves along, because it's your relationship with pain and suffering—not your transcendence of pain and suffering, but your relationship. There's Venus with pain and suffering that provide depth.

They provide compassion, they provide empathy, they provide forgiveness, acceptance, patience, peace, serenity. You know, our experiences of pain and suffering make us real, just like the bunny—you know, and our experiences of pain and suffering in a relationship—if the relationship can accommodate those experiences, the relationship becomes deeper, more satisfying, more intimate—and intimacy that you can't even put words to because you've seen and been through things together.

And when two people have a value, a taste for that texture of a relationship, those are the couples that we look to, and we say, I want to know your secret. I want to know what you're doing, because you guys don't look or seem perfect, but you seem to have an unspoken, a tacit agreement between your souls that you will ride things out together—or that you—and that you can see that you've done so.

You know, that is what makes us real. That's what makes anything real. If you think about your relationship—not only with another human but with the thing you love that you do, like astrology, or for me, playing an instrument—it's the calluses that you build on your fingers as a guitar player, or it's the confusion and overwhelm you feel when you're learning a subject or a language like astrology.

And somehow you have allowed your love of something to be greater than the discomfort of the pain and suffering that come with it. You've made room for the pain and suffering and let your love for the process to be greater than the discomfort of the pain and suffering.

I think that is a hallmark of people who have experienced the real, beautiful fruit of Venus and Saturn. It's like, yeah, what you love has been made deeper and much more powerful because you've allowed space for the difficulty. That doesn't mean you haven't experienced it. It doesn't mean you haven't really felt it, you know. But you've allowed for it. You've somehow let it move through.

So pain and suffering are part of how Venus and Saturn make our love real. Endings. Sometimes things end. People come into—I remember there's this quote from Stephen King's The Body, which was made into a movie called Stand By Me. It's like one of my favorite movies of all time—Stephen King, one of my favorite writers of all time—and he said, "People come in and out of our lives like busboys in a restaurant."

And I just remember that line—it comes at the end of the movie. It's always stuck with me because I worked in restaurants for five years or so when I was in graduate school, and there's just a turnstile of people in life. And I remember thinking about that when I would be on subways when I lived in New York City.

And I think the idea that Venus and Saturn wants us to consider is that when something reaches its natural expiration, when something dies—a relationship ends, a contract expires, an apartment that you're living in that you loved is not going to be available any longer—you know, all of these little endings that we experience—when the departure, when the moment of departure arrives, everything that has come before it suddenly solidifies, crystallizes in your psyche as a real experience.

It's funny how endings—everything up until an ending—we don't or can't fully appreciate as real. And if you project this onto the nature of the evolution of the soul itself, each death grants us such powerful insight into the reality of our own soul and how beautiful and treasured and precious life is, and our own soul in the scope of life is—that we are sacred, that we are important—not more or less than anyone else, but uniquely important.

You know, there's nothing like endings that deliver that to us. So this is bittersweet—it's like a medicine that tastes bad going down, feels good coming out. You know, Venus-Saturn: endings that make things more real, make things more substantive. Not all endings have to be tragic, either—they can just be maybe a little bit bittersweet.

Sometimes the natural endings are the ones that we actually, oddly, have the easiest time with, because we just—who can argue? I remember when our dog got a cancer diagnosis last January and was gone by February, and the cancer was so advanced—and we, you know, just caught it too late, and everything like that. And it was like, well, this is her time.

And I was so sad, and my wife was just crushed, because this was really her, her spirit dog, you know, but everything that she had been in our life for was suddenly more real to us because of that ending.

There's another thing that comes with Venus and Saturn, which is that Saturn is like the bearer of—when we think of the reality principle, we also have to reconcile ourselves to difficult truths. One of the things that I don't like about astrology—like, a pet peeve that I have about astrology—is when astrology channels are either inherently sensational and, you know, like anxiety-provoking or mindlessly optimistic.

You know, anytime you see, like, "Mega Blood Moon, transformational portal, biggest paradigm"—there's, like, a paradigm shift in a major transformation happening every day in the world of astrology online, you know? And that sort of bothers me, because it can be, like, really stressful, you know?

What we're really trying to do is use symbols to give some depth to our everyday experiences. And astrology, I think, at its best, is much more everyday than it is epic. There are epic transits, you know. And some are like, whoa, this—there are some really intense energies that we, you know, have to be also real about.

The sensationalism, you know, it's—a hard truth that many people don't want to accept—that's very Saturnian—is that life is rather boring or repetitive or mundane. Like, you spend—apparently, if you live to 90, you spend like 25 years of your life asleep, sleeping at night. I don't know if that's the exact statistic, but you get what I'm saying.

There's a great deal of life that's just ordinary, and astrology is not meant to make every single thing extraordinary and epic. A hard truth that Saturn wants us to embrace is that you may die without ever having felt like you achieved some miraculous level of spiritual realization, or "I just manifested my purpose," and you know, everything was clicking—and no, probably a lot of us will die not necessarily feeling that way.

Most of our names will be forgotten within a couple generations. You know, that doesn't mean that we're not significant. People are so afraid that those hard truths mean that they cancel out something sacred or something benefic or beautiful about our existence. They don't, but they're also not truths we can whitewash with false, like, you know, kind of naive positivism.

So I also don't like channels that are like, "Your purpose is flying down on the wings of angels to lift you up." I mean, maybe it is—I probably it is, you know, probably more than my Capricorn Moon wants to think. But I also believe that, you know, that there's a kind of a middle path that, I guess I appreciate, where, when there's reason to be optimistic and there's beautiful light sides of archetypes to explore, we do that.

And when there are difficult, more challenging sides to things that we explore, we do that—we're not either overly positive or overly negative in this way though. You know, it's not particularly exciting to walk a middle path, you know, like a moderate path in life, where the most important things are something like, you know, clean fuel, clean food for your body, water, good rest, steady relationships that aren't rooted in drama and crisis, learning how to steady our consciousness, protect our serenity—those things are, in some ways, about walking a middle path.

That's not like super thrilling, I would say—though ironically, there's this kind of thrill to living in the middle, because it's actually a very sensitive place, and the more you live in it, the more that your sensitivity increases to extreme things. And that is actually very magical. But anyway, that's just my own reflection.

Saturn will bring up hard truths. Whatever that hard truth is, it might be different for you. It might be different for me. We all have our own unique psychologies, and so what constitutes a difficult truth is going to look and feel different for everyone, but Venus and Saturn says you will actually come to appreciate, enjoy, and taste life at a richer, deeper, more satisfying level if you are also able to include within your experience the reality of difficult truths.

Here's something that I think all couples go through. My partner—let's just say you're in a committed relationship that's kind of, you know, like healthy-ish as they go—a difficult truth is that my partner will never be every last thing that I think that they ought to be.

You know, my partner is not going to be all. I can't control or change my partner to be everything that I want, so I'm going to have to find some of what I need or want, you know, in friendships or in interests, but I can also be happy with accepting who they are. There's enough there that I'm—that I can accept. Like, that's a compromise that I notice, especially my clients.

No offense to anyone of any age category, but like clients in—clients in their 20s, prior to Saturn Return, who are going through relationships—maybe prior to finding a more long-term committed relationship, and they're in the dating phase of life—will be going through, it's like, "I'm trying to find someone that has as many of the checks—you know, I can check all the boxes. They've got enough things."

But there's also this process, this reality principle of like, "I have to accept that someone can't be every last thing that I want or need, and can I live with that?" And the truth is, you're going to have to, you know, because all of us have to. But when that truth is deeply embraced, all of a sudden you have eyes for someone that you're with that you couldn't have had before, because you are allowing their limitations to be a part of what you love, you know?

And when we do that for each other, that really is a Venus-Saturn way of acceptance: "I forgive and love you because you're limited, and I recognize that I'm limited, and rather than seeing that as a bad thing, I'm choosing to see that as a feature of intimacy—that I say yes to you despite limits to what you can be." We do that for ourselves, right? When we do that for others, that's important.

So anyway, whatever the hard truths might be, we have to accept them. We become realer. Love becomes deeper when we do. Complexity that we have to embrace. See, complexity is a little bit like a difficult truth. The world and our relationships and people and life itself is rather complicated.

And a lot of us—some of us love complications. We're like, you know, if you're particularly mercurial, you know, you might value ambiguity. But complexity is sometimes the enemy of certainty. And we really like certainty because it can stave off the feeling that you're living at the edge of existence. It can stave off existential doubts, and it can stave off mystery.

It can stave off things that are hard to live with. But Saturn—as the OG, you know, lord of the underworld, the OG ruler of darkness before we had planets like Pluto—you know, Saturn reminds us that the nocturnal world, the dark world, the unconscious world, the world of depth, of death, of winter, of mystery, of night—these were all Saturn's worlds.

That those realms are, in a sense, in an antagonistic—well, often in an antagonistic relationship with certainty, with clarity, with light. But they are both—light, illumination, certainty, clarity, a kind of knowing—those are important too. But when we embrace complexity, when we let go of certainty, there's a kind of love and a kind of appreciation and a kind of depth of aesthetic experience, of sensual experience that emerges and is really spectacular.

But we have to allow for it. We have to allow for complexity. And when Venus and Saturn come together, you will often find that you are faced with things that are rather complex—emotionally complex, relationally, psychologically. Yet if you allow for that, there will emerge within you a nameless, wordless feature of like aesthetic depth and appreciation.

Depth that we must explore. Just final point—Venus and Saturn will provide real opportunities when they come together for going deeper, becoming more mature. And depth—like mystery—is something that Saturn is associated with. We like to think of Saturn as limits and rules and regulations, and that is, ironically, just such a limited way of understanding Saturn, especially when you read the ancient literature.

Saturn is a planet of great depth and mystery and vastness. It rules things like hermits and solitude and monasteries and libraries and distance from the world—living in a hut at the edge of the village, very Saturnian. There are deep, liminal spaces that Saturn encourages us to explore, and when we do, we find a pleasure, a depth of intimacy, a joy, a taste for life that is robust.

So these are things to consider as Venus and Saturn conjoin. I hope you find them useful—that this meditation, like all the others on the channel, are just one more helpful way of working with your experiences. On that note, I will sign off for the day, and we will keep looking at the astrology—we got a Full Moon in Libra coming up, some other things to look at, planets turning direct, so forth. So more to come. Hope you're having a good one. See you again tomorrow. Bye.