Venus Turning Retrograde in Scorpio

Into the Underworld of Love

On 3 October 2026 Venus stations retrograde at around 8° Scorpio, beginning a journey of just over 40 days during which she appears to move backwards through the zodiac, eventually returning to Libra before turning direct again on 14 November.

When a planet turns retrograde, there is a popular temptation to ask:

What is going to go wrong?

We all know the old Mercury retrograde cliché. The computer breaks down. The train is late. The email goes astray. Suddenly everything becomes Mercury’s fault because it’s retrograde.

But the experience of planetary retrograde is a lot more nuanced than that.

A planet in retrograde motion is basically going back over old ground, moving back across a section of the zodiac that it has already traversed, turning around, retracing its steps, and eventually crossing back over the same territory again.

We encounter something.

We go back over it.

Then we encounter it again.

And sometimes we have to look back in our lives in order to discover how to go forward.

There may be something we need to revisit, reconsider or recover. Perhaps there was a twist to what happened, a misunderstanding; maybe something got neglected, distorted or left unfinished.

In the case of Venus, the territory we feel compelled to review belongs to the realm of love, relationship, beauty, pleasure, money and self-worth.

What do we truly love? What do we find attractive? What do we really value?

Forty Days in the Wilderness

Venus retrograde periods are relatively rare. They happen approximately once every nineteen months, and Venus spends only around forty days moving backwards.

Forty days.

Think of the forty days and forty nights that recur within our religious and mythic traditions — Jesus spending forty days in the desert, for example.

Maybe that’s not a coincidence. I don’t know.

But it does invite us to wonder about the symbolism of a forty-day period of withdrawal, testing and reflection.

What are we doing during a Venus retrograde?

We are reflecting deeply on the nature of love.

We are being touched by a deeper quality of Venus.

Beauty Written into Geometry

And there is something else extraordinary about Venus.

The geometry of her cycle is exquisitely beautiful.

Over an eight-year period, Venus makes five retrograde loops in her relationship with the Earth and Sun. Seen geometrically, these describe an almost perfect five-petalled flower, with the five points of the retrograde cycle tracing a pentagram through the zodiac.

During that same eight-year period there are ten conjunctions between Venus and the Sun — five occurring during Venus’s retrograde phases.

There is something wonderfully Venusian about this.

She is the goddess of harmony and proportion, and her beauty is written into the geometry of her dance.

Dance of Venus - image courtesy of John Martineau

Venus Comes Close

At the midpoint of every Venus retrograde comes another important astronomical event: the inferior — or inner — conjunction of Venus with the Sun.

At this point Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun.

She disappears into the Sun’s glare.

And it is also around this part of the cycle that Venus makes her closest approach to the Earth.

This gives us an important clue as to how to think about retrograde motion.

It isn’t that the power of a planet somehow becomes weakened when it turns retrograde.

Quite the opposite, perhaps.

Our experience of the archetype can become more intense, more intimate and more subjective.

Venus comes closer, and we become more intimately involved with her.

And sometimes, because we are so deeply involved, we lose perspective.

We become entangled.

That can affect the way we love, our experience of attachment, the people we desire, and our ability to recognise our own value.

Old feelings may resurface. Old patterns of relating may return. People from the past sometimes reappear.

But the return of something does not necessarily mean that we are meant simply to restore it to what it was.

Perhaps it has returned because we need to understand it differently.

Venus Retrograde in Scorpio

This particular Venus retrograde begins in Scorpio.

And that provokes a much deeper and more complex Venusian enquiry.

When Venus is in Scorpio, she is not particularly interested in niceties.

She wants to know what lies underneath.

What is the desire beneath the desire? What is the deeper attachment that underpins a particular relationship? In what ways have love and power become entangled?

Where have we given our power away because we were frightened of losing someone?

Where have jealousy, resentment, betrayal or mistrust taken root?

What do I really want from love?

What does my soul actually desire?

Venus in Scorpio takes us into the darker territory of love because intimacy always makes us vulnerable.

To genuinely love another person means allowing them into places where they might hurt us. The deeper the bond, the greater the possibility of loss.

This is why love and fear are so often intertwined.

And during this Scorpio phase, certain ghosts from the past may reappear.

It could be a grief we thought we had finished grieving. An old longing. An old betrayal. An old desire.

Perhaps even a creative passion that we abandoned because it was impractical, or because somebody once told us that it wasn’t valuable.

Astarte by Dante Rossetti (1877)

Recovering What Was Left Behind

This is where the idea of recovery becomes so important.

Sometimes we have to go back because something precious was left behind.

Perhaps we return to the place where love became twisted, where trust was lost, or where we started believing that we were somehow less worthy of love than we really are.

Venus retrograde can therefore also become a journey into self-worth.

What is my value?

What do I value?

And is the life I am actually living truly an expression of those values?

Sometimes the real recovery is not the relationship itself.

It is the part of ourselves that became lost within it.

The Descent of Venus

On 24 October we reach the symbolic heart of this retrograde, when Venus makes her inferior conjunction with the Sun in the first degree of Scorpio.

Venus has disappeared into the Sun’s light.

Symbolically, she descends.

And with this happening in Scorpio, it is difficult not to imagine this as a journey into the Underworld.

The goddess of love becomes invisible.

She goes down to seek the truth of love.

Something must relinquish its old form if it is to be reborn.

There is a beautiful astronomical transition here too. Around this conjunction Venus is moving from her identity as the Evening Star towards her re-emergence as the Morning Star.

Something disappears.

Something changes.

Something returns in another form.

It is an alchemical moment of union and reunion.

A moment in which we might make an offering to Venus and ask some of those more probing and unsettling questions:

What is love demanding of me?

What is love asking me to become?

From Scorpio Back into Libra

On 25 October Venus retrogrades back into Libra.

And there is a change of emphasis.

In Scorpio we want to know:

What is really going on here?

In Libra we begin asking:

How can we relate differently?

Where is the balance? Where is the reciprocity? Where have I compromised too much — or perhaps too little?

The movement is from Scorpio’s excavation to Libra’s renegotiation.

Scorpio takes us beneath the surface in search of emotional truth.

Libra asks what we are actually going to do with that truth in relationship.

An Eight-Year Echo

There is another dimension to the Venus cycle worth remembering.

Because of the extraordinary eight-year geometry of Venus, the retrograde pattern returns to approximately the same part of the zodiac every eight years.

So there is an echo here of the Venus retrograde of autumn 2018, when Venus also travelled backwards through Scorpio and Libra.

It may therefore be worth looking back.

What was happening in your relationships then?

What were you discovering about love, desire, money or self-worth?

What was asking to be healed or recovered?

You are not back in 2018. Life has moved on.

But perhaps something that began then has reached another turn of the spiral.

Did You Leave Something Precious Behind?

And I think this is important.

Astrology is not there to make us frightened of living.

A Venus retrograde does not mean we should put our emotional lives on hold for forty days, refuse to begin relationships, stop spending money, or become paralysed by the possibility of making the “wrong” decision.

That would be to turn astrology into superstition.

Its value lies in helping us become more conscious of the quality of the time we are living through.

So perhaps the best way to approach this Venus retrograde is with curiosity.

What is returning?

What am I being asked to revisit, recover or understand differently?

Where has desire become entangled with fear?

What am I discovering about my own value?

What might I need to reclaim?

And what am I ready to let go of?

Because going backwards is not always regression.

Sometimes we have to go back because something precious was left behind.