Venus Retrograde 2025

A Venus Retrograde in Aries Breakdown...among other things

This is so funny, as I posted this into my drafts, I realized that almost exactly a year ago from my writing this one (within two days!!), I had reposted my first blog post that I had written and initially published at the same time the year previously. Funny how life goes huh?

The Grief of Beginning

This season is such a strange one. Here in Santa Fe the winds come howling across the mountains like they intend to mete vengeance on the land, whipping dust and newly budding pollen into a frenzy of irritation that near derails the entire infrastructure of working people in the town, while the fight between warm and cold unsettles things further.

This week the power company tested an emergency protocol where they announced they might do an unprecedented shutdown of every power grid in the county to reduce wind-related fire danger. However, not knowing how the grids themselves would react to the situation, there was no telling when they could be gotten up again, and many public and government institutions decided to just close for the day to bypass the chaos, schools included. The power company had sent out the initial announcement the night before, suggesting they wouldn’t be able to say definitively until eleven the next morning.

Things were mostly normal in town day of—my girlfriend and I even went out for breakfast and got a $15 microwave at Savers—but there was definitely an edge to every interaction and many quipping exchanges with strangers about the freak factor of it all. It turned out to be a false alarm, or a tester, or maybe the winds weren’t as bad as they feared. But the uncertainty had colored the world quite dystopian and apocalyptic for a moment, bringing a strange kind of kinship to the populace.

Spring isn’t just a time of new beginnings. It’s a working through of winter’s stillness, sweeping away the decay the cold brought, that which it killed with impunity for not having roots and warmth enough to survive. Those things that stick around and drain resources at the end of the growing season, causing fires when the winds arrive if they have not been dealt with. It’s a cleansing one way or another: through ice or more thorough fire.

That day was Thursday; today is Saturday. We woke up to a thick blanket of snow, to which we all breathed a sigh of relief, knowing the moisture will keep us safe from the raging flames a few days longer.

The astrology of the moment is no less intense than it feels. Venus has been retrograde since the beginning of March, meaning it appears to be going reverse through the normal order of zodiacal constellations. Like this seemingly backward motion, retrogrades are always times of returning or revisiting in some way. When Mercury is retrograde, for example (which happens about every six months or so, due to its planetary speed), our communication and travel often double up on themselves, requiring revision or just straight up abandonment. When Venus is retrograde, (every 18 months or so, a slower moving planet than Mercury) the past is what comes back in spades, forcing a reconsideration of the values, dreams, and relationships that make us who we are.

Venus is currently retrograding through Aries, the “first” sign in the Zodiacal order (though of course it is a cycle that repeats itself). Aries is the baby of the Zodiac, the spark of inspiration that starts it all (again). The Sun, the luminary of the day, of the very light that keeps the Earth alive, has its exaltation in Aries, meaning this sign is the role it feels the most comfortable shining from. Aries also has a connection to youth and even nostalgia— not the daydreaming aspect, but rather the impulsivity that can result from its intensity. Aries is, after all, represented by the ram, whose horns to do more than threaten their potential enemies.

Before Venus went retrograde, we were already dealing with Mars in Cancer (started February 23rd and will extend a couple weeks after the retrograde ends on the 12th of April). This is a difficult placement for Mars because it is a planet that prefers direct movement, whereas the crab only moves sideways. During this transit, things slow down in strange ways, even impacting Mercury by trine aspect to potentially cause Mercury-retrograde-like symptoms of negatively affected travel and communication. Cancer shelters in its shell—it does not want to leave home.

Expression must thus come from unconventional sources at this time. One of my favorite internet astrologers is Lauren Ash Astro (on most platforms I think) whose commentary on this transit centered a lot around the power of accepting your own cringe—that is, empowering yourself to be vulnerable and embarrassed while creating, but still create. To create strangely, unreasonably, unexpectedly, but to still create. That resonated deeply with my own interpretation, which sees the impulsive nostalgia of Aries mixing with the angsty nostalgia of Cancer, leading to a desperate need for sharing experience despite or maybe because of the weirdness.

This is especially true not only because Mars is molasses-ing through Cancer, but also because Saturn is at the same time headed for a Cazimi, where a planet conjoins with the Sun (going exact March 12-14ish), coming between Earth and the luminary by our point of view, and both aspecting Mars by trine. Cazimis tend to cause obscurity, as when something passes in front of a light and becomes nothing but a silhouette, if not swallowed by the brightness altogether. Because Saturn is, among other things, the planet of boundaries and obstacles, this could be a day of great expansion beyond those limitations, leading to deeply intimate connections or realizations; it could also lead to someone walking right off a precipice that might otherwise normally be clearly marked.

At the end of March, Venus will transition as the retrograde dips into Pisces before going direct there on the 12th of April (and soon heading back into Aries) and this nostalgia is likely to intensify, past visions tempting influence on the present, and communication likely to be misconstrued. This, coming off the Saturn Cazimi especially, is when I believe we need to be on highest alert for our blind spots (if they didn’t hit you already before you realized it was Venus retrograde…). The important thing is that we want to clear them before the winds of direct Aries Venus season truly hit us.

Now that we’ve reviewed (lol) the astrology, let’s revisit (lol) what it all really means as a whole picture. When a season begins, regardless of its status as a season of beginnings or endings or what, it must deal with the effects of the season (and seasons) before it. The land works to purge itself of the old and the useless through hot and cold measures, seemingly vying for dominance but actually working together to purify the ground for new growth. One atmosphere eventually trumps the other by consistent cycles, bringing winter after summer and summer after winter year after year. Each part of the process is essential—the clearing, the sparking, the planting—for the land to recover from its transition between warm to cold. Now you stack these up, and you have a lifetime.

I think one gift the season brings is the weirdness Lauren Ash describes. This opportunity for expression asks us to challenge our values in order to repair old wounds. In this challenging, we receive perspective on our circumstances. And while forgetting can remain difficult, forgiving is the key—forgiving the seasons of your life for cycling through its natural purges and regrowths, forgiving yourself for dealing with those moments in embarrassing or cringe-worthy ways, and forgiving others for participating in or witnessing that cycle. By expressing your true self, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you, or how sad, you become more of who you were meant to be, under all those layers of old, forgotten hurts.

The other gift the season brings is grief. It’s necessary, when transitioning from one state to another, to give reverence to what came before. It is seemingly the only way to move on. You have to acknowledge grief, cater to it. Grief can lie dormant for years, can be ignored and pushed down, can be put up on a shelf and forgotten about. But not forever. It will eventually be a fire danger, one spark of aching memory and the wind reveals every dry scrap that will become fuel. Grief may even be the flames themselves. “Moving on” is such a nebulous concept, but grief teaches us that we can feel excruciating things and still survive, still function, still, eventually, thrive.

So when I say it is a gift: cherish it. It illuminates your vulnerable places, those that must be cauterized, those that will host new life in the next season. Do your spring cleaning internally as well as externally. The grief of beginning recognizes the pain of leaving something behind, while preparing the landscape for what is to come, and remaining grateful for what is. Be weird about it, be silly— channel that grief and do not push it down. Your inner child, and your outer future self, will thank you.

As I post this to Substack, along with a backlog of other posts I’ve made on previous iterations and attempts at a blog, I am preparing for the lunar eclipse in Virgo, a whole other part of this Venus retrograde that will be relevant and provide further nuance to the energies at play. The thing about astrology is that it’s kind of time-sensitive, and by the time I get to writing about it, it’s often nearly over. But we feel the effects long after, and I will certainly be bringing transit interpretations to the page again very soon.