The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 549, titled:

Venus Retrograde in Scorpio in History

With Chris Brennan

Episode originally released on September 18, 2026

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2026/09/18/venus-retrograde-in-scorpio-in-history/

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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com

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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo

Transcription released October 5th, 2026

Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m gonna be talking about Venus retrogrades in Scorpio in history, and I’m gonna go through the past century or so of Venus retrogrades that happen every eight years in the sign of Scorpio and talk about some of the main events that happened during those previous retrogrades in order to give us some insight into some of the events that will take place over the next few months as Venus once again goes retrograde in Scorpio here in late 2026. 

All right. So I kind of established this approach and methodology about a year-and-a-half or almost two years ago the last time there was a Venus retrograde, which was in Aries, where I went through ahead of time before the Venus retrograde started and we just, like, went through these eight-year periods over the previous century and studied what kind of events came up during those periods. And then what ended up being interesting is that many of the themes and sometimes literal events would recur or repeat in different ways once that retrograde repeated in the sky. So I’m gonna follow a similar approach here today now that we’ve sort of worked out that methodology, because it’s actually really effective in understanding and getting to the core of what Venus retrograde means, what the sign Scorpio means, and what it means when those placements are together and what kind of themes emerge in the world in general, including not just in personal lives but also in politics, in art and culture and music and all sorts of different areas. 

All right, so let’s define a little – let’s do a very quick introduction. We’ve got a lot to go over today. This is gonna be a very ambitious episode. I’ll try to break it up using some timestamps especially on the YouTube version or on the audio version on the podcast website to make it more manageable. Last time with Aries retrograde, we went through chronologically in eight-year increments, but this time I’m gonna try to break it up and group them based on topics or based on similar themes in order to make it a little bit more approachable. But nonetheless, I have a very ambitious episode today because when I did this research in the history, I ended up with something like 175 separate events that were notable events that I wrote down during each of the different Venus retrogrades where I did, like, 10 to 15 major events that occurred under each retrograde over the past century. So I’ve parred that down a little bit, but sometimes it’s only by seeing the big picture and seeing everything at once that you can truly understand how impressive it is to study some of these historical cycles and in which you can get the most from it. So as a result of that, I’m gonna try to pack a lot in here today, and yeah, let’s get into it. So let’s do a little introduction about the current Venus retrograde and then talk about some of the cycles. 

All right, so the current Venus retrograde coming up, I have this diagram that was made by my graphic designer Paige Allison who worked with me to put together this new Venus retrograde graphic. And what it shows is my definition of the Venus retrograde itself. So the actual retrograde starts on October 3rd when Venus stations in the sky and turns around and starts moving backwards in the zodiac for 40 days. So Venus stations retrograde October 30th [3rd], and it will station direct on November 13th in Libra. So it stations retrograde in Scorpio and then it goes direct in Libra. The cazimi – the conjunction with the Sun – is right in the middle on October 23rd at zero Scorpio, and this is actually the last cazimi that’s gonna take place in Scorpio because after this, all subsequent cazimis will be in Libra for, like, a century. But for me, there’s also the shadow period, which is when Venus first passes over the degree that it will later retrograde back to, which in this instance occurred on August 31st when Venus passed over 22 degrees of Libra, and then it will exit its post-retrograde shadow on December 15th when it passes 18 [eight] degrees of Scorpio. But what I’ve noticed over the past few years, and one of the things that I think I demonstrated pretty compellingly in the last Venus retrograde a year-and-a-half ago is that, really, because part of what Venus retrograde is in one way is that it’s an extended trip where Venus will spend an abnormal amount of time in one or two signs of the zodiac for a few months, it means that as soon as Venus goes into one of the signs that it will retrograde back to, you really start seeing some of the events and circumstances surrounding the retrograde starting to build up. So that began for us in this current cycle on August 6th, 2026, when Venus first ingressed into the sign of Libra. And then that period will not end until January 7th when Venus finally departs from Scorpio for the last time and moves into Sagittarius. So as a result of that, the time period for this current Venus retrograde is, you know, several months in the later part of 2026 that we’re paying attention to in terms of how Venus retrogrades are often the unfolding of a sequence of events over the course of that entire period of time. And while sometimes there can be certain events that really stand out, especially around the exact retrograde or direct stations or even the cazimi, that really if you pay close attention, that entire period that it’s transiting those two signs will sort of like, contain a whole sequence of events especially because for each of us in our personal lives, it’s gonna be transiting through two whole sign houses in our charts for an extended period of time. And in that context, you can understand why that entire period would be important, because it means Venus is really hanging out in those two sectors of your chart or those two houses and activating the topics associated with those houses in some way for this extended period of, like, a few months, which is different or abnormal compared to usually the three weeks or something that Venus normally spends in a sign when it’s going its normal speed. 

All right, so that’s how I am gonna define most of these Venus retrograde periods that I’m talking about through the first ingress and last ingress. And when you define them in that way, one of the things I should say really quickly is Venus – every eight years, Venus will go retrograde in approximately the same spot in the sky. And it just shifts gradually about two degrees earlier each time. But as a result of that, here on the screen for those watching the video version right now is the list of years over the past century or so in which Venus went retrograde in this eight-year cycle in the sign of Scorpio. So the first one was in 1906, and that’s when Venus, it had been retrograding in Sagittarius for most of the previous century, but then for the first time in 1906, Venus retrograded back into Scorpio and stationed direct there. And then for every subsequent eight-year period, basically, Venus would keep moving every eight years about two degrees or so further and further into Scorpio at the direct station until eventually it was spending its entire time in there. 

So with that in mind, here’s the Venus retrograde in Scorpio years; I’ll read them off for the audio listeners real quick. So it is 1906, 1914, 1922, 1930, 1938, 1946, 1954, 1962, 1970, 1978, 1986, 1994, 2002, 2010, 2018, and 2026. So keep these years in mind, because these are gonna be the years we’re gonna focus on. And because of how closely Venus retrograde repeats itself every eight years in the same spot in the zodiac, it does it not just in the same sign – like, let’s say in Scorpio in this instance – but also it does it in very closely or roughly the same part of the year. So the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in all of these years is basically taking place in the last few months of that year. So we’re gonna be talking about the last few months of each of these years that I just mentioned in eight-year increments. And when you take into account the first ingress and the last ingress, it gives the following set of dates that I will list here for the video people. I’m not gonna read all of these off; maybe I’ll just read the first two. So in 1906, for example, on September 7th, 1906, Venus first ingressed into the sign it would later retrograde back to. And then it finally left or departed or made its final egress from the sign it retrograded in on February 6th, 1907. And what’s cool is that because of the way the signs work out and shift over the years, it means these dates were relatively stable, and you have a block of signs where it was retrograding in Sagittarius and Scorpio, and then another when it was retrograding in just Scorpio, and then another block where it was retrograding in Scorpio and Libra, which is the current one that we’re in. 

So okay. So here’s the first block, which is basically from 1906 to 1954, these retrogrades were taking place in Sagittarius where Venus would station retrograde in Sagittarius, and then it would retrograde back into Scorpio and station direct there. So all of the eight-year increments from 1906 until 1954. 

Then for the next block of time, Venus started retrograding just in Scorpio from 1962 until 2002, where it would station retrograde in Scorpio and then it would station direct in Scorpio. 

Then the current one that we’re in now, Venus keeps gradually shifting back, and now Venus stations retrograde in Scorpio, but then it stations direct in Libra. And that started in 2010 and then 2018 and finally now in 2026. 

All right, so that gives you some idea of the data that we’re gonna be looking at in terms of the dates here. And I could do other preliminaries, but why don’t we just jump right into it with the dates, because we got a lot to cover. And I wanna see how much we can actually get through during the course of today, so let’s get to it! 

All right, so the first category I want to touch on is I kept noticing this theme of unearthing the underworld and there being buried discoveries and hidden secrets that would come out sometimes during these Scorpio retrogrades of Venus. So the first one is in 1922 in the Venus retrograde in Scorpio, it started in Sagittarius, and on the exact day that Venus stationed retrograde in Sagittarius on November 4th, archeologists who were working in Egypt discovered the steps to the completely untouched tomb of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. And what happened is over the course of the subsequent Venus retrograde where it stationed in Sagittarius and then it backed up and stationed direct in Scorpio, they basically found this ancient Egyptian tomb that had never been raided by graverobbers, basically, which had been really common up to that point over the 2,000-plus years or more since many of those pharaohs were buried. And so it ended up being this, like, media sensation where it’s like this ancient thing that gets unlocked or discovered in this really opulent, ancient Egyptian tomb. And what was interesting is that a bunch of the media sort of went crazy over this and eventually it ended up causing there to be, like, this – it ended up influencing aesthetics and fashion trends and architecture and other design trends during the course of the 1920s where there was something called, like, they sometimes called it “Egypt-o-mania” where Egyptian themes and stuff started getting incorporated into western art and fashion and design. Especially the art deco movement was very much inspired by some of these discoveries that had just taken place and the publicity surrounding them. So Venus retrograde, when Venus stations retrograde and starts moving backwards in the order of the zodiac and in the order of the signs, sometimes there’s this backwards-looking orientation where things from the past come back into the present. 

So similarly, under the 1938 Venus retrograde in Scorpio, there was this prehistoric fish that was discovered that was thought to have gone extinct, like, 66 million years ago with the dinosaurs. And a fisherman caught it and dragged it out of the ocean and then some scientists basically got wind of it, and then it completely rewrote scientific history through the discovery of this ancient fish. 

Or later on during the 1994 Venus retrograde in Scorpio, there was this group of explorers in France who stumbled upon this perfectly sealed underground cave system which contained the oldest and most beautifully preserved paleolithic art in the world. So it was actually a discovery of ancient paleolithic art from thousands and thousands of years ago that was hidden in a cave that was discovered during the course of the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in late 1994. And I thought the symbolism of that was so brilliant and so beautiful. 

And then similarly, one other event that happened in the 2010 Venus retrograde in Scorpio is that there was this disaster that happened with a group of miners in Chile where 33 miners were trapped, like, really far – like, half a mile underground – in pitch darkness. And they were trapped for 69 days, but then they were miraculously were pulled to the surface alive. And their rescue was globally broadcast and supposedly more than a billion people were watching the rescue, basically, of these 33 miners so that it became one of the most watched televised events in history. 

So that just gives you – that’s my final one for this section, but it just gives you an idea of some of the things that can come up when we’re talking about Venus going retrograde in the sign of Scorpio, and sometimes it can be very literally, like, underworldly themes being pulled up from under the ground into the surface. And that’s in, like, a very literal sense, but as we’ll see, that can also happen more metaphorically in society and art and culture. It can also happen in relationships and personal dynamics when it comes to Venus retrogrades in Scorpio. And we’ll see the full range of that. But I wanted to start with showing that sometimes these retrogrades can work out very, very literally. 

All right, in the next section, I want to talk about themes having to do with high stakes diplomacy, brinkmanship, and sometimes even in extreme cases so-called “deals with the devil.” So the first two I want to start off with was 1906, and this was still when the Venus retrogrades were largely in Sagittarius, and so you do get a dominant Sagittarius theme. But nonetheless, there was a couple of interesting ones where in 1906 under this retrograde, President Theodore Roosevelt embarked on an overseas journey aboard a ship to inspect the construction of the Panama Canal. And this was actually a major historical event, because it was the first time a sitting US president traveled outside of the United States while he was in office. And what was interesting and cool about this is that this was the very day that Venus stationed retrograde in Sagittarius. So it was kind of striking to me that you get this president traveling overseas for the first time – like, making a historical precedent – on the day that Venus stations retrograde in Sagittarius. And then interestingly, a few months later on December 10th, 1906, Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering a treaty in a war between Russia and Japan the previous year. And this marked another first, because this was the first time that an American was honored with the Nobel Prize. So that in December, so that was towards or, like, after Venus stationing direct in Scorpio. 

All right, so other themes, though – another big one that stood out was the 1914 Venus retrograde in Scorpio, because this retrograde basically took place in the last months of 1914 just after World War I had broken out over the summer. And initially everybody went into World War I thinking it would be, like, an easy and quick war, but then they were confronted with the way that technology had changed the nature of war at that time. And it became way more brutal and intractable, and it quickly ended up settling into trench warfare and just lots and lots of people dying due to the use of machine guns and things like that. 

But then later on in December, there was this really special and unique moment that occurred that’s often talked about in history books, which is the famous Christmas truce where during Christmas, basically, a little bit after I think when Venus was like, stationing direct, the soldiers at Christmastime who’d been, like, fighting these terrible battles and murdering each other for months now spontaneously had a ceasefire around the Venus direct station. And what happened is they started crossing over the trenches into no man’s land and exchanging gifts and singing carols together and basically having a really brief, very brief peace in what was otherwise, like, a really brutal context of this terrible war, of literally the First World War which had just started months earlier and they were still in the very early stages of. So that’s one of my favorite, you know, little positive examples of a little truce for just a matter of a day or two that did not last very long, but nonetheless it was one for the history books. 

Okay, so moving on. 1922, I was really surprised to learn – I guess I hadn’t focused on this a lot, but in the 1922 Venus retrograde in Scorpio, delegates from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and other regions signed a declaration and treaty for the creation of the USSR. So this is basically the foundational treaty to centralize power and to give birth to what became the Soviet Union, basically, during this Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1922. And what was interesting is it was like, Venus retrograde in Scorpio that year that stationed direct conjunct Jupiter, which was very similar to the Venus-Jupiter conjunction in the United States’s birth chart. And then additionally, there was also a Mars-Uranus conjunction at that time, which is also similar to the Mars-Uranus conjunction of the US birth chart, which I’ve talked about extensively in recent episodes over the past year. And then what’s interesting about that with the Soviet Union having a Mars-Uranus conjunction in its birth chart is that the first time that the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb was on a Mars-Uranus conjunction, just like the United States having a Mars-Uranus conjunction in its birth chart detonated its first atomic bomb on a Mars-Uranus conjunction in 1945 or at least used the first atomic weapon in battle then when they were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. So there’s more to go into there, but it was just a striking instance of, like, a union coming together under a Venus retrograde that stationed direct in the same sign of Jupiter, which is Scorpio, which just provided a very interesting parallel with the United States. And of course, the US and the Soviet Union for much of the 20th century would become the two biggest global superpowers, as well as global enemies that would kind of, like, fight during the course of the rest of the 20th century. 

All right, moving forward. 1938, this is a really important Venus retrograde one that’s important for astrologers to internalize, because this one was really about the Munich agreement and this period of appeasement, basically, where the prime minister of the United Kingdom, Chamberlain, and Hitler – so Hitler was in power in Germany, and Hitler was already making military moves. And the Europeans were trying to avert another world war, and they thought that they could, so they started appeasing Hitler and basically just giving him whatever he wanted. So under this Venus retrograde in the fall of 1938, Chamberlain and Hitler signed this desperate treaty of appeasement to avoid war. And this is essentially the shadowy sort of like deal with the devil that brought a very temporary peace for the next few months, but ultimately failed catastrophically because the next world war would begin basically the next year when Hitler invaded Poland and then all of the different treaties with the Allies and Poland started kicking in. Additionally, this was also a failure because right not long after the Munich agreement, in early November in Germany, Kristallnacht happened where there was, like, the Nazi used somebody being killed – like, a mid-ranking Nazi was killed – and the Nazis used this as an excuse basically in order to orchestrate what’s called the Night of Broken Glass where all across Germany and Austria and other places they started destroying hundreds of Jewish synagogues, looting thousands of Jewish businesses, killing nearly a hundred Jews, and interning 30,000 men in concentration camps. So this Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1938 was not just dark because of it was, the period of appeasement of some of the western powers attempting to placate Hitler to put off a world war, they thought, even though Hitler was fully intent on military expansion at this point. But this was also the point during this Venus retrograde where what had been largely political persecution of Jews and other figures up to this point under Nazi Germany suddenly turned to very tangible, extreme, actual physical persecution and the early phases of what would become, essentially, the Holocaust. So that’s a really dark Venus retrograde there in the later part of 1938. 

All right, so moving on. 1954 was the Formosa Resolution. This is when the US basically signed a mutual defense pact with Taiwan, and this ended up averting what’s called the First Strait Crisis where China was potentially going to move into more of a direct military confrontation or invasion of Taiwan, and then the US signed a pact basically saying that they would defend Taiwan if they were invaded. And that ended up basically putting off or making it so that China didn’t invade Taiwan at the time. But this one’s kind of important, just because of that means there’s a bit of a signature here for Venus retrograde in Scorpio and the complex relationship between China, Taiwan, and the United States, which is an ongoing issue today and will very obviously continue to be as world events evolve and unfold over the next few years. So we’ll see how that goes during this upcoming Venus retrograde in Scorpio later this year. 

All right. Another major one, perhaps actually the biggest one on this list, is 1962 during that retrograde later in the year was the Cuban Missile Crisis. So this is basically, like, the absolute peak of Cold War brinkmanship between the US and Russia where there was this incredibly tense 13 days around the time of the Venus retrograde in Scorpio where humanity was on the brink of just all-out thermonuclear war between the world’s two main nuclear superpowers. And then it was only resolved through these really highly secretive back channel diplomacy agreements between the leaders of the US and Russia, between JFK and Khrushchev. And it involved an agreement that the US made to take some missiles out of Turkey and in exchange Russia turned some ships back that were headed towards Cuba, and it was basically a big mess. You can look it up; I don’t have to go into it. But it was basically the closest that the US and Russia ever came to an open nuclear war during this Venus retrograde, but then it was, like, turned around suddenly at the last minute through back channel agreements. 

All right. So similarly, 1978 had something similar happen with a couple of things involving Jimmy Carter’s investigation where on the one hand, he during the course of this retrograde in the later part of 1978 he basically sequestered the leaders of Israel and Egypt for these intense, highly secretive negotiations, which resulted in a historic Middle East peace treaty between the two countries. And then interestingly, that wasn’t the only back channel, secret negotiations he was involved in, but it turned out that weeks later, around the time of Venus’s direct station in Scorpio in December, which was actually conjunct Uranus that time, the US shocked the world by announcing that they’d been in secret negotiations which eventually led to having full diplomatic relations with China. But it also involved pulling back with some of their relationship and agreements with Taiwan, which then caused a bunch of political issues in the US and parts of Congress rebelled against Carter’s agreement and set up alternative agreements with Taiwan. But again, it’s another one of those – basically those repetitions where it’s a repetition of the 1954 one where things are happening under the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in terms of the relationship and the shifting alliances and agreements between the US, China, and Taiwan. So that further heightens the likelihood of other similar things like that in the future, especially with this upcoming Venus retrograde. And one of the reasons for that is that China, with the current chart of China from the mid-20th century, has Venus in Scorpio; it’s not retrograde, but if the time is correct, it may be in the 10th house of the chart. So that may be one of the reasons why China in particular could be sensitive to Venus retrograde through Scorpio transits. 

Okay, so two more. One of them in 1986 was the Reykjavik Summit between Reagan and Gorbachev where they met for this dramatic, all-night set of negotiations that unexpectedly almost came to the very brink of eliminating all nuclear weapons. Like, the negotiations came incredibly close to making major sweeping not just motions, but basically, like, actions to remove nuclear weapons from the table after decades of building up to the brink of potentially destroying humanity if the two countries had started shooting at each other due to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. But then basically at the last minute, they got hung up on one point that they couldn’t get through, and the negotiations fell apart at the last minute. So it was, like, an agreement that almost happened, but then it was averted or aborted or canceled out in some way with the Venus retrograde. Although this agreement did end up setting the stage for some subsequent agreements that would take place over the next few years that would put some limits on nuclear weapons between the two countries, so it wasn’t a complete loss. 

And then finally in 1994, similarly during that Venus retrograde in Scorpio, the country of Ukraine formally surrendered the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees about its borders, which famously became really tragic and unfortunate later when those agreements would be violated years later when Russia would invade Ukraine, which is the war that we’re dealing with now. And weirdly, around the same time, Jimmy Carter negotiated a peaceful step-down of a military junta in Haiti when the US had planes literally in the air mid-flight to do a violent military invasion of Haiti to overthrow the military junta. And Jimmy Carter as former president was somehow able to do some back channel negotiations in order to arrange a peaceful solution and step-down of the leadership, which averted major bloodshed that otherwise would have happened so that when the US forces landed in Haiti shortly after that, it ended up being a peaceful transition of power. So that was a positive one to sort of, like, end out this section on how different types of back channel negotiations can sometimes go sometimes in being successful and helping to avert disaster, and other times not being so successful or resulting in situations like appeasement with Hitler that just kicked the can down the road or put things off until later. 

Okay, the next section I wanted to talk about has to do with state secrets, themes of espionage, and also covert operations. So it’s kind of like, adjacent to the previous one, but less in a diplomatic sense and more in the recurring themes of, like, spies and things behind the scenes coming up. So for example, in 1970 during that Venus retrograde in Scorpio, the US and the CIA interfered in the government of Chile, and exactly as Venus was stationing retrograde, the CIA basically launched this massive covert campaign to destabilize the democratically elected government in Chile at the time through political assassinations and through shadowy, invisible blockades of economic sabotage where they kind of like, tried one set of things to overthrow the government and it didn’t work at the beginning of the Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and then by later once it was stationing direct, the US shifted to a covert strategy of doing economic espionage, which eventually a few years later was successful and eventually led to that government being overthrown and a new, I think, dictatorship coming to power, basically. So that one may be relevant coming up, because we know – like, for example, the US recently announced heightened economic blockades basically and sanctions of Iran this summer. And so it’ll be interesting to see, I guess, to what extent some similar themes come up over the course of the next few months as Venus is retrograde in Scorpio again. 

All right. Elsewhere, 1978 during that retrograde eight years later, there was this famous incident in spy lore where there was this Bulgarian dissident journalist who was jabbed in the leg suddenly by somebody with – he was jabbed in the leg in London by an operative – like, a secret agent – who was using a modified umbrella. And the umbrella shot or injected this lethal pellet of ricin into his leg, which subsequently killed this dissident journalist. So it was known as the famous ricin umbrella assassination because it was such a weird situation in terms of how it was done. 

Other times, another really major one, probably one of the biggest ones, was the 1986 Venus retrograde in Scorpio which is when the Iran-Contra affair broke basically in the news and in the government where what happened is that there was this massive, shadowy conspiracy involving the US secretly selling weapons to Iran in order to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, which was then during the course of this Venus retrograde got exposed to the public through this, like, series of events. I think it was first exposed through a Lebanese newspaper and then other reporters picked up the trail and it eventually blew up into this entire scandal basically, which really almost brought down the Reagan administration and did lead to some members of the Reagan administration being prosecuted. So that was a major one during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and what was so weird is it was just, like, shadowy backroom deals coming to light basically that shouldn’t have been happening based on the public relationship and antagonism between the US and Iran up to that point. But then it turned out that behind the scenes they were sort of, like, doing deals with each other. 

Similarly, another one that happened in 2010 was the WikiLeaks Cablegate, which is when WikiLeaks basically published – if people remember, this is like, not that long ago now – this huge trove of something like 250 classified US State Department diplomatic cables and documents. And it basically dragged a bunch of backroom global diplomacy into the light, especially because some of the things they published early on that got a lot of press were, like, what different diplomatic people were saying about different world leaders and stuff like that behind the scenes, as well as some of the different efforts the US was making and different agreements or different ways they were putting pressure on different countries and different things like that. So it was a huge disclosure during the course of that Venus retrograde, and but then that also led to all sorts of stuff with, like, Julian Assange, the leader of the WikiLeaks, and I think by the end of that Venus retrograde he was arrested in December. And it was a whole thing. It’s like, there’s some of these retrogrades where I’m mentioning it, but one of the things you have to understand or what anybody will realize if they’re familiar with that news story, if they remember being there at the time, is it’s oftentimes a series of disclosures and other things that happen over an extended period of time that brings to light some hidden or underworldy backdealings that are happening behind the scenes. 

And then similarly under the 2018 Venus retrograde was the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, who was a dissident journalist for the Washington Post who went into a Saudi consulate and then was killed and dismembered behind closed doors. And the reality of that, it’s like, the event happened, but then the news reporting and the reality of it slowly came out over the course of the next few months during the course of the Venus retrograde. So it was a really grisly story in terms of that time period that evolved over a period of time. 

All right, so let’s keep it moving. So we’re doing pretty good so far with time. There’s a lot, but we’re getting through it pretty quick, so let’s keep – I’ll try to keep this pace up.

All right, so the next section I want to talk about has to do with something I kept noticing, which was major political power shifts, and sometimes massive wave elections that take place where, for example, two early ones in the 20th century were not pleasant – were pretty bad – which is in 1922 during that Venus retrograde in Scorpio, Mussolini’s National Fascist Party orchestrates this march on Rome. And it was like, this massive psychological bluff, but what ended up happening is they get there,and the king basically just, like, refuses to declare martial law, and instead appoints Mussolini as prime minister, which officially birthed the modern fascist state or the fascist state in that era of the 1930s in Italy, 1930s and ‘40s. And then subsequently, that allowed him to start just systematically dismantling all of Italy’s democratic institutions from within. So that was during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1922. 

Similarly, eight years later during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1930, the Nazi Party in Germany achieved this massive electoral breakthrough where – this was in the middle of the Great Depression and they basically capitalized on the collapse of the Weimar economy in Germany. And through the votes, their party skyrocketed from basically having, like, 12 people in the government to 107 parliamentary seats, which virtually overnight just shifted the Nazi party from a fringe faction for most of the 1920s to all of a sudden being the mainstream power that was then able to start permanently dismantling the democratic government that had been there up to that point and basically taking over Germany. 

So those were two pretty dark ones in the 1920s and 1930s. And then in the United States, the Venus retrogrades in Scorpio often have to do with midterm elections, and there were some pretty notable ones. I’m not gonna do a whole study of all of them here – maybe I’ll save that for another episode, but – some of the ones that really stood out were 1946, there was this massive shift that were called the Had Enough Midterms, where basically the Republicans capitalized on post-war inflation and fatigue because the Democrats, especially with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had been in power for a really long time up to that point. And then Roosevelt had just died in 1945. And what happened is during the 1946 election when Venus was retrograde in Scorpio, the Republicans swept both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1928 in one of the most historic midterm elections in the United States’ history. So this basically ushered in a really fiercely partisan what’s sometimes referred to in history books as, like, the Do Nothing Congress, which actively challenged President Truman and dismantled some of the World War II economic controls that had been in place up to that point. 

So that was 1946 where basically the Democrats had been in power for a long time and then suddenly the Republicans, the party that was not as much in power, suddenly came more into power at that point. Similarly, in the 1954 midterm elections when Venus was again retrograde in Scorpio, Democrats flipped the House during the course of President Eisenhower’s first term. And this election established what became a 40-year streak of unbroken Democratic majorities in that chamber of Congress that lasted for a really long time all the way until the 40-year anniversary of that, which was a subsequent Venus retrograde that happened in 1994. And so this Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1994 was not long after Bill Clinton was elected, there was what’s called the Republican Revolution, which was led by Newt Gingrich and his so-called “contract with America.” And what happened is they flipped 54 seats that ended the Democratic streak that had been lasting for, like, 40 years at that point since 1954. And this sweeping wave sort of ushered in this new aggressively partisan and sort of confrontational era of modern politics where usually, like, most historians at this point or most political commentators look back to the 1994 election as being part of where that shift took place. 

Similarly in 2010, you know, it’s like, Obama had just been elected in 2008, so then 2010 is the midterm that takes place after that. And this was the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the later part of 2010. And what happened is that the Tea Party movement had really taken off, especially early that year, and the midterms had this massive wave where there was a 63-seat Republican swing in Republicans’ favor. So that was actually historically the largest single legislative swing since 1948, which even President Obama at the time, he commented on it and he said that they had taken a real shellacking, basically, at the polls in terms of the pushback and the number of Republicans that were brought into office at that time, which then really ground to a halt a lot of his ability to push through new legislation after that time. 

Similarly, the other one I wanted to highlight that really stood out was 2018. So this was the midterm election after Trump had been elected the first time in 2016. And in 2018, this was what’s sometimes called the Pink Wave or the Blue Wave election where this set of midterms handed control of the House back to the Democrats, who picked up 41 seats. And this was the first election that took place after the Me Too movement had really exploded the previous year, and there was also at the time outrage over the Kavanaugh hearings for the Supreme Court where around that Venus retrograde station some dark stuff came out about his past or some dark allegations were made about things he may have done in the past. And as a result of that, this election ended up shattering a lot of history books’ levels, because what happened is 102 women were ushered into Congress at this time. So there was not just – it was not just a shift in the Democrats’ favor, but during this Venus retrograde in Scorpio, a huge amount of women were brought into office and Congress at this time. And that actually ties in with the very next event that I’ll mention in the very next section, but I’ll wind that down here and we’ll switch to the next section after this. 

All right, the next major topic I saw come up a lot was women’s rights, queer liberation, and cultural reckonings during these Venus retrogrades in Scorpio over the past century. So the first one was really early on; it was a really cool one that I saw, which was in 1915, when Venus was retrograde in Scorpio during the later part of that year, the US House held its first ever floor vote on a federal constitutional amendment to grant women the right to vote. And it ended up failing at the time; it didn’t go through. But it ended up laying the groundwork so that that would actually happen over the course of the next decade. And it was a major step, because partially at that point they were able to get everybody to commit to voting, one way or another, and then the women’s suffrage movement could then sort of, like, target which seats to focus on in the future, which then was successful over the course of the next decade and eventually getting women the right to vote. 

So that’s a really interesting connection with our last one from 2018 if you think about it. It’s like, 1915 is the US holding its first ever vote basically on whether to give women the right to vote, whereas in 1918 during the Venus retrograde in the same sign in a repetition, literally a century later, we get this historic wave of 102 women being ushered into Congress, which is pretty cool. 

So similar themes in, like, 1947, for example – in Canada, there was this citizenship act which came into effect during this Venus retrograde, and it created this groundbreaking shift in terms of civil rights by allowing married Canadian women to hold their own independent citizenship status rather than automatically losing it if they married a non-citizen. So again, it’s more specific to a certain country, but it’s like, women getting more rights basically and getting more civil rights during the course of the Venus retrograde, and having some old rules revisited and revised or in some instances rejected in order to grant women greater freedoms and greater civil liberties. 

So elsewhere, a really sad one was in 1978, and during the course of this Venus retrograde in Scorpio, this was the Harvey Milk assassination where there was this former supervisor who snuck into City Hall, and he basically assassinated the mayor as well as the supervisor of San Francisco, who was Harvey Milk. And Harvey Milk is famous today in the history books for being the very first openly gay elected – or one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States. And then this plunged the city into major civil trauma and protests and other things like that. So that’s more of a negative or sort of depressing instance of a Venus retrograde, but it was an important one because of what happened and how it impacted people, but also then how it in some ways energized people to make more change in the future and to change things. 

All right, so moving on. Another similar one – the 1986 one, one I really loved learning about was this was the Venus retrograde where during the course of that fall, Oprah Winfrey starts her nationally syndicated show. And what was cool about this is that eight years earlier, Oprah started a local show – like, a local television show or talk show. But then what happened when that same Venus retrograde recurred eight years later in 1986 is suddenly she got a nationally syndicated talk show, which was seen by people all over the country, by viewers all over the country. And one of the things about this that was very Venus retrograde in Scorpio is that Oprah was willing to talk about really difficult things, especially in the lives of women. And at one point during the course of this Venus retrograde, she spontaneously opened up and revealed her own experience of childhood abuse on national television. And this kind of set a new precedent in terms of shattering this precedent of like, silence and deep social stigma surrounding those topics. And she – Oprah – in her birth chart has Mars and Saturn in Scorpio in the same sign, and I think if I remember correctly, Venus was like, retrograde and exactly conjoining her natal Saturn when she made that disclosure. 

So that was part of what that was about, but it was also a broader thing about her talk show during that three- or four-month period at the end of 1986 just becoming this national sensation. And she was willing to talk about sensitive stuff like that or other things, and that was one of the things that especially women at the time found really endearing for her and eventually turned her into, like, her openness and willing to go there was part of what turned her into the national sensation that she would become by the end of the century where I believe by the end of the century she became the richest Black woman of the 20th century, basically. And there’s some other interesting stuff there about, like, in December she did a 60 Minutes interview, so it was, like, her profile had raised enough so that by the time Venus is stationing direct, she’s being interviewing on 60 Minutes for being this sudden sensation. And even during the course of that Venus retrograde, I think she also started dating what would become her long-term partner named Stedman. So there’s lots of cool stuff there that would make for an interesting study about Oprah at some point and how the Venus retrogrades in Scorpio have been important for her. 

All right, moving forward. Jumping eight years forward to 1994, there were a couple of sort of parallel things that happened under this Venus retrograde in Scorpio that were tough but important. One of them was the landmark Violence Against Women Act was signed into law at this time. And one of the primary senators who was promoting it at this time was a younger Joe Biden who had not just a stellium in the sign of Scorpio but also was born with Venus in Scorpio. And this event kind of dovetailed with another one that was taking place in the media at the same time, which is that during the course of that Venus retrograde, the jury selection process began for the OJ Simpson trial. And there was a lot of national discussions that were taking place about domestic violence and abuse and different things like that that were sort of, like, really dominating the media headlines during the course of this Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And OJ Simpson later was famously acquitted, but then found guilty in a civil trial, I believe, for murdering his wife Nicole Brown Simpson. 

So that was a tough one, but it gives you an idea of some of the themes that can sometimes come up during some of these Venus retrogrades, and sometimes there’s difficult things, but then also sometimes there’s progress like the passage of this Violence Against Women Act which was pretty landmark at the time. Of course, there’s other parallel things, because also issues of racism with the police came up during the course of the OJ Simpson trial, and that’s another topic in terms of racism and issues surrounding it coming up sometimes during Venus retrograde in Scorpio that I’ll talk about I think in one of the next sections. 

All right, so moving forward. 2010, Obama signed the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy basically where he got rid of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which permanently allowed gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans to serve openly in the armed forces, where up to that point, there was this bizarre rule where it’s like, you could be gay as long as you kept it secret or something like that in the military for the past, like, 17 years leading up to that point. But finally in December after Venus stationed direct in Scorpio, Obama repealed it, which was one of his campaign promises in 2008. And one of the things that’s interesting about that from earlier in that fall with the Venus retrograde in Scorpio just before it went retrograde is that Lady Gaga did the famous – she showed up at the MTV Video Music Awards famously with this dress made out of raw meat. And it’s always remembered as, like, the meat dress at the time. But what’s open not remembered is she actually said it was – she was protesting the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, and I believe that she showed up with or was accompanied by four former members of the military who were gay or lesbian who had been discharged from the military as a result of their sexual orientation. So part of what was happening is, like, at the beginning of this Venus retrograde in Scorpio earlier in the fall, Lady Gaga is protesting Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and she’s also trying to like, contribute to the effort by putting pressure on certain senators that were going to be important in terms of not blocking that. And then by a few months later by the end of the Venus retrograde in Scorpio once it’s stationing direct, Obama officially signs the repeal of that policy. 

All right, moving on. The next one was pretty tough, and this was in 2018. One of the main hallmarks of that Venus retrograde in Scorpio was that the nation was really gripped by the Brett Kavanaugh hearings where Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to become a Supreme Court Justice, but then there were these hearings for it basically, and a woman named Dr. Christine Blasey Ford came forth and she testified about past sexual assault during the Supreme Court confirmation process, which exposed some of the real raw cultural divisions that were really coming up in the post-Me Too era, which had really emerged over the past year prior to that. But then, you know, he was still nominated basically or still approved and became a Supreme Court Justice despite that in the middle of the Venus retrograde subsequently. 

So that Venus retrograde, though, as I said, was the same retrograde in which 102 women were elected to Congress, which was historic, and that was partially fed by the Kavanaugh hearings that were happening at the same time and just the sense of outrage that many women had that there was a woman sort of coming forward and reporting this, and then that the nomination still took place. 

And then one other smaller but still important and relevant story that I found while I was researching that also happened during the course of the 2018 Venus retrograde in Scorpio was the Tokyo Medical University scandal where early on in the retrograde, it got exposed that there was this prestigious medical university in Japan that was systematically altering the entrance exam scores for, like, more than a decade in order to intentionally suppress the enrollment of more women into their program and in order to bring more men into it instead. And this came out, and then it became a whole controversy during the course of that Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 2018. So that’s, yeah, that’s one of the major themes of sometimes these major scandals coming up, but then also sometimes major progress being made in certain areas as well. 

All right, let’s move onto the next section, which has to do with themes I was seeing that kept coming up that involved racial justice, desegregation, and civil rights struggles. So right at the beginning in 1906, one of the interesting ones I noticed was that Mahatma Gandhi coined the term “satyagraha,” which essentially means “nonviolent resistance” in order to characterize his political movement while he was living in South Africa. So I thought that was really interesting, like, the Venus retrograde in Scorpio and this one was also still in Sag, but that idea of nonviolent resistance emerging at this time under what was essentially the first Venus retrograde where it started in Sagittarius and went back into Scorpio. And then there was actually a lot of – there was, like, at least two or three subsequent Venus retrogrades in Scorpio for that century that ended up being really important in terms of Gandhi and in terms of some of the efforts to liberate India, basically, from colonialism. 

Under the same 1906 Venus retrograde in Scorpio, the Atlanta Race Massacre basically occurred at that time where a group of thugs, basically, who were spurred by sensationalist local newspaper reports, this whole, like, armed white mob went and terrorized this Black community in Atlanta and massacred a bunch of people. And this tragedy, though, one of the positive things that happened subsequent to it is it galvanized some figures which ended up leading to the creation of some things, such as the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, which is the first Black intercollege fraternity in the US. And this then became a cornerstone of Black civil leadership. So that was a theme I saw come up a few different times, and this Venus retrograde in 1906 is still largely in Sagittarius, so I saw a few different times more educational and travel and other themes coming up during this time. 

So for example, under the same 1906 Venus retrograde in Sagittarius and Scorpio was the San Francisco Segregation Crisis where for some really stupid reason the San Francisco public school board triggered this international diplomatic crisis by ordering Japanese students into segregated schools. And this ended up during the course of the Venus retrograde causing an international incident with Japan, and the president, Theodore Roosevelt, ended up having to intervene in order to prevent a greater escalation with Japan at that time. And so it had to do with racism, not just against Japanese people but also Korean people were targeted as well as Chinese people who had historically been the subject of racism and segregation for decades up to that point as well. 

All right, so jumping forward. Another big one was in 1992 was the Rosewood massacre where there was this false allegation that took place, and then an armed white mob stormed and systematically burned down this entire prosperous Black town of Rosewood, which is in the state of Florida, and basically burnt the entire town to the ground, erasing it from the map. And this massacre, interestingly, was actively suppressed. Like, the documentation and knowledge of it was suppressed after that point, especially by the state, all the way until 72 years later in 1994 where there was a Venus retrograde in Scorpio and Florida, during that Venus retrograde in Scorpio which was a recurrence, became the first US state to offer financial reparations to survivors of the massacre. So there was also a movie that was made about that in the 1990s and other things like that, but it was, like, a long process of eventually documenting what had happened and, like, greater awareness of it coming about later in the century after occurring way earlier in the 1920s in 1922. 

Another interesting one that I saw that I didn’t know a lot about before but I found fascinating was the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1930 and what happened is on the exact day that Venus stationed retrograde, there was a king in Ethiopia named Ras Tafari Makonnen who was crowned as Haile Selassie I, emperor of Ethiopia. And this crowning of him as emperor was, like, widely covered and publicized in the media where it became this global almost spectacle that was interesting because the publicization of it had some unintended side effects where later on over the course of that decade, it ended up directly inspiring the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica, who viewed this emperor as a religious figure and as a source of inspiration. And then it ended up inspiring anti-colonial resistance and Black pride and other themes like that. But it was interesting that the coronation happened exactly the day of the Venus station, and it was something that was widely publicized and known about, and it was one of those events that really caught my eye, similar to how, for example, the day of the Venus retrograde station in Sagittarius in another year was when they found the first steps to the entrance to the tomb of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. So sometimes these themes of eminence and people in power, but also the royal regalia and different things like that are some of the themes that can come up during the Venus stations. But also one thing I kept noticing is that sometimes something will happen on a Venus station, like an event, but there will be artistic or cultural or religious or other things that that will influence that won’t become visible until several years later. So, for example, with that one inspiring the Rastafarian movement, or even aesthetically the discovery of that Egyptian pharaoh leading to the art deco movement or influencing artistic directions in the 1920s, for example. 

All right, jumping forward. 1962 during that Venus retrograde, this was the integration of a college where a student named James Meredith registered as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi. And this was during Kennedy’s administration, and what happened is it required federal troops and US Marshals to basically, like, overpower defiant state segregationists. And as a result of that, he was able to attend college there and finish his degree. So this was, like, a major turning point in terms of segregation and especially school segregation and breaking that up in the 1960s. And then weeks later towards the end of the Venus retrograde, I think once it had stationed, after facing mounting pressure from civil rights leaders, President Kennedy signed an executive order that officially banned racial discrimination in federally funded housing. So that was another really important one that was happening, again, during the course of this Venus retrograde where oftentimes it’s like, a series of things that are happening rather than just a singular event. 

Elsewhere jumping forward to 1986, when anti-apartheid leader Desmond Tutu was enthroned as archbishop in South Africa, and then he subsequently used his international pulpit to demand sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. So this was, again, similar, and it was reminiscent to me of earlier when Haile Selassie was crowned as emperor of Ethiopia, you have this interesting, like, similar figure here being crowned, but in this instance, like, a religious figure. And one of the things it reminded of seeing some of the religious things come up sometimes is that in some of the Hellenistic astrologers like Vettius Valens, they actually associate some elements of the religious functions and religious priests with the planet Venus that had more of a religious function in ancient astrology than we sometimes think of it today. But these are some instances where sometimes that really can come up. 

All right, jumping forward – two more. There’s one in 2002. This was when US Senator Trent Lott resigned even though he was the incoming Senate Majority Leader after this bipartisan uproar took place when he praised, like, the 1948 segregationist presidential campaign of another senator, or of – not another senator, but another politician. So he basically, like, praised this campaign, but then everybody pointed out that that was a campaign that was really much focused on segregation being a good thing. So it drew widespread condemnation, and then he was forced to resign. 

Elsewhere, one last one. This ties back in with the previous story where James Meredith was able to register at the University of Mississippi as a student in 1962. But what happened is in 2018, on October 5th of that year when the Venus retrograde in Scorpio recurred exactly 56 years later, he was formally inducted into the University’s alumni hall of fame, basically recognizing his as being the first student that was integrated into the school at that time during the course of desegregation. So this is an important thing that we sometimes see in terms of recurrences is sometimes something will happen or somebody will do something or be the first to do something during a Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and sometimes it’ll be something that’s really difficult or dangerous. But then it’ll set a precedent, and then years later, when the Venus retrograde in Scorpio recurs, they’ll sometimes be recognized for that or receive some recognition for it. And we see that here, or we see that with, as I said, with Florida in one of the previous ones recognizing that town and paying restitution to the survivors or some of the residents who were survivors of that massacre at that time. And I’ll do a little section later if I have time and don’t run out of steam on other repetitions in order to collect some of these together to show you other ones that I found as well, because I actually found a bunch. 

All right, let’s keep things moving. So I’m kind of doing just, like, a very top-level initial description of each of these events because I decided to do that rather than almost any one of these I could drill into much more to talk about the details and the nuances. But I thought it would be better to give, like, a brief overview of as many as possible rather than just focusing on individual ones to give you more of a sense of the full scope and breadth of what these Venus retrogrades can mean in Scorpio. 

So let’s move onto the next section where some themes I kept seeing come up involved poisons, pollution, and ecological reckonings. So for example, the very first one – this is towards the very tail end of, like, the sign-based Venus retrograde, but it may still be relevant, which is in 1915, Germany makes the first largescale use of poison gas in warfare where they deployed tear gas against Russian troops at the Battle of Bolimow. So this was the first major widespread use of poison gas just after this Venus retrograde had taken place, and so sometimes it’s like, when you see an event happening towards the end of the retrograde or to the later part of that cycle, it means that there was a period of intense development and stuff that led up to it in the few months before that, which is probably what took place here. 

All right, so moving forward. A big one, one of the most impressive ones I found, which connects to eight-year cycles, was in 1962, there was a marine biologist named Rachel Carson who published a landmark book which exposed the hidden and deadly effects of toxic and especially aerosol pesticides like DDT and the effect that these pesticides were having on the natural world, and this basically kickstarted the contemporary grassroots movement for environmentalism. So she basically – because up to this point, this is like, ever since World War II and after that, pesticides and stuff were just being used like crazy to get rid of mosquitos and other things like that. And there was an assumption that these things were safe, basically. But all of a sudden, this scientist publishes this book, and it’s one of the first books – it’s one of the, like, few books in American history where there’s a few books like this or like Uncle Tom’s Cabin for example in the 1800s that really are so big that they actually cause major – it’s such a big expose that they cause actual, tangible and lasting political change because over a very short span of time, it alerts people to dangers that are happening or to bad things that are happening that they didn’t know otherwise. And in this instance, it had to do with basically toxic pesticides and how that was destroying entire ecosystems, but how that also then could affect humans in negative ways. And so what’s interesting is that was the Venus retrograde in Scorpio of 1962. But then eight years later in 1970, that Venus retrograde in Scorpio repeats, and then what happens is that the Environmental Protection Agency is established in the United States specifically for the purpose of cleaning up pollution and toxicity in the earth and in the air and in the water in reaction to the movement and to the disclosures that started eight years earlier in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring. So that’s one of the most brilliant connections between two – an eight-year cycle, basically, of like, Venus retrograde happening, and then a major event taking place and then it starting a movement – in this instance, like, the environmental movement – which then culminates in this really major government entity of the EPA being formed exactly eight years later at the repetition of that same Venus retrograde in Scorpio. So I thought that was really cool, and that was one of the most compelling repetitions, basically, in an eight-year period that I found in researching this particular cycle. 

All right, other – there’s a couple somewhat related ones. One of them was in 2002 involving toxic gas where in Russia there was this hostage crisis that took place in a theater that ended catastrophically when the Russian special forces pumped an undisclosed amount of this lethal – what turned out to be a lethal – chemical agent which was supposed to be a knock-out gas into the building’s ventilation system. But then it ended up killing over a hundred of the hostages or something like that. So it ended up being seen as sort of a catastrophic disaster even though it was supposed to be, like, a rescue operation; but it was a rescue operation that went awry. So that’s part of the symbolism, I think, of the Venus retrograde in Scorpio is a rescue operation that goes awry. But in this instance, it also involved what turned out to be a poisonous gas. 

All right, and finally the last one which kind of ties in, I think, in interesting ways to the environmental theme that we saw in the 1962 and 1970 Venus retrograde in Scorpio is in 2018, this Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the last few months of that year coincided with the emergence of the young – at the time just 15-year-old – Swedish high school student Greta Thunberg who started protesting and started a campaign that was called the School Strike for Climate Campaign where she was holding a sign. And one of the things that was really interesting about this and about her and as she emerged basically onto the world stage during the course of the three-month period of this Venus retrograde in late 2018 was that, like, she was really fueled by a deep anger over ecological collapse, as well as invisible carbon emissions. And her protest ended up igniting what’s called the Fridays for Future movement where millions of students ended up or began striking from school over the environment. And what was interesting is that the movement of this, which was really explosive at the time if you were around back then, ended up resulting in her getting invitations first in November during the course of the Venus retrograde to give this really famous TedX talk, and then from there she was actually invited to give this really highly publicized speech in December. I think around the time that Venus is stationing direct or maybe just after it’s already stationed direct she gives this speech for the United Nations at a climate summit in Poland. And she basically, during these speeches, ended up like, channeling this generational anger which is very Scorpio that was directed at the establishment and at the government and politicians where she fiercely criticized global leaders for their inaction and basically bluntly told them that they were stealing their children’s futures. 

So I thought that was a really interesting one in terms of Venus retrograde in Scorpio and the emergence of a new environment activist figure in a similar way that, like, 1962 saw the emergence of Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring, and then 1970 saw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency as a result of that. So interesting themes coming up with these Venus retrogrades in Scorpio where sometimes it’s identifying something that’s killing people, but it’s doing so quietly or silently – in the case of Rachel Carson’s book, it’s literally called Silent Spring – and bringing that to people’s attention in order to try to fix it or make it better or to resolve or restore it in some way. 

All right, so shifting gears. In the next section, one of the major themes that I started to see come up over and over again were themes having to do with true crime, cults, and psychological terror where sometimes these themes involving mass cultural panics surrounding toxic relationships or psychological manipulation or even high-profile murders that sometimes shatter the illusion of safety in society. 

So for example, the very first one was in 1947, and this was the Black Dahlia murder where there was this gruesome but also really highly sensationalized murder in Hollywood of an aspiring actress named Elizabeth Short. And prior to this, it’s like, Hollywood had this glamorous, beautiful, picturesque sort of veneer to it, especially to outsiders. But then this highly publicized death just kind of like, shattered the American post-war idealized dream about Hollywood. And instead, what it substituted in its place was part of the modern obsession with true crime stories. And it showed this gritty, sort of underworld side to Hollywood, basically, and to California and that area in general. 

So we sort of take this for granted nowadays in terms of the podcasts and the YouTube channels and other things like that that focus on true crime stories. But this is really one of the first really big ones in America was this murder in 1947 under a Venus retrograde. 

All right, so jumping forward to 1978. This was the Jonestown Massacre during the course of this Venus retrograde in Scorpio when there was this cult leader whose name was Jim Jones, and he directed this horrific mass murder or I should say mass suicide of over 900 people who famously drank this cyanide-laced punch and then died. And this led to the famous, like, eventually the famous phrase, like, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid” became one of the phrases that came out of this, although it turns out they weren’t drinking Kool-Aid, but they were drinking some, like, cheaper knock-off version of it – not that that matters, but it kind of illustrated the darkest extremes of themes of toxic devotion and psychological control. And once this happened – again, it was really highly publicized massacre and mass suicide, so a lot of these themes were just all over the media and the news for weeks after this during the course of the retrograde as the people in the country and around the world are sort of, like, discussing themes of what would lead cult members to follow a charismatic leader into death and different things like that. 

Similarly, a dark one – I originally had this in the first section on digging up old things, but this one was a little different, a little bit more gruesome. This was in 1978 was the arrest of John Wayne Gacy who was this famous serial killer, basically, in the United States. When police – there was a disappearance of somebody, and John Wayne Gacy became the primary suspect, and eventually they went and they searched his house and they uncovered a mass grave in his crawl space that was in the dirt that was concealing a lot of people, basically, that he killed. And it really shocked the public at the time because he turned out to be, like, one of the most prolific serial killers in the country. But to his community, he was known as somebody that was thought to be, like, a good guy or something like that, because he actually played a clown. Like, he went to parties and acted as a clown at parties in his suburban neighborhood. So it’s like, his local community was absolutely shocked, but then the country and the world was shocked as well when he turned out to be a serial killer. 

Similar was in 1994. This is, like I said, the jury selection process for the OJ Simpson trial, and then the jury process itself became really highly publicized due to the double murder and due to how famous OJ Simpson was at this point, both as a famous football player – one of the most famous football players in America – but also as an actor where he’d become a successful actor in the 1980s as well, playing in comedies and other things like that. And it raised – like, the jury selection process itself, because the whole trial was later televised the following year once it got started, but with the jury selection process itself, there was this national discussion and reckoning at the time about themes of domestic abuse and toxic relationships in particular. And because the lawyers at the time during the jury selection were also arguing about whether certain evidence could be submitted at trial about, like, previous abuse allegations or about the phone call that his wife or ex-wife made when he was breaking into the house to murder her and the guy that she was with, there was a lot of discussions at the time that were pretty intense and pretty dark during the course of that Venus retrograde. 

And then finally, another one I remember really vividly from 2002 during the course of this Venus retrograde was the Beltway snipers where there were these two guys, there were these two snipers, who went around on the east coast around Washington, D.C., and they executed this seemingly random set of killings where they were, like, concealed and they put the gun through a hole in the car in the trunk. And then they were just, like, shooting people over this three-week essentially what became, like, a psychological terror campaign. Because this was late 2002, so this was only, like, a year after 9/11, and the country was still very much on edge and very paranoid about terrorism and all sorts of things like that. And then there’s these two guys that go around the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area just, like, shooting people with sniper rifles over the course of a three-week period. So it was a very crazy time. And yeah, that was the last in terms of that and in terms of how sometimes events like this can cause feelings of psychological terror in the news and in terms of people being worried about, like, am I next? Or what precautions should I take not to be the subject of – the victim of – something like this? And so on and so forth. 

Next section I want to talk about some themes that I saw come up repeatedly about economic control, economic sabotage, and also sometimes economic structural revolutions. So for example, in 1914, around the Venus retrograde in Scorpio that occurred that year, the US government officially established the Federal Trade Commission. And the goal of this was to protect consumers, to crack down on corporate trusts, and also to prevent anti-competitive business practices. So it’s like, Venus going through Scorpio and setting up a thing that was set to help consumers avoid being ripped off, basically, by crooks or by criminals. And sometimes that criminal element can sometimes come up when you have things going on with the sign of Scorpio, including attempts to sometimes fix that criminal element. Like I think – you know, in another context, like the FBI I think – I think the Federal Bureau of Investigation was created under Saturn in Scorpio or maybe it was that, like, maybe it was J. Edgar Hoover that had Saturn in Scorpio or something like that. But in this instance, it was a Venus retrograde in Scorpio. 

Similarly, under the same Venus retrograde in 1914 in Scorpio, the Federal Reserve banks opened, or the very first set of 12 banks which were regional Federal Reserve banks officially opened across the United States. And the point was to decentralize the central banking system in order to pool reserves and stabilize the nation’s fractured financial sector. And this would actually become really important later on, because that’s 1914 when the Federal Reserve Banks open. But then what happened is in 1930 when there was another Venus retrograde years later, like two cycles later, we had the collapse of the Bank of the United States where on the east coast – I think it was in New York – there was these panicked depositors who basically triggered a bank run that triggered the collapse of the Bank of the United States. And this was the largest commercial bank failure in US history up to that point. So it was ironically happening on a retrograde recurrence of Venus retrograde two cycles after the Federal Reserve was created. It was actually a really notorious failure of the Federal Reserve to step in and act as a lender of last resort because the Federal Reserve basically refused to step in and let the bank fail, which in retrospect was seen to be a bad call that was motivated by really bad things or really stupid things. 

So there’s some sort of history there in terms of just the fact that the Federal Reserve was created, or that the banks were opened, at least, under that Venus retrograde sets up some sort of important precedent whenever that Venus retrograde recurs again in the future. 

All right, moving on. 1938, that Venus retrograde – there was the landmark New Deal economic legislation took effect where basically it established – this was during Roosevelt’s presidency – it established the first federal minimum wage. It mandated overtime pay, and then it also outlawed oppressive industrial child labor. So it was like, during the course of the New Deal when Roosevelt’s implementing all of these economic policies during the course of the Great Depression, basically, or the 1930s, this was like, one of the major things that was implemented at that time in order to attempt to offset or help things, in order to put some rules and guidelines in place to help people and to help the little people which is more of a Venus-type thing. 

But then later on in 1946 – so this is post-World War II, and something interesting that happened was it was like, right towards the end of this Venus retrograde in Scorpio in ‘46, President Truman officially proclaimed the cessation of World War II hostilities. So it’s like, World War II had technically ended a year, year-and-a-half earlier in mid-1945 in terms of the actual fighting in Europe and in the Pacific. But then what happened is at the end of this Venus retrograde in late 1946, he officially on paper and for economic and financial reasons declared the war officially over. And what this did is it systematically started dismantling some of the emergency federal controls that had been in place during the course of the war – during the course of World War II – about things like domestic prices, wages, and also manufacturing. And this transition then helped make the economic transition to ignite the post-war civilian consumer economy. So that’s really important in terms of sometimes Venus has more to do with regulation and like, economic regulation and things like that than we really think of. And you can really see that sometimes during these Venus retrogrades in Scorpio, both in terms of, like, when regulations are put in place in a good or helpful way, or sometimes when regulations fail or are not put in place or used appropriately. 

And finally, there was one other economic one that came up. It was the 1970 Venus retrograde, and this was when the US government ended up orchestrating this invisible blockade in order to destabilize Chile’s economy. And what they did is they pressured international lenders like the World Bank to completely halt development loans. And I think I mentioned this already, but it may just be relevant in terms of some of the recent heightened economic blockades in terms of Iran that were announced this summer, and then we’ll see what happens – how that plays out – over the course of the next several months as Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio again and we get a recurrence of something similar to 1970. 

All right, moving onto the next section to keep things going. So I found some major themes – we’ll sort of shift gears at this point, because the next section to do with themes involving the media, broadcasting, and global icons. So for example, in 1906 during the very first Venus retrograde that dipped into Scorpio, there was an international conference that took place and they formally adopted the Morse code sequence S-O-S as the universal maritime distress signal for basically if you need help. And I thought that was a really interesting, like, Venus retrograde thing of having a signal that’s now universally recognized. Like, even if you don’t know Morse code, everybody knows that like, S-O-S is that distress signal that ships will put out if they’re in trouble. And I thought that was really interesting Venus retrograde, like, symbolism of going retrograde and asking for help or alerting others that you’re in need of assistance.

Similarly, under the same retrograde, there was another first where at this time, a person transmitted what is widely recognized as the first audio radio broadcast during this Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And what was interesting is it brought – he used both his human voice, but also used music. This guy played music over the radio, and he astonished – it really surprised some of the wireless shipboard operators at the time. And the person who did it, his name was Reginald Fessenden. So the very first basically human voice and music over the radio occurred under this Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and this significance of that will become clearer as I go through some of the repetitions. 

So we jump forward one cycle to 1915 when Alexander Graham Bell inaugurated the first commercial transcontinental telephone line by calling his former assistant from New York to San Francisco, and he repeated his iconic phrase – or then iconic phrase – “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.” So the first basically opening up towards the end of the Venus retrograde, and I think they were, like, testing it and working it out during the course of the Venus retrograde, and then by the time it stationed direct, they did this big, publicized first call on this transcontinental telephone that was calling from New York to San Francisco. 

All right, moving on. 1922, Venus retrograde in Scorpio. This was the start of Technicolor Cinema, basically, where there was this movie called The Toll of the Sea, and it premiered as the first feature film that was produced in two-color subtractive technicolor that could be screened without specialized production equipment. So it was a really huge turning point in terms of starting to bring color, basically, into film, which had largely just been black and white up to that point, but also in terms of pushing the technology forward to make it easier to make color films, which eventually would come to dominate movies and television and everything else today. But this is really a crucial turning point in terms of being the first feature film that did this with that specific approach. 

Jumping forward to 1954, a really interesting one that had a repetition that I found is that it turns out that during the Venus retrograde in 1954, the very first episode of The Tonight Show debuted with Steve Allen, who was the host originally on NBC of The Tonight Show. And The Tonight Show ended up becoming this, like, American institution, because it set the standard for late night talk shows, basically, that all subsequent talk shows would imitate after that. And what’s cool about this one is – so, The Tonight Show starts under the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1954, and then get this. Exactly eight years later, when the Venus retrograde in Scorpio repeats in 1962, that’s when Johnny Carson took over The Tonight Show, which he ran for the next I think three decades or something like that. And at that point, it really took off, and The Tonight Show became sort of like, the primary hit late night show in television that just dominated the ratings for decades. And I thought that was interesting, because I’ve used Johnny Carson’s chart for other things at other points, and I know that he has Scorpio rising with Mercury and Saturn in Scorpio in the first whole sign house. So that means that that Venus retrograde that happened in 1962 when he was taking over The Tonight Show was going through his rising sign in his first house and activating his Mercury and his Saturn in the first house, and he became a household name as a talk show host. So I thought that was pretty cool. 

Actually, now that I think of it, that’s actually similar to my own chart and situation, because I also have a Mercury and Saturn in Scorpio, and I took over as host of a podcast on my birthday in 2010 in the middle of a Venus retrograde in Scorpio in my 10th whole sign house. There was this old podcast I took over called Traditional Astrology Radio that I took over from my friend Jacqui Menkes, and I ran that for, like, a few years, and then eventually launched The Astrology Podcast in 2012 actually under a subsequent Venus retrograde because I wanted to not just talk about traditional astrology, but I wanted to talk about lots of different forms of astrology, and that’s why I broadened it. But now that I think about it, it’s funny that I also got started under a Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the 10th house over my Mercury-Saturn conjunction at the time. 

All right, good. Always finding new things, even in the process of talking about them. All right, so jumping forward, 1962 – that same Venus retrograde where Johnny Carson is taking over The Tonight Show, one of the things I found really fascinating is that the band The Beatles released their debut single at this time, which was the song “Love Me Do.” And this was basically their first commercial single and was the start of what would become, like, massive commercial success where they became the most successful band in popular music history, and it all started with this Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1962. 

All right, moving forward to – jumping forward eight years to 1970. That Venus retrograde in Scorpio was particularly depressing for some reason, and in some instances this has to do with, like, what planets are aspecting the Venus retrograde, either by being in the same sign as Venus – like, being in Scorpio, for example. Like, there was one where there was a lot of surprises, and it was because Venus was stationing with Uranus conjunct it. And that was, like – what was it? That was the president – I think that was like, Carter or somebody announcing the agreement with China. But there’s other times where it’s with Jupiter and it’s like, a little bit more easy or favorable. There’s other times where there’s other planets like Mars aspecting Venus by a hard aspect, and you can see those ones being a lot more rough in terms of certain stories. Anyway, so the 1971 – just two weeks apart during this Venus retrograde in Scorpio, both Jimi Hendrix as well as Janis Joplin ended up dying tragically at the age of 27 years old. And both of them died from tragic drug overdoses. So this was, you know, I wasn’t around at the time, but that must have been really rough, I imagine, especially for a lot of the younger people and a lot of the counterculture people that listened to their music. And then, yeah, this was also cementing the idea of the 27 Club, of sometimes famous musicians passing away around the age of 27, which later musicians like Kurt Cobain would continue unfortunately. 

All right, moving on. So in 1986, I talked about the debut of the Oprah Winfrey Show when she started her nationally syndicated show and then just like, became this national sensation over the course of the next few months by talking about tough things and being really empathetic and open and willing to go anywhere with her audience. And that’s a really important one where sometimes there’s, like, figures that rise into prominence during these Venus retrogrades. So in terms of, you know, Oprah rising into prominence there or the Beatles releasing their first single in 1962 or Johnny Carson taking over The Tonight Show in 1962 under the Venus retrograde. And oftentimes, it’s because Scorpio is falling is an important spot in the chart, or it’s because the people involved have important placements in Scorpio. 

Okay, the last two I wanted to have in this section are 1994, when NetScape Communications released NetScape Navigator 1.0, and this was the first widely successful commercial web browser which basically gave, like, a visual user interface that was easily accessible for accessing the internet. And this helped to transition the internet from, like, this sort of like, academic curiosity into the indispensable global medium that everybody uses today that’s really easy to access. And part of that turning point was having a visual way to access the internet that was easy and accessible, and that partially really started here with the release of NetScape in 1994 during that Venus retrograde. 

And my very last one, which is one of my favorites, happened in 2010. And this is when during this Venus retrograde in Scorpio, like, early in the retrograde, software engineers released the photosharing app Instagram. And Instagram was released during this Venus retrograde in Scorpio in late 2010, and then it just, like, quickly became wildly popular and it attracted something like a hundred thousand users in just its first week. And then by the end of the retrograde, by the time Venus stationed direct in Libra in November and December, Instagram had hit over a million followers, basically, by December by the end of the retrograde. And it essentially completely revolutionized the idea of visual social media as well as mobile photography, because 2010 was still, like, the very early days of smartphones and iPhones and other stuff like that. And Instagram being a social networking platform that was entirely focused on photos was really novel at the time, especially because it had a unique feature of being able to put different filters on your photos and back then people were putting all sorts of, like, you know, dark and mysterious and other kind of filters on all of the photos that they were posting on Instagram. So I thought that was amazing. 

And the other thing that’s amazing about that is 2010 was the first time that Venus started the retrograde in Scorpio, but then it stationed direct in Libra. And then when Instagram itself was launched, there was a stellium of planets in Libra involving the Sun and Mercury and something else, I believe. So I think that’s part of the shift, and that’s like, an early preview and intimation of the larger shift that we’re going to be seeing emerge over the course of the next century as the Venus retrogrades continue to drift from Scorpio into Libra more fully, and potentially this being an early example of that just in terms of the power of images, the power of video, the power of aesthetics and different things like that, which is a very Venusian thing. 

All right. Digression! So yeah, I’m working through these pretty good so far; I’m gonna try to keep the momentum up. This is obviously a lot, but hopefully you’re starting to get some perspective on how it all comes together when you start seeing the big picture. I meant to say that obviously it started off with some of the more challenging stuff, and I’m treating these mundane studies as separate from a natal study. So it’s not like, you know, anything in this that we’re talking about in a natal context, it doesn’t mean that that’s necessarily how it’s gonna manifest in a private or a personal context, because it really depends on how the birth chart is set up in different ways. But if people would like, let me know in the comments and I may do a separate episode talking about examples of different people that natally have Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and that could be an interesting additional avenue that I largely decided to leave out of this treatment, just for time and space. 

And yeah, what else did I mean to say? I meant to give the date that I’m recording this on September 17th – Thursday, September 17th, 2026. I used an election with Sagittarius rising. I think I was a little delayed; I was shooting for a Midheaven in Virgo, but I think it ended up being Midheaven at zero Libra. But I had a nice Moon-Jupiter trine today that I wanted to take advantage of for recording this. And I’m a little struggling, because I’m getting over being sick with covid this month that’s been lasting for, like, two or three weeks that has exacerbated some of my existing long covid symptoms with fatigue and brain fog and memory loss. So I’m relying a little bit more on the extensive notes that I wrote down than I might normally, but that’s why – just in order to make sure I’m saying all the main things that I meant to say in terms of all the research, although this is still in many instances I’m just giving, like, the bare minimum or highlights of some of the research. 

All right, let’s get back into it. Let’s move into our next section, which is one of our more fun sections, which has to do with movies, media, and dark themes in pop culture. So going all the way back to 1906, I found this fascinating because during this Venus retrograde in Scorpio where it just barely dipped into Scorpio for the first time, we had a first – a world’s first – where the world’s first feature-length narrative film premiered. And it was titled The Story of the Kelly Gang. And this film, what’s funny about this film is that it actually chronicles the notorious exploits and anti-authoritarian rebellion of – as well as the tragic downfall of – this 19th century Australian person and his outlaw gang. And it was, like, the leader of a gang named Ned Kelly. So what’s funny about this being the world’s first feature-length narrative film is that it was like, kind of about crime and criminal acts and gangs and underworldly stuff like that. And what’s funny is that will set up a precedent that we’re gonna see recur in especially a major recurrence of Venus retrograde later on in 1994 that I’ll mention here in just a little bit. Okay, but world’s first feature-length narrative film. So it sets up an important precedent for doing long feature-length film, and something like that can actually be successful. 

All right, so jumping forward to 1938, this one was really funny, because this is when Orson Welles broadcast a fake alien invasion over the radio which caused widespread psychological panic because he basically did, like, a radio version of the War of the Worlds book and story. But he played it like it was a newscast that was live and unfolding. And they did like – I think they did a little disclaimer at the beginning, but since some people tuned in late, they didn’t hear that, and they thought this was, like, live – like, an alien invasion was taking place and destroying things and taking over the world. So it freaked out a bunch of people, and it set a really interesting precedent in terms of mass media and the potential for panic or misinformation or paranoia and fears and different things like that with this Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1938. 

All right, jumping forward, there were some different movies that came out during Venus retrogrades in Scorpio that were really interesting and iconic for different reasons. And one of the ones that I found the most fascinating is the Venus retrograde of 1946, the movie It’s a Wonderful Life came out. And this was interesting, because it actually premiered shortly after Venus stationed direct in Scorpio, and the film itself, even though it’s usually viewed almost a century later as this Christmas movie and a Christmas classic at this point, when it first came out, it didn’t do super well because it was somewhat of a – it was viewed as a somewhat bleak exploration of themes of suicide and corruption adn things like that. And the main character was, you know, at the brink of suicide. But then he sort of comes during the course of the film to appreciate his life, essentially, and appreciate the value of his life, but only got there after going to a very dark place psychologically. And so what’s funny about that is the movie didn’t do super well when it was first released, and it’s only later on – like, a few decades later – the production company accidentally let the rights to the movie lapse. And so when they did that in the 1970s, a bunch of television stations started playing the movie over and over again, because they could play it for free. And as a result of that from the 1970s forward, it became this ubiquitous Christmas or holiday-type movie. And what’s funny is there was a repetition then in 1994; I think it was NBC got the rights to the movie to play it exclusively, and they ended up, like, restricting – their strategy from 1994 forward was to restrict its usage, and this was during a Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1994. And what they did is they set it so that the movie wasn’t being played all the time anymore, but instead they restricted it so now it was only played – they would play it twice a year, two times in December. Once in early December and then once around Christmas. And they heavily publicized and hyped up the showing of the movie to make it, like, an event. And this was during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio of 1994, and then that set the precedent that’s basically continued all the way until the present time. So I thought that was funny, both in terms of the original theme, but also in terms of being a good example of a repetition. 

All right, moving on. In 1954, the very first Godzilla movie came out in Japan, and this ended up being this massive pop culture monster sensation. But one of the things that was interesting as I was researching this that I didn’t know and I learned recently was that, like, Godzilla – this was 1954, so this is, like, you know, less than 10 years after World War II had ended. And there was a lot of heavy censorship in Japan after the war about talking about certain things, including certain aspects of, like, the US having used the atomic weapons and dropping those on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And so Godzilla itself was partially the movie where there’s, like, this monster and there’s nuclear themes and it’s destroying entire cities was partially – there was a subtext to it where it was partially reflecting on and a way of processing publicly through media the trauma of having experienced the nuclear weapons that were unleashed that killed so many civilians in 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So even though it’s, like, Godzilla is viewed at this point in time – since it’s been such a long franchise – as this sort of like, the start of monster movies or a genre of monster movies, and there’s been all sorts of different iterations of that, there was a more interesting, deep psychological context for the movie when it was released in 1954, besides just the basic thing on the surface that everybody knows. 

Interestingly, that’s another repetition that’s about to take place later this year when Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio, because there’s another Godzilla movie – a major Godzilla movie – that’s about to come out later this year that is a sequel to one that was released just a few years ago that actually won an Academy Award, I think, for Best Special Effects for the first time, which was a pretty big deal when it happened just a few years ago. So that’s another repetition, and that’s one of the reasons why even though – you know, I’m going through these and some of these stories seem random, or sometimes it’s obvious. Like, a certain story is obviously very tied in with Venus retrograde and the symbolism is obvious. There’s other times when the symbolism initially may not seem as obvious, and you have to kind of like, dig into it, and once you do you kind of understand the subtext and that there is a way that the symbolism matches up with Venus or Venus retrograde or the meaning of Scorpio or other things like that. Other times, the story is important because if something started under Venus retrograde in Scorpio, then it just sets it up so that there’s gonna be repetitions and that thing is gonna be revisited at some point in the future when Venus again goes retrograde in Scorpio. And so that’s why sometimes when you’re doing this research, it’s important to have a really wide view of what were the major things that coincided with the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the past? Because sometimes those things will come up again the next time that same retrograde happens. So that’s a good example of that. 

All right, moving on. One of my favorite movie discoveries that I found was the 1962 Venus retrograde where the very first James Bond movie came out during the Venus retrograde of 1962 in Scorpio. And this was the film that basically launched the entire James Bond franchise, and it introduced a lot of the basic elements of the entire James Bond franchise that are still used to this day where you have this, like, suave handsome sophisticated but ruthless secret agent spy, and he’s going around doing spy things like assassinating people and using secret weapons and secret compartments and there’s all sorts of intrigue and other stuff like that. And it sort of triggered this global spy craze. But what was funny is that it came out in the UK in the fall of 1962, and then normally movies would only be in theaters in the UK for like a week, but it was so wildly popular that they ended up extending it in different theaters to be two or three weeks showings, and then sometimes they would even bring it back it was so popular. So it really was something that, like, comes out early in the retrograde but then builds up in popularity during the course of it. So there’s, like, not just a singular event, but it unleashes something culturally that people are talking about and into and becomes popular basically, or becomes part of the popular consciousness at that time. So that was one of – I thought that was cool, just like, James Bond movie coming out and starting that and Venus retrograde in Scorpio. 

All right, moving on. 1962 was also interesting because there was a quieter yet still important release where hitting the newsstands exactly one week after Venus stationed direct in Scorpio was the first issue of The Amazing Spiderman – so the comic book The Amazing Spiderman – and also the debut of Iron Man came out basically in the same week. And these were both simultaneously introduced by Stan Lee, and Stan Lee is this legendary comic book creator with Marvel who was behind many of the superheroes that have become so popular over the course of the past couple of decades when they started making superhero movies, especially based on the Marvel characters that he created or co-created. But one of the things as I was looking into this that was funny, especially for Spiderman and Spiderman being introduced at this time, is that part of his formula is not just, like, or part of the thing that was innovative about things like Spiderman at the time is that he had this formula where he created vulnerable psychologically complex heroes who were wrestling with things like guilt or personal trauma or like, shortcomings or other things like that, or like, flaws basically. Like, they were flawed superheroes, which was really innovative and different at the time. And even having – I watched an interview as I was researching this with Stan Lee, and he was talking about even just having Spiderman be a young guy, having Peter Parker be like, a teenager who’s a superhero who’s dealing with teenager problems itself was innovative at the time. And people – like, his boss did think that that was appropriate or would work because it didn’t fit the mold of what a superhero was supposed to be. So there’s something really important about this. And then get this – Stan Lee, the creator of this, he was born with Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1922. So so brilliant – like, that you have somebody born during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio cycle or around the Venus retrograde of 1922, and then he introduces what would become some of his most iconic and influential characters basically the same week during a Venus retrograde in 1962, which are Spiderman, which became his most iconic and successful character, but also Iron Man, which everybody knows at this point it was the Iron Man film that came out in 2008 which really launched the entire superhero era of Marvel comic book movies that have just dominated cinemas for the past couple of decades. So interesting repetition, though, about that – there’s, like, a big – you know, Venus is about to go retrograde, and there’s a big Marvel superhero movie that’s coming out later this year that’s gonna feature a bunch of his characters, including not just Spiderman, but also Iron Man who like, died in a previous Avengers movie back in, what, like, 2018 or 2019. The character who plays him was Robert Downey, Jr., and he’s coming back to play a different character in this new Avenger movie; he’s playing a character named Dr. Doom. So basically there’s some Venus retrograde themes involved there, and it goes back to the introduction of some of these characters in 1962, but also it goes back to the creator himself, Stan Lee, being born around the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1922. So I thought that was an amazing and sort of stunning thing. And then I’m sure when that movie comes out and we find out what the actual plot is, there may be ways in which that makes even more sense once it becomes clear how some of those characters are being used in the upcoming movie. 

All right, the next one I have to give a shoutout to my friend Patrick Watson who pointed this one out for me where he pointed out that in the 1986 Venus retrograde that opening just a few days before the retrograde station itself in Scorpio, there was this record-breaking mega musical which was Phantom of the Opera. So the Phantom of the Opera came out in 1986, and it’s interesting in terms of themes, because it focuses on this disfigured genius who’s hiding in subterranean catacombs, and it’s deeply exploring these themes of unrequited love, severe isolation, and also the destructive aspect of artistic obsession. So I thought that was really perfect in terms of just Venus retrograde in Scorpio themes of having, like, a dark, obsessive type of character in the context of that movie and that musical. 

Another one, probably one of the most impressive ones, though, is the Venus retrograde of 1994, because this released exactly as Venus stationed retrograde was the movie Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino, which ended up just being one of the biggest blockbuster movies of the year and one of the biggest blockbusters of that decade, which is so fascinating to me because it was released right on the station of Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And this was, like, an indie blockbuster, and on the one hand, it was like, a crime drama, and it features a bunch of criminals doing criminal things like shooting or killing people. So you have this Scorpionic element, but one of the things I love about this that’s interesting is that – and that was unique about it – is you also get a retrograde element, because Pulp Fiction incorporated non-linear storytelling where it basically redefined some of the different storytelling conventions for movies because it had an out-of-order narrative where you were coming in with different characters at different points in the story. And sometimes there would be, like, a character who would die in the middle of the movie, but then it would later in the film at the end of the film it would go backwards in time and you would see that character again at some earlier point in their story. So the nonlinear storytelling keyword is one of the things I think is really important about this happening on a Venus retrograde station. And yeah, but it was also just, like, a gritty underworld crime drama that became a massive commercial success at this time and helped to launch the career of Quentin Tarantino into the stratosphere. And one of the things that’s funny about that is just it really reminds me of how – remember the very first feature-length narrative film movie in 1906 was that movie, The Story of the Kelly Gang, and it was about a gang of outlaws and criminals basically. So we have the seeds of that in the very first feature-length film, and then in 1994 you have this repetition of Venus retrograde in Scorpio and you have one of the most – one of the biggest or most successful sort of crime type movies with Pulp Fiction. So I thought that was pretty brilliant. 

Similarly, another one – again, shoutout to Patrick Watson for this one, but Patrick Watson pointed out to me that in 2002 in that Venus retrograde towards the end of 2002, the movie Chicago came out. And this was released at the tail end of the retrograde cycle, but it was kind of this dark, biting satire that was focused on the stories of these two women that had murdered people, and they were both on death row, and it was about different themes about manipulating the tabloid press, and about all of these different intense themes, because it was also a musical. And some of the different scenes had different women that were in jail for different things, and it was about other topics like lawyers manipulating the media in order to flip or control the image of somebody that had done a crime and to make it look better. There’s, like, a lot of different themes and subtext to Chicago that are just, like, really brilliant when you think about them in the context of Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And what was crazy is that that movie was, like, wildly successful, and it went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture just a few months later in early 2023 when the Oscars happened in March. But it was released under this Venus retrograde in Scorpio in late 2002. 

All right, so that’s actually the last one. So and I’m sure there’s other movies or plays or books or other things that I didn’t even get to that came out during different Venus retrogrades in Scorpio in the past. So if you happen to notice one or you find one, let me know in the comments section below this video on YouTube, and then maybe we could collect together and do a separate episode at some point about different things in the media or that emerged in stories or other things like that in the past, because I’m sure we could do a whole episode just on that. 

All right, moving onto the last couple of sections before I wrap things up. One of the things that came up as I’m reading through dates and there’s different places where you read through lists of, like, what happened sequentially on this date in history. So like, Wikipedia has a lot of good pages that show things sequentially during different years or different months. But sometimes you’ll come across disasters where a major disaster happened around the time of a Venus retrograde. And sometimes it’s hard to – like, I experienced this during the Venus retrograde in Aries where we did that research, and in that episode we largely ended up skipping over and not mentioning a bunch of the disasters that we found, because I had a hard time knowing whether those, like, stood out as unique or overly important, or whether it was just, like, that disasters are sort of like, always happening at different times. But then what was weird is during that Venus retrograde in Aries, some certain types of disasters that had occurred in the past – like, especially there had been like, a lot of plane crashes that came up during the Venus retrograde in Aries series in history. And I wasn’t sure if that was a pattern or not. But then all of a sudden when Venus went retrograde in the early part of what was it? Like, 2025, there was this string of airplane crashes, and I realized that that was something I should have mentioned. 

So I did write down the disasters. I’m not gonna go through all of them, because there’s a lot. But I’ll mention just, like, I don’t know, let’s say the top five really quickly in the off-chance that archetypally some of this becomes relevant again for some reason in the off-chance. And hopefully it won’t! But just for the sake of a little bit of completeness. 

So for example, the biggest one that I noticed that came up during a Venus retrograde in Scorpio was November 12th, 1970, which was the Bhola cyclone where there was this catastrophic offshore storm surge which struck eastern Pakistan and modern Bangladesh. And it triggered – it killed this massive amount of people. It was like, 300,000 to 500,000 people, which is just an unimaginable number of people to die in a natural disaster. And then afterwards, the government did such a bad job of handling it that it actually triggered the Bangladesh liberation war after that point. So it actually had political implications as well. And that’s one of the things that we kind of saw last year where, for example, we had the Venus retrograde that coincided with those fires in Los Angeles is that sometimes afterwards, like, communities can come together, and there’s networks of support that develop. But also sometimes when disasters take place, there’s outrage and anger and it leads to political change and leads to revising or fixing especially, like, codes or fixing rules and regulations in order to ensure that a similar disaster doesn’t happen in the future. 

So yeah, so okay – so moving on, January 13th, 1915, was the Avezzano earthquake, which was this earthquake that struck in Italy which killed at least 30,000 people. So that was a major earthquake in Italy. 

In January of 1939, there was a major earthquake that stuck Chile, which killed an estimated 28,000 people. 

In September of 1922, there was the Great Fire of Smyrna, which was this – Turkish national forces apparently captured this port city, and then incinerated the Greek and Armenian quarters which marked this really catastrophic conclusion to the Greek-Turkish War and killed tens of thousands of people. So that’s, like, tied in with also the end of a conflict or a war, but it was also still a major disaster involving a fire. 

Elsewhere in September of 1906, there was a major typhoon and tsunami in Hong Kong, which struck Hong Kong and destroyed thousands of vessels and resulted in the death of over 10,000 people. 

There was also a earthquake and tsunami in September of 2018, and that struck Indonesia and resulted in more than 4,000 deaths. So I could kind of go on and on; I think I’ll leave it at that. But I just wanted to mention a few of the major ones, because you know, it’s not all just like, political – Venus retrogrades are not all just political intrigue or changing fashion trends or aesthetics or themes that come up in movies. But sometimes Venus retrogrades can also be really important for tangible events and tragedies that affect people’s lives and change the course of not just people’s personal lives, but also the course of history. So that could be a whole separate episode, but I’ll leave it there for now. 

All right. I was gonna have a section on, like, repetitions, but I’ve already mentioned most of these, so it’s probably not wroth repeating them where I said how, like, you know, Theodore Roosevelt was born under a Venus retrograde in 1958 in Sagittarius or near that Venus retrograde in Sagittarius, and then he had a recurrence in 1906 when he wins the Nobel Peace Prize. 

I noticed one where the Soviet Union was created under that Venus retrograde in 1922, and then in 1986, there was a major – there was a Venus retrograde in Scorpio and there was a major rebellion in Kazakhstan that was put down, and this many historians regard that as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, because after that point, some of the instability started to spiral out of control in terms of that eventually culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But that was kind of, like, interesting because it was kind of like the beginning of the end in some sense during that Venus retrograde in Scorpio recurrence. 

Elsewhere, I mentioned the Rosewood massacre in 1923 and how Florida became the first state in US history to offer financial reparations to survivors in 1994 on that recurrence. 

I mentioned Stan Lee and his recurrence with being born on a Venus retrograde in Scorpio and releasing Spiderman and Iron Man under a repetition of that in 1962, and then how that movie’s gonna come out later this year in I think November of 2026. 

There was an interesting one about wars in Vietnam in 1946 and 1954 that were connected to the Venus retrograde and a repetition of that where it went from, like, France and then switching to the United States in terms of the war in Vietnam. 

One other one that I haven’t mentioned yet, which is a great repetition, is 1962 and the creation of the Kennedy Center around the time of that Venus retrograde in Scorpio where in late 1962, President John F. Kennedy at the time launched a fundraising campaign in order to create the National Cultural Center, which is I think what they were calling it at that time. And they had this entire arts week or something like that over the course of a week in order to promote and raise funds for this cultural center. And then I think after Kennedy was assassinated, they later ended up naming the Cultural Center after him and it became known as the Kennedy Center. But then, of course, this topic is coming up in the news again right now because there was a recent Washington Post headline that I saw just this past week about the Kennedy Center closing and about there’s these conflicts that are basically happening with Trump, who’s trying to put his name on the venue and then a federal judge rejected that, so now it’s, like, being closed or something like that. And I’m sure that will continue to play out during the course of this Venus retrograde in Scorpio recurrence. 

Okay, so there’s other repetitions that I could mention, but I think it would just be repeating things I already said, so I think that’s sufficient. And yeah, I think you get the picture, that sometimes when a Venus retrograde happens, especially if something new is started at that time, then when that Venus retrograde repeats then there’s something about the past that will be revisited for some reason in the present or in the future. 

And it’s like, part of the symbolism of that is because Venus retrogrades – when Venus turns retrograde, it starts not just moving backwards, but it starts looking backwards towards the past. And so during Venus retrogrades, there’s sometimes an inherent past-looking orientation during those retrogrades, and that’s why sometimes we see, like, you know, ancient things – things from the past – coming up into the present, which sometimes can be, like, aesthetic trends, cultural trends, political trends. It really depends on what it is. But that’s part of the inherent symbolism of the Venus retrograde is that looking to the past. 

All right, in the final section, I want to talk about the planet Venus where I found some pretty stunningly literal, but also impressive repetitions when it came to Venus retrogrades in Scorpio. 

And the first one was in 1962 during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio where this was NASA’s Mariner II mission which completed the world’s first successful flyby of another planet where, you know, NASA launched a spaceship and it was the first time humanity had passed a spacecraft by another planet in our solar system. And the planet they decided to go by was Venus. So they sent this probe, basically, that passed by Venus, and one of the things that it did during the course of this Venus retrograde is it confirmed that Venus actually had a really toxic atmosphere, and it had really scorching temperatures as a result of its atmosphere. And so this kind of didn’t completely but it kind of put to an end some of the theories where they thought that maybe Venus could still have, like, a habitable atmosphere or planet or that there could be life on Venus. But then when they flew by it, they realized it had a toxic atmosphere and really, really high temperatures. And so it seemed less likely that life could exist on Venus as a result of that. 

All right, so that’s – you know, which is in and of itself a funny kind of Scorpio realization, that the atmosphere is more toxic and more hot and scorching so that it’s hard to support life. But get this – so that’s the first spacecraft that flies by another planet. Eight years later at the next Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1970, that was when the Soviets sent a probe, which is Venera 7, which made the first successful soft landing on Venus. And they sent a probe and it actually landed on Venus and it survived the heat long enough in order to transmit data back to earth. So this was a major, major step in terms of landing a probe on Venus and getting even more information about its atmosphere, and also that it was, like, really hot and inhospitable to life. So I thought that was amazing that it was an eight-year repetition. 

But then get this – it keeps going! So 1994, NASA’s Magellan spacecraft, it finished or it concluded a four-year mission or four-year journey by then in late 1994 deliberately plunging into the Venusian atmosphere and crashing on Venus. And this occurred the exact day that Venus stationed retrograde, that basically NASA finished up this four-year mission by crashing the probe into Venus. And I just thought that was so funny and interesting, given that that was again a repetition of Venus retrograde in Scorpio, just like the first probe that was sent to Venus in 1962, and just like that other – the probe that landed on Venus in 1970. 

So if that isn’t funny enough, I just saw in the past few days just days ago in mid-September here of 2026, there was a news story about a new astrophysics study that was released that suggests that Venus may have actually swallowed its own Moon. That at some point in the distant past that Venus may have actually had a Moon, but that due to Venus’s really incredibly slow rotation, that it actually pulled its Moon into itself through its own gravitational force, and by relentlessly dragging its own satellite inward, eventually the Moon was dragged into Venus’s atmosphere until it was completely destroyed and buried deep below the planet’s surface. 

So I thought that was really funny, and I thought it was also striking symbolically at this point after doing all of this research and seeing all these different themes surrounding Venus retrograde in Scorpio emerge that like, the planet of love and connection literally consumed its own companion satellite and Moon, and that it’s sort of like, hiding the evidence in the underworld of its thick atmosphere. And to me, this was kind of symbolically reminiscent of some of the toxic relationship and hidden trauma themes that we’ve seen bubble up with this retrograde over the course of the past century. And you know, I was sort of reflecting on it, and I thought it was really interesting, because it’s like, it means that we just learned something new as Venus is getting ready to go retrograde in Scorpio again. So I thought that was just really funny, because it’s like, it literally tells us that Venus has a dark past, and that there’s a hunger there or even an obsession of sorts. And you know, despite this, Venus is still a beautiful star nonetheless, and she still tries to do her best astrologically to do benefic things. And sure, she may have eaten a lover or two along the way, but she’s still deserving of love and redemption. And in some sense, aren’t we all? So that’s the question and that’s the point that I’d like to leave you with today. 

All right, my friends. That is it for this episode. So we have made it, and you know, as we step back now and we look at the entirety of this repeating eight-year cycle of Venus retrograde in Scorpio over the course of the past century, I think it becomes sort of like undeniable, the rhythm that comes along with those repetitions starts to emerge and starts to become incredibly clear. And there’s, like, this recurring descent into the collective underworld in some sense where we find the hidden, sometimes the toxic, sometimes the taboo, get sort of dragged out of the collective underworld, and forced into the light and forced into public consciousness in some way, for better or worse. Sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. And you know, whether we’re looking at earlier in the study, those themes of like, high stakes brinkmanship where these powerful countries are bringing humanity to the very edge of nuclear war, whether we’re talking about massive societal reckonings with things like systemic trauma and civil rights and prejudices or taboos or other things like that, or whether we’re talking about the unearthing of dark cultural milestones in media of different sorts, I think one of the things that keeps coming up is that these periods demand that we confront what lies essentially below the surface in the underworld or in the depths. And ultimately, while Venus does seek harmony and connection in most instances, in Scorpio the path towards that or the resolution towards that can only happen through this necessary but often painful process of purging and other times transforming or transmuting some of the more difficult things in order to then be able to move forward again. Like, sometimes you have to slow down, stop, dig up, and wrestle with the shadow in some sense, and then eventually once you do that and go through that deep internal process, eventually you can then start moving forward again onto other things. 

So by tracking some of these different historical cycles, we’re not just – I hope it’s clear at this point that we’re not just, like, cataloging the past randomly, but we’re actually mapping some of the different archetypal currents that continue to shape our world into the present day, especially through those repetitions and those eight-year cycles, which for very mysterious reasons can link events that occurred in the past even a century ago with things that are happening right now today in the present time. And some things, as we’ll see in the next few months, that we can’t even anticipate are gonna come up again now, and yet mysteriously in the next few months you will see some of the news stories and some of the themes or topics that I talked about today emerge into the public consciousness and become topics of discussion and news and politics and art and culture over the course of the next few months during the course of this retrograde, especially as it really gets started early next month in early October when Venus stations retrograde in Scorpio. 

So we will check in again then in the future, and maybe I’ll do some updates to see what different news stories come up and how the past ends up linking to the future. But otherwise, thanks a lot for joining me for this deep dive today into Venus retrograde in Scorpio. I really appreciate it, and yeah, I guess that’s it. So I’ll see you again in the next episode! 

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