This Venus Retrograde, I find myself turning inward with my creativity. I have long looked to Venus to tell us about our aesthetics, style, inspirations, artistry; the things we enjoy and make us who we are.
What I love about astrology is that it gives me a language for all of the intangible, singular things about me, including what makes my art different than yours and yours different from mine. We might take for granted that we have different routines, subject matter and style but astrology lays it out for you, showing you new sides of yourself to celebrate.
This week, I want to begin a Venus retrograde series on astrology and art. Today, I will focus on some points to consider what your writing style is like; this is for poets, novelists, essayists, journalists, bloggers, diarists, and anyone who has writing be part of your creative or spiritual life.
If you want to talk to a professional about your chart and what it unlocks for your writing or creative life, book a Creative Praxis Consult with me :) For all of Venus Retrograde, take 20% off this offering with the code SHINE when you book.
May the points we discuss help you relish your own way of writing.
The Moon
Believe me when I say the Moon begins everything, especially things that arise from the mysterious void of our souls, like our voice and the words that follow. I forget where I read this, but an astrological study showed that the Moon was more reliably prominent in author’s charts more so than even Mercury, the planet of writing. When you think about the nature of writing, this connection makes sense. Abu Ma’shar gives “watching of omens and a sense of things to come, revelation…keeping measurements, emotions, undistinguished feelings,” as well as “rumors, messages,” and “the inability to keep secretes” to the Moon, as well as calling her “the giver of forms”.1 She speaks to the fact that writing derives from a deep witnessing of our raw experiences and “undistinguished” emotions. Just as the Moon reflects the light of the Sun, so too, does writing, in the words of author Jorge Luis Borges, “transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory”. She is alive in the omens, what was at first an ordinary object but through you gaze becomes a revelation filled with meaning.
This excerpt from my “Meeting the Moon” speaks on this:
We musn’t overlook the minor moments, feelings, memories in our life that the Moon can help us access, or appreciate more deeply. Just because something is common or embedded in ordinary circumstances does not diminish its power. In his short story “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain,” Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine author who was born with Cancer rising (the sign of the Moon), tells us of the titular character believing “that ‘great literature’ is the commonest thing in the world, and that there was hardly a conversation in the street that did not attain those ‘heights’”.
Profundity is not diminished merely because it happens all the time. We diminish the power of each moment by letting its commonness halt our attentiveness. Each experience is always new. It has already been lived before, by many before you.
The Moon is our ability to find the enchanting, what is worth writing about, in our daily lives. She is what gives these human-made symbols weight and heft, reverberating long after they were first arranged. She will tell us what kind of impressions we absorb into our writing and what sort of feelings we are trying to evoke. Famous poet Rainier Maria Rilke has his Moon in the conjoined Mars and Saturn, two difficult planets, and those who have read him may understand what I mean when I say that witnessing his work is like traversing a dark, remote mountainside. He said this of writing, echoing this sentiment of being between a rock and hard place:
Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself…A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgment of it: there is no other.2
This quote also speaks to this Moon’s rulership by Saturn, planet of difficulty, solitude and deep thought, as well as necessity and occult knowledge. This excerpt from his poem “Pietá,” fits with the themes of Saturn nicely:3
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