The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 552, titled:

Venus Retrograde in Scorpio in Birth Charts

With Chris Brennan and Skye Barclay

Episode originally released on October 8, 2026

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2026/10/08/venus-retrograde-in-scorpio-in-birth-charts/

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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 14th, 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. Joining me today is astrologer Skye Barclay, and we’re gonna be talking about Venus retrograde in Scorpio in natal charts. Hey Skye, thanks for joining me. 

SKYE BARCLAY: Thanks for having me! I’m excited to be here. 

CB: Yeah. This is great; we’ve been researching this episode over the past few weeks, and we have found a lot of great examples of Venus retrograde in Scorpio to mark the occasion, which is that Venus just stationed retrograde in Scorpio only a few days ago on October 3rd. We’re recording this on October 6th. And you actually are the author of a new book titled 2026 Venus Retrograde: A Dance of Daggers and Delights, so I thought you would be a great person to talk to about this topic. So thanks for joining me. 

SB: Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s quite a transit, so it called to me. 

CB: Yeah. We all knew this was gonna be a big retrograde, and it obviously has started, and it brings up a lot of stuff during the course of it. I did a whole episode last month on Venus retrograde in Scorpio in history, and I can sort of see some of the repetitions that we were in for, but it’s much different to look at it from a natal standpoint and understand what it means for people when it’s sort of built into their birth chart. And that’s something you focused on a little bit and that I liked about your book is you helped to personalize it for people, especially by looking at it relative to different rising signs, right? 

SB: Yeah, I write horoscopes and journal prompts for every sign, and really try to break it down so people can see how these themes could show up in their individual lives. 

CB: Nice. I love that. Well, it’s a really great book. It’s amazingly illustrated; I was really impressed by the production design and everything else. Like, not just the book and the content itself, but even the aesthetics. And you did a whole photoshoot for it in order to help illustrate it, right? 

SB: Yeah, I did two photoshoots. I did one photoshoot that was a studio shoot showcasing Venus in Libra versus Venus in Scorpio so people could see it come to life. And then I did a photoshoot with me getting my braids redone, because I had a photographer follow me for eight hours because I think of that journey as going into the underworld for a Venusian experience. So giving a new take on Inanna’s descent! 

CB: I love that. That’s brilliant. All right, so what’s our plan for today? Our plan for today is actually we’re gonna center this around – you and I have found a core group of at least 20-something example charts of mainly notable figures or celebrities that have Venus retrograde in Scorpio where Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio every eight years, basically, so it gives you some definite time periods to look for. And it goes retrograde for about 40 days and 40 nights every eight years. So we have about 20 examples that we’re gonna go through and we’re gonna let some of the themes that we found sort of come through and arise by talking about the biographies of some of these people. And in the process of doing that, I think it gave both of us a really deeper understanding of what this transit means and both – not just the transit itself, but also what Venus means, what Venus in Scorpio means, what retrogrades mean, what detriment means, and all sorts of other things I think, right? 

SB: Yeah. I think that when you kind of learn about these archetypes, especially if you don’t have the placement, you kind of learn these keywords. But when you start seeing people who have these placements, they really embody it throughout their lives. And so you’re able to see, one, that people aren’t doomed just because they have one detriment placement, but also all the multiple unique ways you could only imagine they could show up in the good, the bad, and the ugly, and there’s ugly with Venus in Scorpio. 

CB: Yeah. So there’s definitely – I mean, we have to do a content warning at the beginning, because there’s definitely some difficult themes that arise when we’re talking about Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And it’s like, you know, anybody paying attention to the news over the past week or two already knows that there’s been some really tough stuff coming up in the news and really tough discussions and other things like that. So it should be no surprise then that we’re looking at this as a natal signature that there’s some difficult or sometimes dark themes that can come up as well. So we definitely want to give people a head’s up that we’re gonna be talking about some serious themes today, like in some instances – like, extreme instances – serial killers, themes of violence, stalking, and abuse and other things like that. And that’s not to say that the position is all bad, but in order to truly understand it, we’re gonna try to see the entire spectrum of different experiences that people have. 

SB: Yeah. It can get quite heavy, and so if anyone feels like they need to stop the episode for their mental health, like, please do, and take care of yourselves.

CB: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so that’s a good content warning. And then in terms of other main thesis things, we’re gonna be talking about Venus and some of the basic concepts of Venus are pretty crucial. Like, Venus is the planet of love and beauty and art and relationships traditionally, whereas Scorpio is a fixed water sign that’s ruled by Mars. And Scorpio is considered to be what’s called the detriment or the exile of Venus, because it’s the sign opposite to Taurus, which is Venus’s home sign. So it’s sort of as far away from Taurus as you can get in the zodiac by putting Venus in the opposite sign. And as a result of that, sometimes there can be some themes that come out of that that can be challenging or can put Venus in an environment that she’s not used to operating in, which can sometimes be a little tricky. 

SB: Yeah. It can be definitely subverting the norm with Venus in Scorpio. And I think having to use Mars’s tools and what it looks like to do art, but maybe – and do relationships, but in a way that is more conflict-prone and more nonconformist is things that kept popping up very loudly. 

CB: Yeah, for sure. It’s like, if Venus is the planet of love and relationships and unifying and bringing things together, but then you place her in Mars’s sign, which has the opposite significations of severing and separation, then sometimes Venus acts in a way that’s different than what we’re used to thinking of in a classical sense. But the way that that can manifest can sometimes be very interesting and very creative, and other times it can be more tricky and more problematic. 

SB: For sure. And I think seeing where those lies with real people’s lives is gonna be – that’s where it gets juicy. That’s where astrology really gets juicy. 

CB: Yeah, for sure. So and then the last thing is also we’re talking about – well, I mean, one of the things worth pointing out with Scorpio is just Scorpio’s the sign where both Venus has her detriment but also the Moon has her fall or depression. And in the northern hemisphere, Scorpio season is when the leaves start falling off of the trees, and the trees start dying in some metaphorical sense or going through that transformation process. The light is fading at this point, and the nights are becoming longer. So it’s like, we get that theme – some of those themes of Scorpio – but then we also have Venus going retrograde where we have these themes of delays and reversals, but also nonconformity and nonnormative roles are major retrograde keywords, especially for Venus, that we learned during the last Venus retrograde in Aries, but are still very relevant and prominent in some of the examples that we’ll see. 

SB: Yeah, things tend to not go straightforward for folks. There may need to be, like, a revision or things they don’t quite get it right the first time around with these retrogrades. So that’s another recurring theme we saw. 

CB: Definitely. Okay, cool. So let’s jump into examples then. And our first section has to do a little bit with art and fashion as a broad category, because anytime we’re talking about Venus, Venus is the planet of art and beauty and aesthetics and things like that. But it’s interesting when you put it in the sign of Scorpio and some of the ways that that can manifest. So let me share my first chart example. 

All right, so my first chart example is actually of an astrologer that I knew from my time at Kepler College is an astrologer named Inga Duncan Thornell. And Inga’s chart, for those listening to the audio version, she has Gemini rising with the ruler of the Ascendant as Mercury in Scorpio in the 6th house as part of a stellium that includes the Sun, Venus, and Neptune. And Venus is actually retrograde at 17 degrees of Scorpio in the 6th house. And why this position is relevant is Inga was unique; in the early 1990s her mother had breast cancer, and her stepmother also had breast cancer, and so she was there for both of them. And she ended up making the decision to get a bilateral mastectomy. And after that, she decided to get – after she had had the mastectomy and started to heal – she got tattoos that covered her chest in order to sort of create artwork basically over her scars. And this was something that wasn’t commonly done at the time, and she was doing this – it was a little hard to reconstruct the timeline when her and I talked, but I think that it was, like, an eight-month process that may have completed around the time of the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in late 1994. So she would have been having a recurrence transit when Venus, which was natally retrograde in Scorpio in her birth chart in the 6th house of health and illness, when that recurred she was completing this really elaborate chest piece, basically, that was really beautiful. And what was important about this is she was, like, a really early – she’s usually recognized as one of the first people in the US to do this, and it sort of started a trend which is much more common nowadays of women getting tattoos over their chest to cover their mastectomy scars, basically. So yeah, so it was a really brilliant way of in one sense taking something that’s really painful or traumatic in some sense for many women, of having breast cancer or having to have a mastectomy, but then making it beautiful, and sort of reclaiming things in some sense, or reclaiming your body in some sense. 

SB: Yeah. I was – when I looked at the photos, I was blown away how beautiful it was. And also just it being in the 6th house of medical procedures and surgeries, and taking it and making this beautiful art piece. And now looking at her chart, just seeing how Neptune is right there and how much media that caused from this action. And it made a cultural wave. And even just the ruler of that Scorpio stellium being with the IC and doing it for family and this lineage part is just, like, this is how it starts to show up in people’s unique lives of doing the Scorpio, you know, taking something painful and making it beautiful. 

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And yeah, and also the outlier – the fact that this was something that was – because we get some of the detriment themes, and we get some of the retrograde themes as well, because early on this was not common. I mean, even having a proactive mastectomy was not common. Like, that’s become more commonplace in recent years where, like, I think a decade ago you had Angelina Jolie doing that at one point when she found out that she’s genetically heavily predisposed to getting breast cancer and decided to do that proactively, because she has such a big family and she has so many children depending on her at this point is one of the reasons, I think. 

So Inga doing that proactively, but then also being a trendsetter in getting the tattoos, was something that she had to push for a little bit, like, with her doctor and then even I think her tattoo artist; initially there was a lot of discussions that they had about it. The name of her tattoo artist was Tina Bafaro, and the two of them have been, like, interviewed at different points a bunch of different times by MSNBC in 2001 and other times when some of the photos went viral on Pinterest or Today.com and other places. But early on, because it was something that was not common or something that seemed edgy or unique in some way, it was something that she had to kind of like, push through a little bit. And I think that’s a recurring theme that we’ve seen in a number of examples of detriment of being something that’s, like, outside of the norm or where a person feels alienation sometimes. And especially retrograde as being something that’s, like, going against the grain or is nonconformist or is nonnormative in some way. But then sometimes the people that set that, or that do that, become trendsetters, so that something that’s seen as not normal or in other instances could be even seen as odd or weird in some way – like, retrograde planets moving backwards, which is different than most of the planets moving forwards most of the time – eventually that can become mainstream once the initial trend is set. 

SB: Yeah. I think that Venus retrograde in Scorpio is the unconformist of the unconformist. Because not only are you not conforming to doing it the Venusian, classic way, but then you’re also not going the direction that people really want. It’s like, usually people don’t want to do this procedure; you’re going the opposite way than most people want. And you know, seeing that kind of come to life is, like, a really great find. 

CB: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to start with that as an example – I mean, it was also something very painful for her to go through for, like, eight months of doing a tattoo. It sounded like it was a real – they were doing it, like, every Sunday or something like that for eight months. So that’s another element that sometimes comes up with Scorpio being ruled by Mars and Mars being traditionally, you know, needles or something that’s sharp or poking or severing and that theme sometimes becoming relevant in different ways as well. 

SB: Yeah. Using the sharp objects to and going through the pain to get the ultimate lovely result. And maybe people won’t even see it as lovely in the beginning. 

CB: Yeah. So and people can search for her name, for Inga’s name, and you can find her website where she has photos of that. And then you can also do searches for, like, mastectomy tattoos at this point as well, and you’ll see a lot of other really amazing examples of, yeah, women turning something that was painful or deeply difficult into something beautiful and reclaiming it in that way. So I wanted to start with that example, because it’s just a really positive one of sort of, like, transmuting something difficult into something positive. 

SB: Yeah. And especially with the Venusian part with not just the beautiful art piece, but just being such a woman experience of having a mastectomy and kind of going through that pain. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. Because it also gets to a core thing that we keep seeing with this retrograde about beauty standards, like beauty standards especially for women of appearance and the role of appearance and objectification and all these other themes also that are sort of packaged with that that we’ll see coming up with other examples. 

SB: Yeah. And with Venus in Scorpio, really going against the typical beauty standard and beauty rules. 

CB: Right, definitely. Okay, cool. Let’s jump – so shout out to Inga, and thanks Inga, for saying yesterday that I could use that example. I appreciate it. And definitely — 

SB: Thanks, Inga! 

CB: Thanks, Inga! All right. So let’s move onto our next example, which is Gianni Versace. This one’s a timed birth chart that we have for Gianni Versace, who was born with Scorpio rising and Venus is retrograde in Scorpio in the first whole sign house conjunct Jupiter and Mercury. So yeah. This is a very prominent Venus retrograde in the first house in Scorpio, and Gianni Versace was a legendary Italian designer and the founder of the international luxury fashion house Versace, which is his last name. And he’s known for just, like, unapologetic glamour, vibrant aesthetics. He redefined a lot of modern fashion. And yeah, there’s so many interesting themes with him that are just, like, core ones. But one of the – I’m trying to think of where to start, because there’s so many themes. Where would you start with him? 

SB: I would just start with just kind of how you were saying, just the provocative nature of his art. I think that in his work, he was showcasing a lot of these themes, just with even how one would say it wasn’t trying to do the same thing; it was going in that opposite direction and kind of being rewarded in that way of being very in-your-face and just kind of introducing that kind of allure, and “you may not like it, but you do like it“ type of theme that you can see in his art and his work. I think the fact that he also has just noting that he has it with Jupiter and with Mercury, just how loud that was for him, and how abundant in nature that became for his success. 

I think one of the things that we both kind of saw that was really funny was just how people started putting in the Greek myth of Medusa into their work and having to have his company logo being the head of Medusa and wanting that because of the attraction it causes and almost that fatal attraction, and wanting to embody that in his work so much that he puts it, again, at the face of his work. And he created that logo and started that around the 1994 retrograde, because we’re kind of already kind of seeing how people start to make that in these cycles, of those eight-year cycles and how when these come up, big themes kind of announce themselves. And I think that was one that was really, really provocative. And I think that one of my favorite quotes that I saw of him was just that how he wasn’t afraid to really just, yeah, break the norm. You know, people weren’t doing it the way Versace was in his sexuality, in his art, in his fashion, and just the way he moved. 

CB: Yeah. Like, he was notable because he was one of the first openly gay men who was a fashion designer. And up to that point, there were men who were gay, but they were closeted or not that open about it, whereas he was very open and very upfront about being gay. And I think that is the Venus retrograde being in the first house, and just he was unapologetic about who he was and who he loved. And he also incorporated some – I mean, there was a few different things. One of the big things, though, is he published a book in late 1994 that was really important for men’s fashion where, as you said, one of our core themes that you and I have found is that any time – if a person’s born with Venus retrograde in Scorpio, then oftentimes when Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio in the sky again in the future, that’ll be a really important turning point for that person and something really crucial about their life story will unfold. And one of the things is that he published a book in late 1994 around that Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and it kind of shattered some of the expectations about men and male fashion and really set a new standard for male fashion. And one of the ways he did that is by – how is this framed? Usually like, reversing the male gaze as it’s usually done for women, but instead applying it to men, and applying some of the same eroticism or even some element of, like, homoeroticism into the way that he designed male fashion. And so he had them photographed in, like, sensual, sort of fluid clothing and sort of redefined what masculinity looked like at that point in some ways, if that makes sense. 

SB: Yeah. It makes complete sense. And I think even that retrograde fashion of turning the gaze, of going in a direction that wasn’t expected, and kind of realigning eyes to be, like, “No, this is what we are attracted to now. This is what I’m going to say, and this is how I’m gonna be.” And like, leaning into almost the taboo nature of it all. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. And that was another element where it’s like, he took some of the – in some of his fashion designs for women, for example, he took some of the taboo underground club and leather scenes and he imported them into global high fashion where he did this famous one in 1992, this collection called Miss S&M. And there were just, like, really – it was, like, black leather lingerie with gold highlights and connections. And you can look it up right now, and that signature of like, gold and black became his core color signature, which I think is really emblematic of the Scorpio and then the Leo themes in his chart. 

SB: Yeah, I think that also with after that show, there was this quote of, like, you know, half the people in New York are wearing harnesses now! Like, changing the culture, and making it almost normal to go out in these things that were supposed to, like, subversive, underground, not seen, for the private bedroom, and that’s like, a Venus retrograde type of theme because when Venus retrogrades, she is, you know, disappears. And kind of bringing that up front and saying, “Nope! We’re gonna take the private Venus experience and put it out in the public and make everyone look at it,” feels very, again, heavy in that embodying the theme. 

CB: Absolutely. Yeah, because it’s like, you already with Venus retrogrades get these recurring themes of the myth of Inanna like we discussed – I did a whole episode on the myth of Inanna with Demetra a few years ago during the one that coincided with the Barbie movie which just happened to incorporate Inanna themes into the actual story. And this idea of Inanna being, like, this goddess who has this descent into the underworld where she’s stripped of her power and then reaches a low point and then eventually escapes and emerges and reclaims her throne and gets rid of her former lover who had attempted to steal it in her absence. Like, ironically like Ken did in the Barbie movie! So it’s like, you get some of those themes here again with Venus retrograde in Scorpio, but it’s even darker because we get some of those dark, underworldly themes with Scorpio and sometimes like, sexual themes or other ways in which dark – the shadow side of different elements of culture and society that are usually hidden away in different ways come to light more during these times. 

SB: Yeah. I think there’s this classic quote, like, Armani dresses the wife, and Versace dresses the mistress. And just thinking of the mistress being, like, Venus in Scorpio; she’s not, like, pedestaled. She’s exiled. She’s kind of unseen; we don’t want to talk about her, and just the theme of even infidelity with Venus retrogrades. And Versace with his craft, with his art, with his fashion, he’s dressing the mistress and almost embodying that, you know, “I’m doing that work for you” Venus in Scorpio in his collection. 

CB: Absolutely. Yeah. And then to go back to – I was so fascinated, because he founded his – he opened his first boutique in 1978 and founded Versace as a company. And 1978, of course, was one of the Venus retrograde in Scorpio years, which is incredible. But then in 1993 and especially ‘94 when he released that book, he really established that Medusa head as the logo of Versace. And I was so struck by that, because he had a fascination with Greek and Roman mythology. But I kept seeing the myth of Medusa come up over and over again in different ways in different contexts when Venus would go retrograde in Scorpio, either if it was in a person’s natal chart, or if it was happening in the sky. And the myth surrounding that just seems like it comes up in different ways where maybe it would be worth talking about where originally, like, Medusa was a beautiful mortal who was a priestess in the temple of the goddess Athena, and she was noted especially for having really beautiful hair. But then the god Poseidin was attracted to her, and he assaulted her within the walls of Athena’s temple. But then Athena, because she was so furious, she directed her anger not at Poseidon but instead at Athena [Medusa] herself, and then unjustly punished Athena [Medusa] even though Athena [Medusa] was the victim and turned her into this monster where she took her main thing of beauty – her hair – and she turned them into poisonous snakes. And then also made it so that her gaze whenever she would look at anybody it would immediately turn that person to stone. So it’s like, in this sense I was thinking about this myth as like, the original body horror archetype type thing where something about the body has turned monstrous outside of the person – or especially the woman’s – control. And yeah, there’s just something about that myth that’s very relevant, because then I remember there’s a famous – you know, eventually she was hunted by Perseus, and there’s a famous myth of Perseus eventually cutting off her head. And in 2018, this came up because after – like, a year into the Me Too movement and then during that Venus retrograde you had the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and so much anger that came up during that time, and there was some pictures that went viral of this statue that somebody had made where instead of the classical statue of Perseus holding Athena’s severed head, it was, like – or holding Medusa’s severed head – it was Medusa standing there holding Perseus’s severed head in an inversion of the myth. And I thought that was really striking and really relevant now, and it’s actually been coming up again recently in the news over the past few weeks because you’re having these themes of, like, again, like assault coming up and sometimes themes of blaming the victim becoming relevant again. 

SB: Yeah. I think that even in these original myths, these stories of like you said the body horror or taking something beautiful and making it something horrifying, or in Inga’s case the reverse or taking something that would be a horrible experience and then making it into something beautiful is this theme that we’re seeing. And then just with the difficulty of kind of putting the victimization or the vitriol toward the victims and putting the vitriol and the anger and the hurt toward the people who are, like, the feminine figure, and that inducing some sort of rage and some sort of, like, not only unfair, but also just – yeah, this vitriol of making that feminine rage from this original Medusa story for being so painfully wronged is, I think, also something that people tend to embody or touch on either through directly the myth in putting it as your logo, or kind of living that out like we see in the stories today. 

CB: Yeah, for sure. And it’s like, we’ll see some of those themes come up, like the body horror theme coming up with Demi Moore later and her movie The Substance, or we’ll see those themes about the accused versus the accuser and stuff come up with Jodie Foster who, like, Demi Moore was another Venus retrograde in Scorpio and Jodie Foster’s movie The Accused from I think it was 1986 – no, it was 1988, and that being, again, dealing with some of those themes about the accused versus the accuser and the ways that that can get messed up in society. 

SB: Yeah. The villainization of the feminine figure and the story that plays out, you know? 

CB: Exactly. Exactly, that’s it. That’s a good way of framing it. 

Okay, and then the last thing is just the other thing about Versace that was really striking is he apparently in, like, the ‘80s and stuff, there was a strict difference between – like, there was print models, which is where the supermodels were in like, magazines for photoshoots and stuff like that. But like, runway models were lower level, just normal models that weren’t paid very much. And one of the things that Versace did is he started paying really high amounts for supermodels to walk the runway and be the ones showing off his clothing. And this was another way in which he contributed to revolutionizing fashion in some way by centering these supermodels as the faces of the brand on the runway. And I think that’s another really interesting way in which, again, that Venus retrograde in Scorpio is just super upfront for him in terms of his impact on fashion and beauty standards and things like that. 

SB: Yeah. I think when we see, like, where this Venus retrograde is for different people in their charts, and some people it’s upfront, first house, they embody it, and then some people, it’s more private and they kind of, you know, don’t want to talk about it. Maybe like Drake and all his things. But they still embody it somewhat. So, you know, people have their way, and like, Versace just comes alive. And it comes in loud with that Jupiter. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. Well, and it brings up another thing, which is just Venus has been going retrograde in Scorpio for the past century about, but because it drifts two degrees every eight years that it repeats, this is technically just a temporary period in time where Venus is going retrograde in Scorpio and intensely bringing some of these archetypes to the forefront, either in people’s birth charts or in events that happen during that time period when Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio every eight years. But one of the things in doing this research I realized is each of these people, sometimes more obviously or prominently than others, are creating something or contributing something to the world often a Venus retrograde in Scorpio nature and thinking about, like, what was one of the things that they imprinted or brought into the world that then marked the world or stayed with it in some significant way from that point forward. And for him, there’s a bunch of things that we’ve just mentioned, but one of those things of flipping things in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s so that supermodels are the ones walking the runways is a significant thing that changed the world in some way. 

SB: Yeah, just again, the retrograde nature is not going the direction that everyone expects you to go. And so if you’re going this way, it’s like, we’re flipping – we’re going this way. And bring that, you know, like you said, these people bringing it up in this time and be able to be a part of the imprint of time. 

CB: Absolutely. All right, I want to switch to our next chart example, which is the artist Marina Abramovic. So here is the chart for those watching the video version where I was actually surprised as I was researching this to find out we had a timed chart for her where she was born November 30th, 1946, at 7:20 PM in Belgrade, Serbia, but she was born with Cancer rising, and Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the 5th whole sign house conjunct Jupiter and Mercury. So I guess this is actually very similar to our last chart, because he was born December 2nd of 1946, so he was born – Versace was born just a few days later. But this is a good example because of how crucial the rising sign is because it changes all of the house placements, especially with whole sign houses. And whereas he had that Venus retrograde in the first house near the Ascendant, she has this Venus retrograde in the 5th house in the place of art and creativity in the house that’s associated with Venus, the joy of Venus, which is the 5th, the place of good fortune. And she ended up expressing it primarily through art and artistic expression because she’s a conceptual and especially a performance artist. She’s a really legendary performance artist who especially focuses on pushing physical limits and things having to do endurance, but also – which is funny, like, the endurance aspect of the Scorpio placements as a fixed sign is one of the more entertaining things of doing things for a very long time and pushing her body in order to create art, basically, is one of her recurring themes. But and some of her art can be very dark or to have a much more darker theme. This is like, where we see dark, taboo art becoming really prominent. How would you describe it – is that a good description, or what am I missing? 

SB: Yeah. I think that it has this, one, unconventionality to it. And like, I think the endurance test is just kind of pushing through the discomfort in her art, whether it’s going a great long distance or just sitting in one spot and not moving and having that fixity to it. I think that I wasn’t aware of her beforehand, but even just kind of thinking of that Cancer rising element and how much the body plays into it, of pushing her body for her art because it is in that 5th house rhythm of it all, and how it’s not just – it’s not for everyone, I think, either. There is this type of thing where it’s like, you either love it or you hate it. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. And some of it’s really, really dark. Like, so one of the things is for a decade, she was together – she was in a relationship, a really important relationship, with another artist, a man named Ulay, and they did a bunch of pieces together. One of them that was really edgy is like, you can search for it on YouTube – I’d recommend searching for it, because this example of talking about her only makes sense if you look at some of her work. But one of them was like, they had a bow and arrow, and she stood in front of the bow and arrow with the arrow pointed at her heart, and she held onto one side of the bow and then she leaned back. And then he stood on the other side holding the arrow, and then he leaned in the opposite direction so that the arrow was fully taut and pulled out on the bow pointed right at her heart. And they had to trust each other basically, and it was this whole interesting thing about relationships and love and the intimacy of that, but also the danger of being that intimate with somebody and all sorts of themes like that that are pretty striking. In other instances, there’s another video where the two of them sat in front of each other seated and then one of them would slap the other and then the other would slap the other back, and then the other would slap the other back, and then it kept going like that back and forth for, like, a minute or a few minutes or something like that. So that’s like, gives you a sense of the intensity and the edginess and also the darkness of some of the themes that she was exploring, or that they were exploring together. 

SB: Yeah. I think there’s that deep, intimate trust. I think the collaboration element and her Moon being in the 8th kind of speaks to that. Like, how the other person comes in. And then just the – I don’t know if it’s the love that everyone aspires for to, like, for that, but it definitely is real and it still felt and it feels almost dangerous, and personifying that inner art with her partner, I think, is where it kind of almost gets spooky good in the visualization of it all. And just how I think just thinking of the power dynamics and the, you know, the relationship dynamics that may feel touchy or hard to place. Like, “Ooh, I hate you; I love you; I love you; I hate you!” and kind of how they’re showing that with, you know, if you don’t trust me fully, you can get extremely hurt. And I think that speaks to maybe a Venus in Scorpio experience of you gotta trust me, and trusting can also extremely hurt. And like, where the Venusian thing can hurt is a Venus in Scorpio theme. 

CB: Absolutely, yeah. And this idea that we’ll talk about in some of our later examples of like, struggle love or toxic relationships or different themes like that that are very prominent with Venus in Scorpio. They’re kind of like, playing out very literally. And she’s actually most known, I think, for two pieces at this point. One of them is at one point early on in her career, she did this performance piece where she – I think she stood in the middle of a room, and she set out like 78 objects and she said to her audience that the audience could do whatever they want to her. And it started out with the audience doing timid things, but then eventually during the course of that, it got darker and darker with the audience, like, cutting her at one point and there was blood. Or like, cutting off pieces of her clothing, or eventually there was a loaded gun, and one of the audience members held it close to her head. So in terms of like, the edginess of her art and the extent to which she’s willing to do things or to be in a place that’s uncomfortable for very extended periods of times – that was one of the more extreme examples. But going back to the relationship stuff, one of the things she’s most known for these days is in 1988 – so it’s like, her and Ulay had been together for like, a decade or something at that point. And originally they were gonna get married in a performance piece on the Great Wall of China doing this thing where they walk together. But then as they got closer and closer to getting the permits for doing it, their relationship fell apart so that they ended up changing the plan by the time they got there. And instead they turned it into a breakup performance piece where it was this 90-day, grueling walk across the entire Great Wall where each of them started at each extreme side of the Great Wall of China and then they started walking towards each other for, like, 90 days, and eventually they met in the middle. And then when they got to the middle, they talked for a few, but then they broke up, basically, and then walked their separate ways, which in and of itself is, like, such a stunning Venus retrograde type thing, because that’s one of the things that Venus does with the Sun during the retrograde is that Venus – the retrogrades are all about Venus’s synodic cycle, which is its relationship with the Sun. And one of the things astronomically that Venus does when it stations retrograde is it gets just about as far as it can from the Sun, but then it starts moving towards it and then once you get to the cazimi or the retrograde conjunction, there’s this wrenching apart motion where Venus and the Sun forcefully go separate directions. And in previous retrogrades, I realized that that’s one of the reasons why Venus retrogrades can be especially associated with breakups because of this astronomical wrenching motion. And they had that kind of, like, built into this, which happened to occur – that breakup occurred towards the end of a Venus retrograde in Gemini. Venus was slowing down to station direct when they finally broke up in 1988. 

But then where the story becomes really interesting is in 2010, she was doing a performance piece at the MoMA in New York, and the title of the piece was The Artist is Present where for several – I think, like, three months, she would sit at a table and people would come up to her and sit at the opposite end of a table in a chair, and she would close her eyes initially and she would open her eyes, and then she would just look at them and look at them in silence. And like, hundreds of people came up I think for, like, a minute basically was the time for each person. But she would sit there for hours each day for three months straight, to give you another example of that fixed Scorpio energy of, like, you know, people that sit and have that persistence – like, do something for a very long time, which is funny because that’s actually something I do with all of my Scorpio placements is known for is, like, very long – I don’t know if you’ve noticed that about me. You’ve heard maybe rumors. 

SB: Yeah, I think that is one of the things is like, oh, he’s still going! He’s still going! 

CB: Yeah. Well, now you’re in it today. We’ll see how long today goes with the, like, 20 examples we got. We got through like three so far. But back to the thing – so she’s sitting there, and it’s 2010, and she’s not expecting this. She closes her eyes, and there’s a video of this that went viral online and it’s probably – it had, like, millions of views. It’s probably one of the things that she’s most widely known for now is this video where she’s doing this. And then she closes her eyes, and she opens it, and then Ulay who she had broken up with, like, what, 22 years earlier – and they completely broke contact and hadn’t been in touch for like two decades – he shows up at the exhibit, and he walks up and then he sits down in front of her. And her entire thing for that entire exhibit is just like, staring at the other person and not showing any emotion or anything. And then she opens her eyes and this lover who was so important in her life for, like, a decade or more just appears in front of her, and you can see the emotion. And it kind of wells up despite her, like, inside of her, and she ends up in tears, and then she breaks character briefly and she reaches across the table to him and they hold hands briefly. And then eventually the minute is up, and she pulls back and goes back to what she was doing, basically. But it’s this viral clip that keeps going viral at different points over the past decade, and I thought that was such an amazing Venus retrograde thing of going viral for having this weeping reunion after 22 years of estrangement as the ultimate manifestation of, like, delayed closure and the sort of returning to the past that sometimes comes up with Venus retrograde. 

SB: Yeah. I think – one, if you think of this woman who is able to have, like, strangers pull a gun and not move or not say anything and do all these things to her, and still keep character, but seeing this lover is the one that makes her break character? You can imagine how much she felt in that moment, and how much that was just, one, so gut-wrenching. It’s so beautiful. I think Venus in Scorpio – you know, you can think of severing relationships and maybe being good to be, like, “we’re no contact,” but then that retrograde being, like, “and, we’re back!” And having that be such an emotionally felt experience. And even just their breakup being long and enduring and also extremely felt – the struggle of it all, I think, comes to life. And for those who don’t know what a “struggle love” is, good for you! That’s great that you don’t know what struggle love is. But it is a love that is, like, a bit more toxic in its relationship, and yet they endure emotional pain – maybe financial stress – like, mistreatment, to prove some sort of loyalty and achieve some eventual reward, which is love, which may be a personification of that Venus Scorpio archetype of just having to endure some sort of difficulty to get that love, which is what shows, you know? 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. And how sometimes some people learn early on, sometimes by seeing their parents’ relationship or sometimes by, like, a relationship with a parent, like, what love is sometimes. And sometimes they learn challenging dynamics or they inherit challenging dynamics sometimes from their parents. That was one of the recurring themes I kept seeing come up is either sometimes the Venus retrograde in Scorpio’s like, parent relationship dynamics of the parents’ marriage that were not good that was the early paradigm for what relationships are like. Or sometimes difficult relationships with the mother especially I saw come up sometimes, especially if there were other circumstances that were confirming that. Who was the case? I can’t – there was somebody – oh yeah, it was like, Tonya Harding was a really good example of that, except she had like, three or four things that were indicating difficult parent relationships, and she really did with her mother. But Marina – I mention that just because Marina Abramovic had a very strict mother, and that was part of her upbringing was extreme rules and strictness and things like that, which then also may have influenced her staying power and expression of art through sticking with something despite it being uncomfortable or something like that. 

SB: Yeah. A lot of single moms pop up, I feel like, with the examples or being raised by that prominent mother. So definitely showcasing that. And I think that, yeah, you learn it early, and then it can reoccur. 

CB: Yeah. I was realizing at one point, like, part of the reason for that might be if you think about it is like, the baby is born at a time when Venus is retrograde in Scorpio. So it’s like, sometimes the parents are going through some stuff in terms of their relationship that may be tense or tough. And the child comes into the world in that context and so sometimes that can be part of what we’re seeing or help us understand or contextualize it a little bit better. 

SB: Yeah. Thinking of that – you know, at least from the mother’s point of view, it’s like there’s a time where there may be difficulty connecting. And what manifests is their child and maybe difficulty connecting with the child. 

CB: Yeah. Okay. Well, so that’s our art section; that’s our first section. So we’re doing good; we got through three examples of 20, so we’re doing good. But let’s move onto the next section, yeah? 

SB: Yeah, and there will be more artists, but different types of art kind of going forward. 

CB: Yeah, exactly. Okay, so this next cluster is kind of interesting, because we’re gonna focus it on one real person versus a few actors, and this interesting difference that we both saw between, like, sometimes artists or actors playing out and manifesting the placement through creativity in a constructive way, versus other times people that don’t have an outlet for that sometimes manifesting it in their life in a more destructive way. And one of the key ones that always comes up any time people try to research Venus retrograde in Scorpio, especially for timed birth charts, is the birth chart of Ted Bundy who was one of the most famous serial killers in the US especially in the past century who have Venus retrograde in Scorpio. 

All right, so here’s the birth chart of Ted Bundy, who was born November 24th, 1946 – so again, it’s another one of these 1946 Venus retrograde types, which the last couple examples have been. But now it’s shifted, because Ted Bundy was born with Leo rising. He was born with a night chart, and that Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Leo is right in the first house. And I’ve always thought that was one of the core things that may have gone awry here in terms of what happened with him. But the Venus retrograde is in Scorpio in the 4th whole sign house with Mercury and Jupiter. And then the ruler of the Ascendant is the Sun, which is placed in Sagittarius in the 5th whole sign house. And let’s see, the only other thing was that he was born a day after a solar eclipse in Sagittarius. So where do we start with Ted Bundy? He was a notorious serial killer, right? 

SB: Yeah. I think that, you know, most known for killing, raping, murdering young women and girls, which is kind of puts that feminine archetype but in the worst way possible and putting it in a way that is very much, you know, victimizing women, which is another thing where we see, like in that, you know, women become the victim, especially in this type of sign where they can be victimized. And I think that his story very much embodies that in a very sick, twisted way. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely, because he was this – one of the things that was weird is that he was, like, conventionally – he was thought to be conventionally attractive, and he was very smart and very manipulative and controlling. But he was a high-functioning psychopath or I don’t know what the exact diagnosis is – a sadistic sociopath – where he took pleasure from other people’s pain, especially from the pain of women, of his female victims, as well as over the control that he had over his victims, not just in life but also in death. And he was very manipulative. He studied psychology in college. But he was so manipulative that he had a bunch of people in his life that thought he was, like, a great guy, and he actually had relationships. He had one or two long-term relationships at least. He had friendships and other things like that, of people that had no idea, so that even once it started to come out that he may have been involved in these murders or different things like this, a lot of the people that knew him didn’t initially believe it or didn’t think it was true because he was so good at hiding who he actually was and what he was actually doing in terms of his true self. He was really good at masking it, I guess. 

SB: Yeah. I think this is one of the ways where you see where it is in the chart, too, and thinking of like, that 4th house being very more under the surface, under not the first house, not front and forward where people don’t immediately see it and it doesn’t immediately come out, but it’s still very much there. I think that the manipulative nature and the secretive nature of Scorpio kind of comes out in that way, too, of like, connecting in a way that is to harm and kind of having that seductive nature of the fatal attraction where people are attracted to him, and yet for their detriment in a way. And that kind of being also another occurring theme with Ted Bundy. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. And he would even accentuate that by at certain points, he would pretend he was injured. Like, he would wear a cast or like crutches or something in order to lure his victim into a false sense of security in order to – that they wanted to help him or something like that. So it’s like, that’s another element of his manipulation. 

One of the things that I didn’t know, even though I’d used his chart at different points before, but I found a fascinating thing that finally explained the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the 4th house in the place of parents, which is that it turns out that the woman that he thought was his sister most of his early life, he found at one point when he was a teenager that the woman he thought was his sister was actually his biological mother. And this was a really traumatic revelation for him that a lot of biographers say that it may have fueled a lot of his lifelong feelings of betrayal and hatred towards women, but also his subsequent manipulativeness and his focus on deceiving people he knew to hide his true self, that he may have had an experience like that early on where his family deceived him about his true parentage in order to potentially hide some sort of dark secret in terms of his family. And it’s not clear when that came out, but it was sometime when he was a teenager. And so this is Venus, which is – let me pull his chart back up again – because it’s really striking for a couple of reasons, but it’s – look at what Venus rules. Venus is ruling his 3rd house of siblings, and it’s like, retrograde in the 4th house of parents in the sign of Scorpio. And literally at some point – potentially even maybe when he was a teenager maybe he’s 16, maybe it was that Venus retrograde in Scorpio, I don’t really know, that would have happened when he was 16 – but at some point, he has this revelation that his family has been hiding this secret, and his mother is his – that his sister is his mother. And what’s crazy about that is not just that, but this is actually the second time I’ve seen this, because I saw the exact same thing with Jack Nicholson.

Okay, so this is Jack Nicholson’s chart, and this came up when I did the – I think it was, like, the 3rd house episode maybe – I found this where Jack Nicholson was also born with Leo rising, and Libra is the 3rd house of siblings, and the degree of his IC is there. But it’s ruled by a retrograde Venus, which is in Aries – also in the sign of its detriment – in the 9th house. And Jack Nicholson was actually an adult; he was, like, a full-fledged adult in his 30s or 40s or something like that when a reporter from Time who was doing a biography on him came up and, like, told him this – that they’d been researching and they found out that the woman that he thought was his sister was actually his mother, because she had him really young and so the family hid it in order to, like, because of the stigma surrounding unwed mothers at the time – like, in the early 20th century. So and it’s, again, a retrograde Venus ruling the 3rd house and the IC, but for Jack Nicholson, you know, he’s an adult. And why this was a really big revelation for him that kind of shook him up and changed his view of his early life and his origins and family and things like that, for – you know, he was an adult by that time, whereas for Ted Bundy, it happened at a much more formative stage when he was a teenager. And therefore it may have had a much more significant, like, psychological impact on him in some ways. 

SB: Yeah. I think that with the 4th house especially, it’s just like, this core wound that kind of runs very deep and almost in an ancestral way where it kind of goes deeper than, you know, one may think with things in the 4th house. 

CB: Yeah. For sure. And yeah, ancestry and origins and secrets. And so one of the main things that’s really striking about his biography is that Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the 4th is also ruling his 10th house, which is Taurus, and when he was finally arrested and put on trial in 1979, it caused this media circus because this was actually the first time a trial was broadcast nationally in the United States. And it happened to be just like, for one of the most notorious serial killers in US history. And he was – I think they were preparing the trial already in ‘78, because he was arrested in early ‘78, right? 

SB: Yeah, like, early ‘78 – let me see. 

CB: I think – yeah, because the murders in the summer of ‘78 or something like that. But then in the fall of ‘78, Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio, and he’s preparing for this trial. And he starts defending – acting as his own defender, but he also starts trying to manipulate the media and manipulate the jury and, like, acting all suave and stuff like that. And the trial started attracting a lot of women, like, starting showing up as fans at the trial and started being into him. And it was this whole weird phenomenon at that time. 

SB: Yeah, I think that it’s these kind of, again, almost the Medusa trope where you’re being attracted to this figure that you’re not supposed to be attracted to and kind of when you fall under it, you can get… I’m trying to think of a better word than “nabbed,” I guess. But I think that even with him and his, like, the layers that he went through for his manipulation, it’s not, like, Jack Nicholson who is like, you know, Venus in Aries where it’s very quick, it’s like, no, he’s studying, he’s learning for this longer game plan that can kind of have that level of control over who he’s talking to. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. And I guess – I didn’t know this, but apparently this is like, a known condition that was really documented at that time. It’s called hybristophilia, which is a psychological condition involving – this is from Wikipedia – sexual or romantic attraction to people who commit terrible crimes like serial killers. And yeah, so that was, like, an early example of that. And ironically, the origin of it is that there was a sexologist called John Money who coined the term, guess when, in 1986, which is a year in which Venus went retrograde in Scorpio. 

SB: Keeps ringing! 

CB: Yeah. 

SB: It gets so loud. And like, oh, go for it. 

CB: So there’s something about that that we saw, and I guess we’ll see in our next example, of like, sometimes people that are attracted to things that seem dangerous or that seem – yeah, dangerous or risky or edgy or dark, and there’s a whole spectrum of that because there’s a light version of that, or there’s a healthy version of that probably, and then there’s this, which is an extreme version of that. Of literally being attracted to somebody that’s done terrible, terrible, disgusting things. And I’m sure there’s lots of shades of grey in between. But it’s like, those are some of the type of things that we’re looking at here when we’re talking about Venus retrograde in Scorpio is Venus is the planet of attraction, and Scorpio is the place where we encounter some of the darker themes in life. And so when you put those two – those archetypes – together, sometimes it can lead to things like this. 

SB: Yeah, it’s a little bit almost being disgusted by your own desires. 

CB: Right. That’s a great way of putting it. 

Okay, so is there anything else with this guy — 

SB: Ted — 

CB: Yeah, he got married while he was on trial for murder in 1980, so that’s another nice Venus retrograde thing. Although apparently, like, the woman that married him really believed he was, like, he was innocent, which is wild. And that it wasn’t until later on that she separated from him, but they ended up having a child while he was in jail, which is also wild. And then there was another woman that was his lawyer, and he ended up seducing her, and it’s just like, this guy – it’s really pretty crazy. 

SB: Yeah, I think of it as, like, putting the romantic Venusian story in a place where it shouldn’t really be – like, on a murder trial or in prison. That’s not usually where the love story kind of forms. And kind of seeing that appear. 

I think the other interesting thing is that the people who played him – like Zac Efron – ended up having Venus in Scorpio. 

CB: Nice. That’s really good, yeah. Because he played him in, what, like, 2019? 

SB: Yeah. He played him in the Netflix film. 

CB: Okay. 

SB: Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, which things that you may be attracted to with Venus in Scorpio. 

CB: Yeah. Well, and it brings up, you know, another one like that was Charles Manson, who also has Venus in Scorpio. So it was just, like, there’s an element here where we’re kind of focusing more on Venus retrograde in Scorpio, which is a more unique thing that only happens every eight years for either 40 days or for like, a few months, depending on how you define it. But there’s also deeper thing about Venus in Scorpio in general, and one of the things about Bundy was that many of his supporters were driven by this desire to rescue him. And it kind of made me think of this thing of, like, this meme sometimes nowadays where like, “oh, I could fix him” or “I could fix her” or something like that. Like, seeing somebody deeply problematic, but being like, “I could make things better” or something like that. “I could make it work out.” 

SB: Yeah, the struggle love. You know, you’re gonna struggle to get that love. And then I think with the retrograde, you know, that Zac Efron film came out around 2018, like, the October-November of 2018, so it was kind of like, recurring and putting Ted back into this and the retrograde nature of that bringing it back. 

CB: Nice. Okay. So I think that’s good for Ted, right? We can move onto the next one, which is kind of adjacent. 

SB: Yeah, to our fictional serial killer. 

CB: Yes. So this is where things get fun, I think – “fun.” All right, so our next example is the birth chart of an actor named Penn Badgley. And Penn was born with Sagittarius rising; we don’t have an exact birth time. He’s mentioned recently, actually, in an interview that his rising sign is Sagittarius, and he has Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the 12th house along with a full Scorpio stellium of probably the Moon, Pluto, Sun, Venus, and Mercury, and he was born November 1st, 1986. 

So there’s several things that are really interesting about his biography, but the coolest thing is that he is an actor who in 2018 during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio recurrence starred in a show titled You in which he played a serial killer who would, like, become obsessed with a woman and then he would stalk her and the whole thing about the series is that you hear his internal monologue the entire time, and how he idolizes these women and then rationalizes what he’s doing to himself and even frames it as if it’s like, a love story, even though he’s become an obsessive stalker. And that’s apparently the original author partially wrote it in that context of, like, taking some classic romantic cliche tropes of romantic movies and books and things like that and some of those tropes that we’re so used to in modern society that sound sort of okay in a story context, but it’s very easy to flip them where something that seems romantic actually becomes toxic and obsessive and negative. And I didn’t – I wasn’t, like, familiar with this, but I watched the entire first season just over the past couple of weeks, and it’s such a great example. You already watched it, like, you’ve seen the whole series, right? 

SB: I’ve seen the whole series; I love the whole series. When you brought him up, I was like, “Oh, yay! I love this show!” And I was just like, putting my fingers together, being like, “I get to make Chris watch this! This is so fun.” 

CB: Yeah, I’m so glad that you did, and that you were familiar with it and could encourage me to check it out, because I didn’t know – I wasn’t that familiar with him. I had only – what’s funny is I just like a month or two ago saw the interview that he said where he was talking about astrology, and he was saying that he had studied it but he didn’t really believe in it. So it was kind of a negative interview against astrology, although one of his main things was just that he felt like most people that talked about astrology just talked about it in a Sun sign context and didn’t know their entire chart. And also he said that, like, he brought up the generational thing that the outer planets – like, lots of people are born with the same placements. So he didn’t seem super into astrology, but he happens to be a really good astrology example, ironically. And part of the reason is that, like, one of the things that’s so crazy – so I just watched the first season so I can’t speak to the entire show yet, but the first season was really good. But what’s cool about it is, you know, even though they say – in interviews, I think they try to downplay what it’s based on. But it’s like, the parallels between his character and some of the real-life stuff with Ted Bundy seemed really obvious to me. Because like, one of the things about the series is the actor Penn Badgley is a really attractive man, conventionally attractive, and so the way that it gets framed and what he’s able to do and pull off, it seemed like there was a lot of parallels between on the one hand, Ted Bendy, he was born with Venus retrograde in Scorpio and did all these terrible things as an obsessive stalker-serial killer, versus this is an example of somebody who is an actor with Venus retrograde in Scorpio who is, by all accounts, a normal guy, like, a fine person. But that energy gets manifested through art where he plays this character who’s doing terrible things, even though that’s quite different than what his own, you know, beliefs and actions and other things are. And that’s a fascinating thing that astrologers have long commented on where actors sometimes will play out placements in their birth charts that otherwise aren’t clear, but it’s incredibly stunning in this context how that played out. 

SB: Yeah. I think that, one, with the astrology comment that his problem was that people don’t go deep enough, which is kind of funny with the Scorpio element. And I think that he – with his character in You, it’s almost – Penn Badgley says even 16 years old could be a little too young for the show, because what it does is you get pulled into Joe’s point of view and you start rooting for him, saying like, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense!” And you get kind of caught up in his own deception and lies that he tells himself where he’s doing these gruesome acts for love, and it’s absolutely terrifying. And so the way you can look at the people for Ted Bundy and say, you know, “How could these women fall in love with him?” You know, you start watching that show and you start seeing, like, “Oh, this is how, because he’s so charming, he’s so good-looking, he makes such a good case, he’s so well-read.” And he starts to play out that archetype. I also think it’s interesting that Penn Badgley has Venus retrograde in the 12th in that kind of like, secret lover, hidden enemy that can be – that hidden enemy that thinks they’re in love with you and actually is gonna bring your downfall of, like, a stalker being very loud and prominent with that show as well. 

CB: Yeah. And we’ll see an interesting parallel with that, because his chart’s similar to Jodie Foster’s chart who both had a real-life example of a stalker who attempted to assassinate the president in order to impress her, but then also she ended up playing and getting an Academy Award, for example, for Silence of the Lambs of being a FBI agent who’s interviewing and trying to work with a serial killer with Anthony Hopkins’ character. So it’s like, really funny interesting parallels there between those two in terms of sometimes – it’s more clear in Jodie Foster’s case where it’s, like, the roles that she gravitates oftentimes towards darker roles. With Penn, it’s more – in interviews, like, I’ve been watching interviews and he’s a little bit more cagey about why he has either that role or the Gossip Girl role was his first big one where he became really well-known for that role, although it seems like he says in interviews that he was more drawn to that role for, like, financial reasons at the time or something like that. 

SB: Yeah. Even the fact of how these things kind of come together – like, you know, Penn was not interested in the Gossip Girl role in the beginning, so there’s kind of like, he had to return back to it. Or even with You, having the show be originally on Lifetime, and then having to find a new home with Netflix and then it can kind of skyrocket into more popularity, of kind of almost the show playing out the Venus retrograde story with these, like, Venus retrograde Scorpio themes. And then, you know, with the main character having that in his birth chart and kind of playing that out again so it’s kind of Venus retrograde story within a Venus retrograde story that tends to happen. 

CB: Yeah, and that – if you look at the timeline of that, it’s actually incredible because it’s like, so he’s born with Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and then Venus retrograde in Scorpio starts to recur in the last three to four months of 2018, especially if you do – like I do and like I’ve demonstrated on episodes where you pay attention to the entire range of Venus in the two signs that it will retrograde in, whether it’s entirely in Scorpio or whether it’s in this instance across Scorpio and Libra. That gives you like, a three- to four-month time window where it was in that range in the last three to four months of 2018. And what happened is early in that range, the first episodes of this series start to air of the series You. And it starts airing on the Lifetime Network, but as it airs, it’s not really drawing a lot of people in terms of an audience; it didn’t really find an audience on the Lifetime Network. And by the end of it – so Venus then goes retrograde in October and November, and it stations direct in November and starts moving forward again in December – Lifetime decides by, like, November once the finale airs that they’re not gonna renew it, and they drop it. And then Netflix comes in and buys the series in December, and then they announce that they’re gonna renew it for a second season, and they drop the series by the end of December. And then it almost like, immediately becomes a worldwide sensation where, within the first two weeks of it being released on Netflix, it has like, 40 million viewers. So there’s a real brilliant, like, Venus retrograde story where astronomically Venus retrogrades, it does this loop and it backtracks for a little bit before going forward again, and that’s kind of what you got where it’s like, he had this big role that perfectly fits the Venus retrograde in Scorpio archetype, but then it got canceled. But then it was kind of revived from the dead and comes back again into this huge sensation. And even just like, watching the timeline of that is just stunning. 

SB: Yeah, things aren’t straightforward, and the success isn’t always immediate. It may be delayed and it has to be reworked, and then, you know, once that change happens, then it can kind of come back to life, which is amazing. Yeah. And found its home at Netflix. 

CB: Yeah. So that’s incredible. And then it went on for, like, five seasons and was wildly successful. And we’ll circle back to that, but one interesting thing I found about his biography in some interviews is he talks about he was born two months premature, and he had severe life-threatening medical issues as an infant where because he was a premie, he spent the first couple of weeks of his life in the intensive care unit because his heart and his lungs repeatedly start working throughout the day. And because he would essentially flatline multiple times a day, his mother had to regularly resuscitate him. So he shared at one point that some of these early life experiences deeply affected him and gave him this sort of fearless perspective on death, and one of the things that’s interesting is then – because the 12th house in ancient astrology, like, Rhetorius of Egypt talks about it being what happens prior to birth and the birthing process itself. And so it’s so interesting that he has this huge Scorpio stellium, and it’s like, he was born premature. And we see that part of his life as he’s at that threshold between life and death and coming into life, but almost immediately walking back into death, just like Venus goes direct and retrograde and then direct again, impacted him in a really significant way. And he said that sometimes it affected his mindset by making him more solitary and meditative, and those are also, like, 12th house keywords. But he also seemed to, as he got older, become very interested in spirituality. And he’s unique for being known as somebody who adopted the Baha’i faith during his Saturn return later in his 20s. 

SB: Yeah. I think that, you know, it’s really cool when you start to see even how these placements play out in the chart, because now we’re looking at the 12th house. And so the 12th house themes kind of start coming louder into view, and even though it’s maybe not a place that comes into view, it’s still able to be seen when you look a little deeper into something like the most private moments and where he goes to isolate, where he finds himself in that moment. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. And that because he has this more spiritual orientation but also moral focus and other things like that, like he’s actually interested in spirituality and ethics and things like that, that it creates a conflict that’s kind of, I don’t know, funny or entertaining to watch when he’s doing press circuits for the show where he’s playing a serial killer. And he’s having to like, especially early on, I could see in some of the interviews he’s having to be very deliberate about differentiating and being like, “No, this character Joe in the show is a bad guy; we have to remind people of that,” because there were some people who were falling in love with him because of how attractive he is or how other things about being attracted to this character in different ways for whatever reason. And he’s having to differentiate and just like, remind the audience, like, “No, you shouldn’t idolize this character” or what have you. 

SB: Yeah. I think that it’s kind of funny that Penn is like, Joe’s biggest hater. 

CB: Right! 

SB: He’s like, “This guy is a spineless, horrible, demented person,” and just constantly kind of ragging on a character he plays! So it’s like, that self – he’s almost self-undoing in his press. It’s like, “No! Don’t like this character that I am,” in this 12th house-y way. You know, it’s like, kind of like that self-hatred. Even though he isn’t Joe, there is a way he is in his embodiment of him as a character and an actor. 

CB: Yeah, I was struggling with that at first, because in the first seasons when he’s promoting it, he’s like, really overtly doing that, and I almost didn’t understand. But then when I learned more about his philosophical and religious focus in life, I sort of started to understand better why he was having that tension. But him especially, because one of the problems is just he’s a really good actor. Like, he’s really good at playing this character who is fundamentally a bad guy. And I noticed that was a recurring theme that we kept coming up to is like, actors who are really good at playing bad guys, basically. Like, bad figures or villains, basically. Actors that are really good at playing villains. And Penn Badgley is a good example of that, but there was also others, like Ralph Fiennes was a Venus in Scorpio – maybe not retrograde, it might have been direct – that played Voldemort or played, like, famous Nazi characters or other things like that, and other famous people that are really good at playing villains kept coming up. 

SB: Yeah. Yeah, I think that it’s almost – it’s funny how it’s written in the stars how they are meant to play these characters because they embody them so well and they can tap into the themes, but in this healthier way. And to do the villain-ness, like, malefic thing, but in a way that is through art feels like, you know, Venus coming out to be like, “We’re gonna take this energy, and put it into a context that is a little bit more conducive for life.” 

CB: Yeah, I think there’s something about… I don’t know. It becomes more clear with Jodie Foster a little bit that she has an interest in some of those darker roles because of the complexity and because of understanding the character sometimes, even if not agreeing with them, and an ability to psychoanalyze or see what’s underlying a character even if it’s, like, a bad person or something like that. And sometimes I notice this theme that’s coming up with Venus retrograde in Scorpio of sometimes, like, humanizing a bad character or a bad person because you know their background more. And sometimes this question that comes up during Venus retrograde in Scorpio of “does knowing the traumatic background of a person who did bad things make what they did okay?” Or more okay. And the instances where sometimes you understand better, and other times, even if they become more sympathetic, ultimately it’s like, still that they did bad things or something like that are some of the themes that I noticed coming up. 

SB: Yeah. I feel like it’s that sweetening nature that maybe Venus is trying to bring in to Scorpio, or just trying to make you connect to that, like, darker figure, which Venus being the connection element and all the Scorpio elements being that dark figure or way of how can I empathize, how can I connect, how can I relate to this darker bad guy? 

CB: Yeah. Yeah. And so it’s like, another example of that that we’ll see later who had Venus retrograde in Scorpio is Emilia Clarke playing Daenerys and that whole thing of a sympathetic bad guy whose backstory you know. And I think there’s just, yeah, it’s worth emphasizing here there’s a difference between a person who embodies the placement versus what they may experience in terms of those energies in specific parts of their life, and I think that maybe we’re seeing it with a lot of actors and artists because art gives people a healthy outlet for the expression of darker themes, or an acceptable societal container for it. And some people, you know, have that, and it can be a really good thing versus maybe sometimes when you don’t have that or don’t find a good way to express it that it can be more tricky. 

SB: Yeah, giving it an outlet and a way to expose – to channel – it definitely seems like a important factor here. 

CB: Absolutely. 

SB: So then it doesn’t show up in your day-to-day life. But even with Penn and his other character that he’s most known for, I think he’s still also somewhat embodies that Venus Scorpio retrograde type of figure, but not in a serial killer way, of course. 

CB: Right. Like, can we talk about that, or is that too spoilery? Is there a way to say that without it being spoilery? 

SB: Oh, I think — 

CB: Does it matter at this point since it’s, like, 20 years ago? I don’t — 

SB: Exactly. I’m like, if you haven’t seen the show by now! 

CB: Okay, so we’ll say spoilers for the entire series of Gossip Girl for the next five minutes. Just, like, skip this. But otherwise, if you don’t plan on watching it, then go ahead and explain what you mean. 

SB: Yes. Penn plays the character Dan in Gossip Girl. It is about the upper elite of New York, these kids who are kind of being terrorized by this gossip girl who kind of writes about their lives, says these salacious things, and is almost a terrorizing force, and the whole question of the show – this big mystery – is who’s Gossip Girl? And at the end, you find out that it is Penn’s character, Dan Humphrey, and he – which is just in itself, you know, the fact that it’s this huge mystery and that there is this gender-bending role of it of him being, you know, the “Gossip Girl” is a man, and that Mars-Venus, Scorpio Venus nature to it, and using it to manipulate his friend group because he feels like the loner and the exile is just another way he’s just embodying this energy in a completely different way. 

CB: Totally. And also, like, 12th house-y as well, which is like, hidden things or hidden secrets, hidden enemies. And gossip is kind of a good Venus in Scorpio keyword too, because it’s something that’s like, can be damaging or harmful or attacking like a Mars thing, but it’s through words and whispers and things like that. 

SB: Yeah. And just using it for, like, his level of control and to have that huge secret and be the center of the secret show, but no one knows it. Like, he is – his character is the title character, but no one knows it for the entirety of the show, kind of putting it in the 12th house is also just a funny way that plays out. 

CB: Absolutely. I love that. Yeah, so that’s amazing. And even apparently he and the lead actress, Blake Lively, so Blake Lively is the lead actress, and apparently they dated for a period of time. But then they broke up in 2010, and I was reading that it was announced later that year, close to that Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 2010, that they had separated. So it was a kind of big news story at the time, since that was one of the big shows at the time. And that’s, like, a tricky part whereas like, we’re focusing sometimes on the celebrities and public events that were documented, but that reminded me that sometimes with some of these, I can tell there’s stuff happening behind the scenes in the person’s personal life or other things like that that aren’t necessarily gonna be visible publicly, but are nonetheless super important to them privately or in terms of internal things. And with her, I think it’s funny that she dated Penn, because Penn has this huge Scorpio stellium, and then of course the person that she would later go on to marry, Ryan Reynolds, also has a huge Scorpio stellium. So it’s interesting sometimes seeing different people have, like, a type, but that type only becoming clear if you see the underlying astrology of the charts involved. 

SB: Yeah. Yeah, no, I thought that was hilarious even, yeah. I thought that was absolutely hilarious, and just seeing – knowing that Venus retrogrades as a process is a very internal review type of process that can be more private, especially if Venus goes so close to the Sun, like kind of disappears, that maybe not always these types of behind the scenes things are visible, but what is learned and decided during those retrogrades becomes a little bit more visible in public after. And then even thinking of the sign of Scorpio, it’s a very secretive sign. So kind of knowing that that may not also be why it may be hard with some of these case studies to really bring them out into public of being, like, this is – unless they’re really embodying the energy, like, it not being the most public thing. 

CB: Yeah, that’s a great point. So yeah, so then the last thing is just, like, yeah, it’s so weird, this phenomenon. I need to do an episode on it at this point of like, actors that embodied the character or became known for a character that matches a placement in their birth chart, but sometimes there’s a disconnect where it may not otherwise describe the person’s personality itself, but it does describe the personality of the character they played. Because this famously came up with Hugh Laurie where there’s this famous interview from years ago, from maybe the ‘90s or earlier, where he went on a show, and an astrologer read his chart and said some things about his character, and he was like, “No, none of that matches at all.” But what’s funny is that when you listen to the astrologer’s description, like, they were very well describing the character he would later play of Dr. House in the show House where he later would become really famous for this role of playing, like, a surly doctor on this long-running TV show. And it’s really funny, like, how the astrologer ended up describing that character. But he at that times in terms of his actual personality or life didn’t connect with what they were saying, and it really brings up an interesting question sometimes about what the mechanism is that makes that work or how that works exactly with actors that I’d like to understand better. 

SB: Yeah. I’m curious, you know, even though we don’t have the exact time for Penn and we just know he’s a Sag rising, I’m curious if that his Midheaven is in Libra, and moved to that 11th house place, just because that Venus Scorpio retrograde is so loud for him. So I’m just curious if there’s, like, a connection there bringing that in instead of being in that Virgo place, because I feel like that also just rings really loud if that was his Midheaven ruler. 

CB: Sure. Yeah, that’s a really interesting question; that’s a good question, because yeah, that does come up with somebody else. Maybe it’s Jodie Foster? We’ll see her later and see – I know there was somebody like that. 

SB: And Matt Damon with just how he plays his character over and over again. 

CB: Totally. Yeah. All right, well, anyway, so shout out to Penn. Hopefully that was okay; I know you’re not into astrology, but you know, just like, throwing it out there – maybe there’s a little something to it with those repetitions, especially the one in 2018. So maybe worth looking into a little more; maybe there’s something to it. We’ll see. We’ll see what future Venus retrograde repetitions in Scorpio bring for him throughout the rest of his life and whatever he ends up doing. 

SB: Maybe something’s going on with him right now, and… 

CB: Right. Yeah, I mean, probably, but yeah, we’ll have to see if that’s something that’s visible or not visible, and maybe we’ll find out or maybe we won’t. 

SB: Yeah. 

CB: All right, so that’s Penn Badgley, and what was funny is – so I watched the entire, like, first season of the show which was really good, and then I started watching the second season and I laughed because right away in the second season of You, a really young Jenna Ortega shows up as one of the main characters in the second season, which I thought was really funny because I had no idea. I didn’t know that’s how she got her start. And then I looked up her chart, and it turned out we have a timed chart for Jenna Ortega, and then I laughed again because she’s Venus retrograde in Scorpio from 2002. And the story of this role is just wild. 

So let me show the chart first. So this is Jenna Ortega’s chart; she was born September 27th, 2002, 5:59 PM in Rancho Mirage, California, with Pisces rising and Venus is in Scorpio in the 9th whole sign house and it’s 12 days from stationing retrograde. So technically, it’s not retrograde, but it’s basically, like, slowing down and about to station retrograde at this time. And what’s really funny is that – well, two things. One, I noticed that the Venus retrograde in Scorpio people tend to be attracted to each other in their lives. It’s like a magnet or something, because I kept seeing any time I would find one Venus retrograde in Scorpio, I kept seeing other Venus retrograde in Scorpios showing up as important in their life. And this is one of those instances where – so it’s like, Penn Badgley’s born with Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1986. Jenna Ortega is then born with it almost in 2002. And then the first season of You airs during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 2018. It becomes a huge success for him, but Jenna Ortega watches that show, and she’s super into it. She loves the show and she’s been wanting to make the transition from, like, being a child actor to more adult roles. And so she actually actively asks her agent to inquire and to try to get a position for her on the second season of the show. So what’s funny about that then is that means that that whole drama that was playing out of, like, the show airing but then not getting a huge audience and almost being canceled, but then being revived by Netflix – that also had a very personal impact for her. And she ends up auditioning for the second season once Netflix agrees to do the show again in December. And like, sometime towards the end of this Venus retrograde – I don’t have the exact date, but I think she probably did the audition if it happened in December of 2002, then it was still in that range of Venus direct in Scorpio post-retrograde. And then she’s announced that she’s gonna be in it, I think, in January, in like, late January. So that means she’s another example of somebody born during a Venus retrograde in Scorpio that had a super important turning point during Venus retrograde in Scorpio, because she ended up being in this hit show and doing really well. And then this catapulted her to the later fame that we all know from basically the past eight years since then where she’s become this major figure, interestingly often in darker roles of playing, like, goth characters or being in horror movies like Scream. She’s become known as a Scream Queen, which is one of the words for an actress who’s famous for horror movies and things like that. She famously played in the Beetlejuice sequel that just came out a few years ago. She played the younger version of Lydia’s character, and ironically Winona Ryder also has Venus in Scorpio, I believe. She played Wednesday in the Addams Family spin-off on Netflix. So she’s done all this stuff, but her story intersects with this other Venus retrograde in Scorpio, which was Penn Badgley. 

SB: Yeah. When you pointed that out, I was floored. I felt like the show just attracts – like you said, they all kind of come together. Maybe it’s not the placement everyone likes, but they seem to be drawn to each other. I think that especially when you start seeing her in Wednesday, as Wednesday, is just so striking because she kind of acts as almost that crime solver, mystery solver, which is classic very Scorpio. And in one season she sees that one of her friends is gonna die, and so she’s trying to stop that by in showing her love and care in this Scorpio way of trying to solve a murder case. So I think that is just another way that these archetypes just keep coming to life, and it’s really, really funny. 

CB: Yeah. And one of the things I like about hers is she very more overtly tends towards darker roles, and is very open that she naturally gravitates to more macabre-type roles. And she once described, I saw in an interview, feeling an invisible string connecting her to, like, serial killers and monsters and creatures and things like that that explore the darker side of storytelling. And elsewhere she said that she loved things that are, like, kind of disturbing or off-putting, because they offer interesting variations for storytelling. And I thought “a bit off-putting” is a good keyword for Venus in Scorpio or Venus retrograde in Scorpio. 

SB: Yeah. I think being attracted and that attraction to the off-putting is just perfect. Absolutely perfect. It’s fun when they describe their charts better for us. 

CB: Yeah, totally. Well, and it’s like, sometimes you see that also we’ll see with Jodie Foster a similar thing in terms of being more attracted to darker roles or roles that deal with more complex or dark subjects. But then even, yeah, authors like Penn Badgley, for example, who ended up in a role like that and is less sort of open about talking about that, but nonetheless was attracted to and ended up in that role for some reason. 

SB: Yeah. And even thinking, too, where she was on the verge of quitting acting, and then she sees this show and it makes this major pivot, so speaking again to how these recurrences become major turning points in people’s lives. 

CB: Absolutely. Yeah, she was getting ready – I saw that a few times, actually, of people that almost were gonna quit in whatever their profession was, but then they had the Venus retrograde recurrence and then they got a role that saved them or defined their career for a while. That seems to be a theme as well, as well as just like, on the forecast a month or two, I was talking about Venus in Scorpio, and one of the archetypes just being people that find beauty in things that are not traditionally viewed as beautiful or might traditionally be viewed as dark or ugly. And with Jenna Ortega especially we see that as being attracted to more of a dark or sort of goth aesthetic as a manifestation of that. 

SB: Yeah. Just not taking the traditional pretty beauty, like, attraction, and kind of just accepting that verve – that detour – is just, yeah. People just play that out and it’s almost hilarious on how loud it gets. 

CB: Totally. All right, so speaking of people playing – moving onto our next example, like, you know, villainous characters, I kept seeing the role of Lucifer and the myth of Lucifer coming up over and over again in different stories, but especially with actors who literally played Lucifer. And one of them is an actor named Tom Ellis who played Lucifer Morningstar on this hit TV show Lucifer for, like, six seasons where he played Satan, basically, who had fallen from Heaven and then was investigating crimes on earth. And let me share his chart. So I believe this is his chart; it’s an untimed chart, so we’re just talking about a chart with – he was born November 17th, 1978, with Venus retrograde at nine-ish Scorpio along with Uranus and the Sun in Scorpio as well. And for him, it’s just, again, with Penn Badgley, it’s like he’s playing a serial killer; this guy’s literally playing Lucifer, like Satan or the devil. And what’s funny is it brought up this whole research thing for me when I kept seeing this over and over again, because the entire mythology of Lucifer developed gradually over the past 2,000 years. But the word “Lucifer” is Latin, and it means “light bringer,” and it’s a translation of the Greek word for Venus, which is light bringer. And there’s this whole interesting etymology about how the Christian concept of Lucifer or Satan gets associated with Venus, but especially in I think it was like, 1667, there was a famous English poem and book – I think it was Paradise Lost, right – where the story of Lucifer is really developed, and this idea that Lucifer was this brilliant angel or this beautiful angel or really bright angel from early on in Heaven that rebels against God and then is eventually cast out of Heaven and falls. So this idea of Lucifer as a fallen angel, that archetype keeps coming up over and over again in different stories. And this is one of the most literal ones is literally with this guy that played Lucifer in a TV show for six seasons. 

SB: No, I thought that was just painfully literal and absolutely hilarious. When I was looking him up, I saw that in his season two of his show CIA just aired on the – what is today – the 6th, so it’s the 5th — 

CB: Yesterday? 

SB: Yeah, literally yesterday. And then he basically – the cliffhanger of season one was that his former partner, who he thought had died in an explosion is actually alive and was secretly working for this security firm. And so confronting, like, that rage and feeling torn in that fact with that revelation of someone in that relationship being brought back, and that happening during this retrograde – it’s like, he’s still playing out this trope in a different show. And even when he was talking about this new season, saying he’s made all these decisions, you can decide as many things as you want. When your heart is telling you something, it’s very different equation to the melting pot of confusion and where is my trust? And I think that’s a question of like, where is my trust in these relationships when these figures come back. And so I just thought that was like, another painfully literal – like, he went and he played Lucifer, and now two days after his second season shows up and he’s playing out this kind of like, my partner returned! And do I trust him? Which is a very Venus retrograde Scorpio, especially from the dead. 

CB: Totally, yeah. So he’s playing a rule-breaking CIA case officer in this new crime drama series CIA. So he went from playing Lucifer to playing, like, a spy basically, which is really funny because one of the Venus retrograde things that I found in history was that the first James Bond movie came out during a Venus retrograde in Scorpio back in the ‘60s. And I kept seeing spy stuff come up over and over again with the Venus retrogrades in Scorpio. 

SB: Yeah. That like, secretive nature to it. So — 

CB: Yeah. 

SB: You know. Just these little tidbits become very hilarious. 

CB: Yeah, little things that like – what’s funny about them is like, you could think – like, I know somebody could listen to that in isolation and be like, okay, well, that’s a one-off. That’s just a funny thing that he played Lucifer or something. Get this – Gwendoline Christie, who is also Venus retrograde in Scorpio, also played Lucifer in a show called The Sandman. So let me share her chart. We do not have a birth time for Gwendoline Christie, but she was born October 28th, 1978, with Venus retrograde at 20 degrees of Scorpio with a full stellium of, like, Sun, Uranus, Venus, Mars, and Mercury in Scorpio. And that’s really funny that she, like, also played Lucifer, but also that Gwendoline Christie is most well-known for her role on Game of Thrones playing a knight, basically, and playing a woman that stands out as being different because she’s a female knight. 

SB: Yeah, that gender-bending thing of when you put Venus in a martial place, and like, a woman wielding a sword is another very, you know, especially in that show where a lot of the other women are not in full armor, she very much stands out in that role. 

CB: Yeah, totally. So she was playing famously, like, Brienne of Tarth. And just, like, yeah, like, a woman who’s wielding a sword as a warrior and stands out because of her large stature and muscularity. And that was kind of a theme we kept seeing come up at different points, I think due to the Venus in detriment, and the idea of Venus which is traditionally one of, you know, only like, at least a couple of feminine planets in ancient astrology, but being put in a more quasi-masculine sign, at least one ruled by Mars, and being given Mars things to do. But then sometimes, like, standing out as odd or different in some way, and sometimes feelings of alienation or feelings of standing out because you’re different sometimes coming up with planets in detriment. 

SB: Yeah. Definitely that alienation point of that difference, especially when you’re not conforming, which is another Venus thing. 

CB: Yeah. So she also played Captain Phasma in Star Wars, which was like, a villain character, although she was really underused in that. I wish she had been better used in those movies, because that would have been amazing, and you hardly got to see her face, except for once briefly. But the funniest thing is that – it’s another one of those instances where she’s a Venus retrograde in Scorpio attracted to other Venus retrogrades in Scorpio – and one of her most recent really notable roles that she played Principal Weems in Wednesday alongside Jenna Ortega in season one of that Netflix spin-off on the Addams Family. So this is another one of those instances I was talking about of, like, Venus retrograde in Scorpios being pulled to each other like magnets or showing up around the same places. And now we’ve got a string that goes, like, you know, like, Penn Badgley is in the show in 2018 and shows up with Jenna Ortega in season two, and then Jenna Ortega shows up with Gwendoline Christie in Wednesday, and it just keeps going. 

SB: Yeah, and then you think, like, oh, Penn dated Blake, and Blake is also attracted to another Scorpio stellium – and then it’s just — 

CB: Right. 

SB: Plays on and on. But yeah! I think that’s what’s hilarious how they all flock together. 

CB: Definitely. And to bring one last piece about the Lucifer piece, I found that Milton’s book Paradise Lost came out in 1667 where he portrayed Lucifer as this tragic, charismatic leader of this angelic rebellion in Heaven. And ironically, that at the time that book or poem was partially criticized for its portrayal of Satan, because some readers interpreted it as Satan being more, like, heroic or sympathetic as a figure. So already that idea of, like, interpreting villainous characters as more sympathetic and some of the debates that arise from that was coming up back then. And that book came out later in 1667, and there was this eclipse on November 15th, 1667, that was in Scorpio at 23 Scorpio conjunct Venus at 21 Scorpio. And I strongly suspect that that’s basically when some of the first, like, everyone’s reading the book, and some of the first reviews of it are coming out at the time. So it’s interesting to see those Venus in Scorpio themes embedded in what became one of the foundational myths for that idea of Lucifer as a fallen angel, even though it had some traces going back much earlier. But then us continuing to see echoes of that now over the past century with Venus retrograde in Scorpio. 

SB: Yeah. I think just this recurring theme of finding love for the monster, and then maybe in the retrograde, being like, why do we love this monster? And whether it’s like, you know, finding more love or less love for the monsters — 

CB: Right. 

SB: — definitely come out. 

CB: Yeah. And people being like, “Well, maybe he’s not such a bad guy.” But like, and sometimes that being okay where it’s like, you have… I don’t know, it gets into really tricky stuff with people that are in jail. Like, there’s a lot of talk about that right now where, for example, this theme of women that have done crimes, but they’ve been crimes of revenge or things like that against men that have done bad things has been in discussion lately and sympathy for that. And then other times, it’s like, you think of the bad flipside of that, which is like, you know, the women who fell in love with Ted Bundy and were like, “Maybe he’s just a victim, maybe he’s not such a bad guy,” but then it’s like, it comes out later, it’s like, oh no, this guy is like, actually a monster. 

SB: Yeah. Or even just thinking about, like, predators that are being protected and why are you trying to sympathize with this rather than the victim? And thinking in that realm, too – just questioning and reviewing kind of that consensus. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. Like, one of the names that’s being discussed a lot right now is Aileen Wuornos, who was executed in the Venus retrograde in 2002, and her backstory in terms of some of her life, and then that, of course, coming up because of the failed execution of a woman that just took place a few days ago and the ongoing drama surrounding that. But that’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about lately as a really potent image as we’re thinking about some of this in a not, you know, artistic or literary context, but in a real life context right now. 

SB: Yeah. Exactly. Being who’s on trial, that’s, yeah. Good call out. 

CB: Yeah. All right, so let’s move onto the next section where I wanted to explore some actresses who are known for exploring darker themes in their work that had Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And the first one and one of the more legendary ones is Demi Moore, who was born – we have a birth time for her. She was born November 11th, 1962, at 2:16 PM in Roswell, New Mexico, with Pisces rising, and Venus is retrograde in Scorpio at 20 degrees, applying to this conjunction with the Sun at 19 degrees. So it’s very close to the cazimi. And Neptune is right next to it, and then Mercury is there as well. And she was actually born on the day of a Full Moon in Taurus almost exactly at the Full Moon. 

SB: I feel like Demi Moore’s example that you brought up was striking. 

CB: Where just last year it was actually as we were heading into a Venus retrograde in Aries and Pisces, which ended up partially being in her rising sign, she won finally a Golden Globe on January 5th, 2025, for the movie The Substance. She won Best Actress. And what was striking about this at the time was that despite her having this, like, really long and successful and notable career as an actor, this was the first major award that she won in her career. And it was happening relatively later in life or later in her career compared to some of the earlier roles that she definitely could have been nominated for. And to me, I took this as an example, which I’ve seen in some other cases, of sometimes retrogrades traditionally like, ancient astrologers like Ptolemy and to some extent Valens talk about retrogrades indicating delays or like, that there’s a delay in the eventuation of the significations or what the planet signifies. And in some instances, that can be, like, receiving your flowers or your awards later on, or that there’s some sort of delay or detour or, yeah, thing that causes that to happen later on. And what was so interesting about that role is that it was really about – how do we describe The Substance? It was, like, a movie about a woman that is an older — 

SB: It was — 

CB: Go ahead, I’ll let you.

SB: Yeah, it’s about this woman who is this older actress, almost kind of speaking to kind of getting your flowers later. But kind of feeling like she’s being phased out by the men in the industry and feeling that frustration with her body and not fitting in the beauty standards, and being offered this thing called “the substance” that allows her for I think about seven days to inject something into her so she can become the younger version of herself and really starts to mess around with what we were saying earlier, with the Medusa themes of body horror and really exploring the, you know, just what people are willing to do to get to that more beautiful state. She was like, kind of ripping herself apart. And so kind of having that Scorpio themed role – Scorpio Venus role – where she’s just doing this grotesque act of kind of separating and severing a part of herself to achieve a certain level of beauty is, one, iconic and almost like she becomes awarded for fully embodying this placement in her chart and getting this award later in her life. 

CB: Right, absolutely. And it was about, like, the sexualization and exploitation of youth and the younger version of her about especially age and women being discarded, especially in entertainment, after a certain age. Like, after your 30s or 40s. And the things that women have to do sometimes to their body to, like, maintain or look younger in order to stay relevant, due to that paradigm basically, due to that paradigm and allusion to plastic surgery and things like that, which then they take in the movie to an extreme level where her body’s falling apart, and she becomes this grotesque character, like a monster in some sense. But then the funniest part – the most incredible part of this – is I kid you not, the younger version of her was played by Margaret Qualley, who was born with Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1994. So the younger version of Demi Moore in the movie was literally an actress that was born – it’s like, Demi Moore is born with Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the ‘60s, and then the younger version of her is played by another actress with Venus retrograde in Scorpio who would have been then born during a repetition of that same Venus retrograde of Demi Moore’s in 1994. And that is just, like, utterly, utterly incredible. 

SB: Absolutely incredible! That was stunning, especially because one comes out of the other’s body, and almost like that recurrence of a Scorpio Venus retrograde of coming back to a younger self, and they literally play that out in their own birth charts. It was a stunning find. 

CB: Yeah. So let me put Margaret Qualley’s chart up. I didn’t notice this until just now, but they weren’t just born with Venus retrograde in Scorpio the same – and both of them have a Scorpio stellium. They’re both born with Pisces rising. So they have the same rising sign as well, which is often associated with, like, physical appearance and things like that. But they’re both born with Pisces rising, and Margaret Qualley was born October 23rd, 1994, 4:50 PM in Missoula, Montana, with Venus retrograde at 15 Scorpio and it’s copresent with the Sun, the North Node, Jupiter, and Pluto. So it’s like, a full Scorpio stellium in the 9th house. And yeah, I was just so – go ahead. 

SB: Oh no, I was just gonna say, and like, Margaret’s Jupiter is right on her almost Venus cazimi of Demi Moore’s chart. 

CB: That’s a really great point. 

SB: So it’s like, her chart ruler is like, really brings out that one element of Demi. 

CB: That’s incredible. Yeah, so Demi’s Sun is at 19, and Venus is at 20, and that’s where the cazimi’s about to take place. And Margaret’s Jupiter is at 19, and her Venus is at 15. Incredible. 

So one of the things that brings up that’s really wild is, like, sometimes a person might, you know, we have that premise that we’ve established, that we’ve kind of seen pretty comprehensively, but we’ll see even more as we go that sometimes a person’s born with Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and then they have important turning points in their life happen when Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio again, like Penn Badgley starting the You series, for example, in 2018 during that. But imagine this – like, sometimes you might – let’s say you’re paying attention to that, but let’s say it’s like, Demi Moore and she’s paying attention to that in 1994, and then she’s like, well, nothing that much happened. But then it turned out that, like, Margaret Qualley was being born at that moment and then 20 years later would end up playing her in this significant hit movie that she would win an award for, and how complex and interesting and intertwined everything you start realizing is. 

SB: Yeah. And it took a while for it to really play out. Like, that delay aspect — 

CB: Yeah. 

SB: — too. 

CB: Yeah, sometimes there’s a delayed thing, and sometimes you just have to realize when you’re having an important transit, it’s because somebody that’s gonna become important in your life is being born at that time, and later on their path will intersect with yours in some significant way. 

SB: Yeah. Yeah. It makes you look at transits differently. It’s like, which one of these babies are gonna come back into my life? 

CB: Right. Yeah. Okay, so with Demi Moore, though, obviously that’s not the only thing that she did. Like, she’s known for a lot of different roles. One of the ones I think Nick and Patrick and I talked about her in the original Venus retrograde episode we did several years ago, and one of the things that stood out that was interesting in her timeline later in the ‘90s was at one point, she did the role of G.I. Jane where she played a woman I think getting into the Marines or something like that, and she shaved her head off for the role; she shaved all of her hair off. And this was, like, a big deal or was very, like, I don’t know if “scandalous” is the right word, but it was treated as this really big deal for this leading Hollywood actress to shave her head at the time and really stood out and made her stand out in terms of that role and the lengths to which she was willing to go to act or sometimes due gender nonconforming things was, like, one of the things. 

SB: Yeah. I think that willing to also just, like, sever a part of your hair too also feels very Scorpio-esque. But yeah, kind of going against the grain and really being seen when you break the Venus mold with that Scorpio placement. 

CB: Yeah, exactly. But one of the things about her early career especially is just that she was famous for taking on provocative, risk-taking and often sexually charged roles, especially during the peak of her stardom in the 1980s and 1990s. So roles like in 1993 Indecent Proposal where she played a wife who faced a moral and relational dilemma when a billionaire offered her husband a million dollars for a single night of intimacy with her, or in 1994 – I think this was close to a recurrence, because that was, of course, Venus retrograde in Scorpio later in the year – she played an aggressive and ruthless corporate executive who sexualized harassed her former lover and subordinate who was played by Michael Douglas. She also played in Striptease in 1996 where she was a former FBI data analyst who becomes a high-earning exotic dancer in Florida to fund a custody battle for her daughter. And yeah, like all sorts of other different roles. So it’s like, that was an element that she kind of gravitated towards at different points in her career. 

SB: Yeah, it’s just kind of honestly playing the role over and over again, even in like, Ghost too. 

CB: Oh yeah, Ghost – that’s a really good one. 

SB: Yeah. Kind of pass death to find that love.

CB: Yeah, no, that’s a great one. It’s like, her lover passes away, he dies – Patrick Swayze’s character – but then comes back to her as a ghost. And it’s like, this really romantic movie, but it’s in a really dark setting or context. 

SB: Yeah. I think with all the love stories that I was looking at with people with Venus in Scorpio retrograde is just kind of partners trying to return back after this big separation. And this is the first of that, of separation by death. 

CB: Yeah. That’s a really good one. Yeah, so you know, there’s a lot of other things I think we could say and talk about in terms of her career and stuff, because not to flatten out her career but just in terms of some highlights I thought some of that was interesting, and especially the connection with The Substance and with Margaret Qualley. And maybe – this is actually one I wanted to mention – Margaret Qualley briefly, because even Margaret Qualley’s interesting because she first really came to prominence in 2018 where during that retrograde I think they were finishing up principle photography for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for the Quentin Tarantino movie. And in that movie, interestingly, she played a member of the Manson family cult who sort of like, lures Brad Pitt’s character to a ranch and then attempts to get him in the cult. But then he isn’t into it, and then it becomes clear that she’s a fanatic, and I thought that was fascinating, because like, Charles Manson himself was born with Venus in Scorpio just before the cazimi. 

SB: Yeah. I think that just almost alludes back to the serial killer fanaticism theme with Penn and Ted Bundy. 

CB: Yeah, totally. And you know, it brings up one of the things you and I kept running into was like, sometimes with Penn Badgley, we had that season aired during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio or sometimes the movie comes out during it. In this instance, it seems like she was filming it basically in the later part of 2018 during the retrograde, so sometimes we’ll see the movie being filmed during that time. And I’ve seen similar dynamics with, like, I don’t know, I found earlier that the book that Hellraiser was based on came out in the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1986, and they also filmed the movie during that time, but then the movie – which is the most well-known part of it – came out a year later in 1987. So there’s some dynamic here I know you and I have – I was sort of putting together a possible episode about movies, like Venus retrograde in Scorpio in movies, of which there’s a ton of really interesting examples. But there’s this interesting dynamic sometimes between, like, the book it’s based on, when it’s filmed versus when a movie comes out that I’d like to work out and understand more. 

SB: And then the characters who play it. So — 

CB: Right. Right, which is — 

SB: You know, which just stacks. 

CB: Exactly! Yeah, and sometimes with this you get really crazy ones, like, yeah, Margaret Qualley and Demi Moore. 

SB: Yeah. With Margaret Qualley, even if you start looking at her current films too that are coming up of what she’s filming now or what’s about to come out, it’s like, the Medusa themes come out again because she’s filming Possession, which is a 1981 film – German film, I believe. And even when you look at the cover of that film, you see Medusa pop up very loudly on the cover. And so just kind of thinking of how these people with these placements keep playing it out, keep playing out the mythology of it all is just very, very loud. 

CB: That’s incredible. So this is the cover you found. So Possession, the 1981 film, if you look that up on Wikipedia it has this image on the cover of a woman with the snakes – hair for snakes – that is like, literally an image of Medusa. 

SB: Yeah. So it’s just kind of like, ope, there it is again! And I think you said it, like, maybe once it’s like, okay. Maybe twice you’re like, okay. But then you see it over and over for a multi-hour Astrology Podcast episode, and you know you got something! 

CB: Yeah, it just starts to arise naturally. And it’s because that archetype is out there, and it just seeps into reality during these times. And those really are the two most potent archetypes – or at least myths, for me, I would say, not archetypes but myths is the Medusa myth and the Lucifer myth keep coming up over and over again. 

SB: And Inanna. Like — 

CB: Inanna, yeah. Absolutely. Okay. So I think that’s good for Margaret Qualley, but you brought up an interesting point, which is like, in every single one of these instances where we’re talking about these people, the Venus retrograde in Scorpio just started. So some of them are already coming up in the news and doing important things that have just come out recently. Others we’ll probably see over the course of the next few months them doing important projects or having important life turning points. And while some of those we’ve already seen or can anticipate but we’re not dwelling on it, there’s others we’ll have to pay attention to in almost every single one of these stories. 

SB: Yeah. There’s definitely some celebrities I have my eye out on for if there’s something gonna pop up with them. Maybe a scandal or two? 

CB: Yeah, definitely some scandals, or I had that one I told you about where in the original research last month for Venus retrograde in Scorpio, I found that Amelia Earhart was declared dead officially by a judge under a Venus retrograde in Scorpio in, like, I don’t know what it was – 1938 or something like that. And it was because her husband, she’d been missing for, like, 18 months, and her husband urged the judge to do it sooner than they would normally for missing persons because he wanted to administer her business affairs or something like that. And I meant to mention that in that episode and forgot, but then I mentioned it in a private Patreon episode with Nick on The Secret Astrology Podcast, and I kid you not, I just saw a news report from NBC the other day saying that researchers think they found on a satellite traces of her airplane somewhere, and they’re sending out an investigative team this week to go investigate and see if that really is – if they found finally where Amelia Earhart crashed, which would be crazy as a repetition of that transit. 

SB: Yeah. It’s like, we’re still in the cycle, so it’s still happening. Even if we’re catching things that are happening in the past or recently happened, there’s gonna be more. 

CB: Yeah. And sometimes it’s like, it’s important to mention those things because even when the repetition happens, it can be bringing those topics up that you wouldn’t even imagine could still become relevant again – in that case, like, almost a century later. But still somehow the echo of that birth chart placement keeps reverberating in history as long as the memory of that person is alive in some way. 

SB: Yeah. Like Ted Bundy getting a show come out, you know, with Zac Efron during a Venus retrograde in Scorpio. 

CB: Yeah, totally. All right, so moving onto our next example, which is Jodie Foster. And let me share her birth chart where we do have a timed chart for her where she was born November 19th, 1962, at 8:14 AM in Los Angeles, California, with Sagittarius rising and a Scorpio stellium which includes Venus retrograde at 16 degrees of Scorpio copresent with Neptune, Mercury, and the Sun, which are all in the 12th house. So I love her chart for a few different reasons. One of them is she’s born within a week of Demi Moore, and that’s one of the things when I first noticed her example, that’s what I realized was a year ago because during that awards season during the Golden Globes. Like, Venus had just ingressed a day or two before that into Pisces, which is the sign it would retrograde back to. So it began the sign-based shadow period functionally of the Venus retrograde. And then at that same awards show, Demi Moore and Jodie Foster both won Golden Globes. And for Demi Moore, it was for The Substance, whereas for Jodie Foster it was for, like, season four of True – man, I’m blanking it right now — 

SB: True Detective? 

CB: True Detective, yeah, yeah, that’s it. So she won for season four of True Detective, but it was so striking at the time that two people who were born within a week of each other with Venus retrograde in Scorpio then won an award as Venus was again slowing down to station retrograde after it moved into Pisces. And both of them, because they were born within a week of each other, both had Jupiter at like, three degrees of Pisces. And in Jodie Foster’s chart, it’s ruling the Ascendant because she’s Sagittarius rising, whereas for Demi Moore, she’s Pisces rising, so it was moving into her actual rising sign. 

But Jodie Foster’s a really interesting case because Jodie Foster has long gravitated towards darker roles in different ways that explore different areas that are very, like, edgy or sometimes controversial or sometimes dark. So for example, her breakout role in 1977 was in the Martin Scorsese movie Taxi Driver where she played a child prostitute who was like, 12 years old or something like that. And she was actually nominated for Best Supporting Actress in this role. Or later on, she won her first Academy Award for the 1988 movie The Accused, and it was a legal drama that was based on the life of a real woman who was raped really brutally in the early 1980s by a group of men. So that was a really important role, because it’s credited as one of the first mainstream films to deal with the horrors of rape as well as the aftermath in a really real way, like a really serious way and a really vivid way, basically. 

SB: Yeah, and having that placement in the 12th house just putting the emphasis on things people don’t want to talk about even more where it’s just putting that action of, like, rape or child prostitution and really embodying those characters and kind of engaging in that space in a way of art and having that be part of her formative years, too, of having to embody these traumatic roles consistently I think also speaks to how certain people can like, are able to get into that headspace or get into that role I don’t want to say easier than others, but like, in a way that feels maybe more natural with these placements in their birth chart. 

CB: Right. Yeah, for sure. Because then later, of course, so that was her first Academy Award, but then she won her second Academy Award just a few years later in 1991 for playing Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, which is a really famous – it’s a huge, huge movie in the early ‘90s where she played an FBI agent who was building this relationship with a cannibal serial killer and trying to get his help to solve another case. And it was kind of a dark movie about serial killers and cannibalism and stuff like that, but also the psychology of understanding them. And that’s one of the reasons it’s actually fascinating about her chart is her chart’s very similar to Penn Badgley’s chart where it’s like, Sagittarius rising, Jupiter in Pisces in the 4th house, and then a Scorpio stellium that includes Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And yeah, so she had a tendency from very early on to gravitate towards these darker, more complex roles, but then she also achieved major success and stardom with those roles, in some instances emphasizing real things that are negative and other times emphasizing more literary or imaginary ones. 

SB: Yeah, just another way where the serial killer trope kind of comes in and relating to the monster also comes in, because that’s where Silence of the Lambs comes in. 

CB: Yeah. And trying to get inside, like, what is the psychology of people like that in order also to solve crimes or to prevent them or what have you, which is actually also kind of interesting in terms of like, the FBI’s psychology department where they started making profiles so that they could track people like that. 

Let’s see, other things. She had a Venus retrograde in the 12th house, which is more of a very private place. And she was long rumored to be a lesbian but she was very private about and very garded about her relationships, but then eventually she did end up coming out in an awards speech in 2013 during a Golden Globes award speech. 

SB: Yeah. I think that kind of putting that, like, who are connecting with, who are you loving into a private space, like, putting that privacy 12th house and maybe having some 12th house experiences around that where it’s not an immediate come out story; it takes a little bit longer to happen. 

CB: Yeah. As opposed to, like, Gianni Versace who has that Venus retrograde in Scorpio like, right in the first house, and he’s just like, open and he’s just like, “This is who I am, and this is part of me” from day one versus somebody in the 12th house where I always think about how the 12th house, when the Sun rises, all of the planets and stars – all the stars especially – start to disappear just after daybreak. And so you get that idea of the 12th house of a disappearance or something that’s hiding or going behind the scenes. 

SB: Like you can’t see it. 

CB: Yeah, exactly. So there’s a bunch of other roles that she played that were also kind of edgy and stuff; that’s not to say that those are the only roles she plays. She certainly gravitated towards that from very early on, but she also played, like, I mean, my favorite role of her was like, Contact, because that’s one of my favorite movies, which is more of a sci-fi role in the mid-’90s. But yeah, in terms of her filmography, there’s definitely a lot of more darker, edgier things that she was interested in exploring. But one of the darker ways that her Venus retrograde in the 12th house manifested was in the 1980s, she was in college, and this guy who watched her in the Taxi Driver movie started obsessing over her, and he decided that he wanted to try to impress her. So he actually shot and attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s in order to impress her. And this happened while she had taken, like, she was away; she took a break from acting to go to college, and then this happened, and it was just this really traumatic experience for her, having this person – because this person was obsessing over her for several months before that and kind of stalking her. And she has – if we go back to her chart, I used this as an example in something else recently, but I was fascinated because that Scorpio stellium is ruled by Mars in a day chart, which is in the 9th house, which is the place of education. And that’s usually where we find, like, college, for example. And she had this really terrible experience happen where in the middle of college, basically, this stalker try to kill the president in order to impress her, and it really shook things up while she was just trying to live a normal life. 

SB: Yeah. I think that’s very striking when you start to look at the ruler and then thinking about how those relational experiences can be almost, like, the trauma – I think of the 12th house as the things we gotta unpack in therapy. And so it’s the people and the love and those types of things that end up having to be talked about in therapy after those type of traumatic experiences with stalkers and such. 

CB: Yeah. The 12th house is where we find traditionally like, enemies or people that are working against you in some way. But it’s also the house, even traditionally, where we can find mental health issues, and sometimes that can be mental health issues that the person themself struggles with, but in some instances, it can be like, other people with mental health issues in your life that are causing you problems in this instance, which was the case with her. 

SB: Yeah. The hidden enemy who’s in love with you and goes about trying to love you by shooting the president, which also is another 9th house figure – like, politician, too. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And then it’s like, you think of – and that’s why it’s also interesting just her chart placement being similar to like, Penn Badgley having that Venus retrograde in the 12th where he’s playing – he’s primarily known for this one role where he’s playing this obsessive sort of stalker type serial killer type. 

SB: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So he’s kind of embodying that character, whereas she sometimes, like, can be falling victim or dealing with that character. And who knows? Maybe with the type of shows that You is, like, maybe Penn had to deal with some people who are, you know, with the Gossip Girl and being that type of hearthrob guy maybe has maybe female stalkers in life too. 

CB: Yeah. I know that – I don’t know. The only other thing about that that was interesting is just I know he mentioned, like, meditation a lot and solitude or isolation being really important to him. And I think that’s a really good way that 12th house people sometimes manifest that is like, for Jodie Foster it was about being private about her private life or relationships, or for him sometimes it can be about like, going away and wanting solitude or isolation or meditation or retreat. 

SB: Yeah. Having – trying to get the positive retreat aspect of the 12th house. 

CB: Yeah, totally. All right, moving on. One last actor example as a – oh, actually no, sorry. One last thing I meant to say about Jodie Foster is a positive thing that I loved so much is that there’s a Disney movie that’s about to come out, I think called Hexed, and she supposedly voiced the villain,t he main character as the villain in this movie, which is incredible. I love seeing one final additional little version of, like, you know, people that are good at playing the bad guy, of her voicing a villain character is perfect. 

SB: No, that’s great. I love seeing it kind of – we went backward, and now we’re going forward. And it’s like, it’s still happening. 

CB: Yeah. And that’s coming out on November 25th, 2026. Gonna be just 11 days after Venus stations direct here. 

SB: Excited. 

CB: All right, so moving on. There’s another big movie coming out, and that movie is The Social Reckoning, which is like, a sequel to the movie that came out at the end of 2010, which was The Social Network which was the original Facebook movie. And that Facebook movie came out during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in late 2010, and it was about Mark Zuckerberg and the founder of Facebook and dramatizing the early darker history of Facebook. And now exactly 16 years later, a sequel is coming out with Venus again retrograde in Scorpio. And then get this – the main actor, because the original actor who played Mark Zuckerberg in the first movie 16 years ago, he didn’t want to reprise the role. So another actor, Jeremy Strong, is stepping in to play Mark Zuckerberg in the new movie. Guess what? Venus retrograde in Scorpio in his birth chart. Isn’t that insane? 

SB: Who would have guessed it? 

CB: Who would have guessed? Yeah. So this is it. He’s a little after. Like, he’s coming off of the Venus retrograde in Scorpio, but it’s still pretty close; it’s December 25th, 1978, so he born just a few weeks after Venus stationed direct in Scorpio, but it’s still Venus at 19 degrees of Scorpio conjunct Uranus at 19 Scorpio, and he, depending on the time, may have the Moon in Scorpio as well. I don’t know if we have a timed chart for him or if this was – this may be a timed chart, actually, but let’s just say for the sake of this that he was born near or just after while it’s still in its retrograde sign, the Venus retrograde in Scorpio of 1978. 

SB: Yeah. I think that’s kind of what we were saying. Like, you know, there’s one movie, the sequel, and then the people who are playing in it, and maybe there’s a book that it’s based off of or an original thing that it’s based off of, and it becomes this Venus retrograde within a Venus retrograde. And that was just – and talking about, like, even just the nature of the film and this reckoning part too with just the nature of where we are at and how this specific Venus retrograde is gonna get those Pluto squares in Aquarius and that technology consensus thing, as Nick Dagan Best says, is like, a societal consensus and all of a sudden it was like, “Wow, Facebook’s so cool!” And now it’s like, “Facebook. Meta. Not cool.” 

CB: Yeah, right, exactly. And I wanted to give a shout out because the person that pointed this out to me actually first was a patron named Muneca Fea, and they were the one that originally noted this. And one of the things they pointed out was, I mean, one, how close it was. That The Social Network came out October 1st, 2010, which is just six days before Venus stationed retrograde in Scorpio. And then the sequel movie comes out October 9th, 2026, which is just six days after Venus has stationed retrograde in Scorpio. But it’s like, the first movie was about how the early versions of Facebook – or the predecessor to it that was focused on in the first movie – was how it was about, like, rating women’s appearance, basically, a website for that that he set up in college. And then I’ve read that the part of the premise behind the upcoming movie – I haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t, like, fully say or talk about it, but it’s supposed to be partially about how Facebook was known in internal studies somehow to have a negative impact on teenagers and especially, like, younger women, but that they still kept going despite that or despite the harm that was recognized or something like that is what I was reading or what I was told that it was about. 

SB: Yeah, and thinking about that, you know, in the trailer, there’s a lot of meeting in these, like, “I have a secret; we need to reveal it!” And how these Venus retrogrades are often about revealing these secrets, and even with the media that comes out is like, reckoning with these secrets because the problem is they knew it was harmful, and they’re still doing it. And almost another Venus thing connecting people – Facebook, this thing that’s supposed to connect people, and it having some sort of harm and being, you know, yeah, that harmful, hurtful type of thing, and that being revealed also in the film just makes a lot of sense. 

CB: Yeah. I’m looking it up. It says it’s about somebody partnering with a reporter to expose company secrets like you said, and that it explores how Facebook altered its algorithm to prioritize rage-inducing content and maximize user engagement over safety, and focuses on internal studies revealing harm to young users’ mental health while leadership allegedly looked the other way supposedly. 

SB: Rage-inducing content. 

CB: Yeah. 

SB: Yeah. Is like, how — 

CB: That’s a good — 

SB: — does this social platform use rage – like, Mars things, rage – to get more connection or activity on the platform. It’s hilarious. 

CB: Yeah. And one of the things I was curious about was, like, why Scorpio or Venus retrograde in Scorpio kept coming up for Facebook and for Mark Zuckerberg, and I glanced at his chart. And get this – he was born the day of a lunar eclipse in Scorpio. So that’s why these Venus retrograde in Scorpio transits keep being important for him with like, now two movies coming out about this guy. It’s because he was born the day of a lunar eclipse in Scorpio, and that was together with a whole stellium which includes Pluto, Saturn, the Moon, and Mars. So it’s like, the founder of Facebook has a large Scorpio stellium, and so now whenever Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio, some important thing is happening about his legacy and reputation and things like that. 

SB: Yeah, and like, him. I think that, you know, oftentimes with when you want to look at a company’s chart you can also look at the head of that company kind of representing part of it too, and just kind of thinking of like, a review of Facebook and Meta and all the things that he owns. So that Venusian review process of like, our relationship to him, and the things he has created, makes a lot of sense. 

CB: That’s a great point. Yeah. Because the Venus retrogrades always have this backwards-looking component where sometimes things from the past come back into the present or sometimes you’re reviewing things from the past, including relationships. But sometimes it can be, like, actions and things like that come up for review. 

SB: Yeah. No, I think that’s so good. The one thing that I found that was really funny when I was talking to a friend was just that, like, Jeremy Strong is on this list of rodent men, which is this type of new beauty standard that women are being attracted to – like, instead of the Brad Pitts and the Chris Hemsworth, it’s almost like the toothier smile, more of a pointed face, and calling that the “rodent man” and how he embodies that and just kind of making that unconventional attractive or the unconventional features more attractive these days, and the ugly is beautiful. I felt like that played out with the Scorpio Venus of it all. 

CB: Okay. Yeah. I see – oh, like, a mousy man with a toothy smile? That’s that archetype? That’s interesting. 

SB: Yeah. He’s like, high on that list. 

CB: All right. And he first became really famous for the show Succession, which premiered in 2018 in June, but then what I find interesting is later that year, Venus went retrograde in Scorpio. So it’s like, the show that he first became a major star with took off by that year basically and by later that year Venus was retrograde in Scorpio. 

SB: Yeah. And I feel like with that show specifically, it wasn’t – like, it got more popular with time, too. Like, at least for me, it got more in my consciousness not immediately, too. 

CB: Okay. I haven’t seen it yet; it’s one of the ones that’s like, on my list to watch. 

SB: Oh — 

CB: I’m gonna watch it. Should I watch it? 

SB: You should. Yeah. 

CB: Okay. 

SB: Yeah, you really should. It’s not fun like You, but — 

CB: Fun? 

SB: — you love to hate him. 

CB: Okay! All right, I like that. I’ll give it a shot.

All right, let’s move into another section. I wanted to talk a little bit about like, satire as subversion, because I found a really good example of that, and I think subversion is a really important detriment keyword, especially Venus in Scorpio keyword is subversion. And one of the people I found for that who has Venus retrograde in Scorpio is John Stewart. 

So John Stewart the famous comedian and the host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central was born November 28th, 1962, with Venus retrograde at 12 degrees of Scorpio conjunct Neptune. And I don’t think we have a birth time for him, so we’re just focused on Venus retrograde in Scorpio conjunct Neptune. And one of the things that’s really interesting about that placement is just how, you know, his primary thing that he’s become known for and arguably his primary contribution in society is just hosting The Daily Show and using it and sort of wielding satire as a sharp investigative weapon, where they were doing, you know, the premise of jokey, comedy show – which existed already in the ‘90s. Like, The Daily Show existed in the ‘90s, and it was led by an earlier guy named Craig Kilborn. But then at some point in the 2000s, John Stewart took over, and then it just started taking this much more different tone, especially during the Bush administration where they were actually doing really biting criticism and incisive social commentary. But it was within a comedic context, and it just became wildly popular. And I think that’s such an interesting and sort of like, potent image for Venus in Scorpio to have, like, biting or sharp social commentary, or to do actually journalistic investigations, but under the context or the premise of comedy and making people laugh. 

SB: Yeah. Like, definitely making – like, saying something really sharp but with a sweeter message. Like, mixing those two. And I think that even with John Stewart’s case, just how politically active and how much of the narrative and the media and that Venus retrograde being so close to Neptune and that media becoming such a media figure in that way. But yeah, definitely uses his commentary and his critiques are really sharp, but they don’t necessarily always, you know, feel as attacking as they are with that Venus placement. 

CB: Yeah. Even though he’s like, you know, uncovering political – pointing out political hypocrisy, unmasking corruption, he’s fact-checking the failures of mainstream media and mocking the mainstream media for going easy on politicians and people that are doing bad things. But one of the things that was always interesting to me about him was, like, he was very uncomfortable with the position then that he got put in where because he was doing this social commentary and he had this role as a comedian at the height of Comedy Central, he was sort of getting pushed towards being more involved in politics than he I think was comfortable with, which ironically ended up culminating eventually during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in late 2010, in October of 2010, when he did this thing called the Rally to Restore Sanity where him and Stephen Colbert did a joint rally together, and they were trying to use satire to satirize hyperbole and media sensation and political extremism, and they were calling for there to be more civility and reason and compromise in public discourse. But, I don’t know. At the time I felt like he would just – he could have taken a more prominent political role at that point, but I think ultimately he decided not to as much as he could, and he pulled back a bit. And then that election, of course, ended up being the election where the Tea Party came in and was elected and everything started to change from there after the two years of the initial Obama presidency. So that was an important turning point for him, I think – that Venus retrograde in 2010. 

But also around that time, he started really focusing on advocacy for 9/11 first responders and veterans, and I think this is where the Venus-Neptune conjunction in Scorpio component comes in, because I noted during my last episode that in 1962 under the Venus retrograde in Scorpio he was born under, there was this book that came out called Silent Spring that was this really important book – like, a groundbreaking book talking about how pesticides and stuff were actually really bad for the environment and ultimately bad for humanity. And it sort of kickstarted the entire modern environmentalism movement and eight years later led to the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency under the next Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And so there’s something actually really interesting that John Stewart himself, who was born with that signature, grew up to be really – and took on this specific thing of first responders and veterans who were exposed and who were suffering from toxic exposure to chemicals and asbestos and things like that that came out after the Twin Towers collapsed or other things like that and were suffering from illness and death. So there’s this signature with Venus in Scorpio, especially with that one that was conjunct Neptune, that has to do with, like, poisons and toxicity and other hidden things that are hidden killers as well. 

SB: Yeah, caring for the folks who suffered from the toxic fog. 

CB: Right. Yeah. So yeah, and there’s lots of – his chronology is actually really fascinating, because he first moved to New York to pursue a career in comedy in 1986, which is a Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and he had other subsequent ones like launching a show in 1994 under that Venus retrograde in Scorpio. But yeah, I think he’s currently in 2026 his contract for The Daily Show, which he’s doing still right now, is up in December of 2026. So it’ll be interesting to see what this Venus retrograde in Scorpio brings for him, and if it’s the end of one chapter and the beginning of a new one. 

SB: Yeah, totally. And just, yeah, I think he’s a fascinating one to watch and just understanding that retrograde nature of, like, being able to – the way he wasn’t very wanted to be a part of the group even though he was getting pulled in and almost more comfortable doing the outsider thing and giving that biting critique with that retrograde of not going the same direction, not functioning the same way, and when being asked to join us, it was like, ew, I’d rather not too. 

CB: Yeah. It’s like, his thing was like, he’s like, “I’m a comedian.” Like, “I’m a comedian; I make jokes. I’m not a journalist. Like, you guys are the ones that are supposed to be doing this,” or like, “you guys are the actual politicians that are actually supposed to be doing good social policy. I’m just making fun of and critiquing you guys, but that’s not actually my job and my skillset.” Which at the time, I was like, kind of annoyed by, and I felt was a copout in some level, but I sort of understand better in retrospect a little bit of what he was navigating there.

SB: Yeah, totally, I think, yeah – just with the Neptune of it all of like, critiquing the media and especially the toxic media. You know, so just being so close in that and navigating his way and being able to be that outsider to expose certain elements too. 

CB: Yeah. Totally. Yeah, and that’s a quote that we’ll actually get to later, but it might be relevant here. For one of our other examples, I found – it was Teresa de Lauretis who – here’s the quote. It says that she argued that “otherness and marginality aren’t just about being excluded from the center, but are positions from which dominant cultural narratives can be critically examined and subverted. In cinema, she analyzed how representations create and reinforce these marginal positions.” I thought that was really interesting, because it’s like, subversion is a core concept with detriment because it’s taking a planet that rules one sign, but then putting it in the exact opposite sign, like as far outside of the center as you can possibly get from where it otherwise originated. And satire and investigative journalism is a sort of subversion of things, and I think that’s one of the things we see come through with John Stewart with Venus in Scorpio retrograde. 

SB: Absolutely. Again, another time when people explain the placement better than we could with their own words. It’s very helpful. 

CB: Yeah, totally. All right, let’s move onto the next one. And this is one that you were researching that was in an interesting similar vein, and this is the chart of Joe Dante, right? 

SB: Yeah. I found him really fascinating. So Joe Dante is an acclaimed American film director and producer and editor best known for his, like, 1950s B-style horror and sci-fi films and satire and cartoon comedy and also probably one of his most well-known films is — 

CB: Hopefully this is right. Is his rising, like, seven Gemini? 

SB: Yeah, exactly. 

CB: Okay, cool. So it’s Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the 6th house with Mercury and Jupiter? 

SB: Yeah. And so I just thought that one of the things that was really funny for him with thinking of, like, satire is that he has a similar chart to Steven Spielberg. And the fact that Steven Spielberg actually complimented his low budget film of – Steven Spielberg made Jaws, and he said that his film Piranha that came out in 1978 was the best rip-off of Jaws that he’s seen, and like, actively helped protect him. And I just thought that the way he partners with people in his work with this being the Mercury-Jupiter thing with that Venus was really, really funny. And just the fact that he’s a classic subverting, you know, the mainstream with Spielberg, who is just so well-known and renowned and his, like, kitschy type of film like Piranha which is a rip-off is also beloved in a different type of way. So I thought that was just another small little example of having figures be, like, showcasing that satire and that subversion, and almost that not necessarily the mainstream of it all with that Venus in Scorpio placement. 

CB: I love that; that’s perfect. Yeah. So it’s like, Jaws comes out in, what, like, ‘75, ‘76, and then Piranha comes out in 1978 in August. And so Piranha would be a Venus retrograde in Scorpio timeframe, too, right? 

SB: Yeah. Exactly. So it’s just kind of like, these two figures who one was born in a retrograde, I think, and one was not kind of having this very different manifestation of similar themes. 

CB: Yeah. That’s a great example. So Spielberg was born just a few weeks later, but it’s his Venus is direct in the 5th house. And let me pull up his chart just for comparison. Because he would have been somebody that we would have used, except he was born once Venus stationed direct. But it was just 10 days earlier. So that’s such a cool thing, then, in Spielberg’s chart, because he has Cancer rising with Venus, Jupiter, and the Moon in the 5th house in Scorpio. And it’s like, he has a tendency to focus on children and younger people in his movies, but sometimes they’re like, kind of scary in a sense, and I pointed out in a recent episode how his symbol for his movie is, like, ET flying across the Moon for his company, I think Amblin, and he took that symbol from a Halloween symbol of a witch flying across a Moon. 

SB: Yeah. No, exactly, and their Venuses are very close. Like, Joe’s is at 18 retrograde in Scorpio, and Steven Spielberg is like, at 19. And so just kind of like that affinity for each other, but very, you know, different subversion types. 

CB: Yeah. That’s really good. And then so they’re both born, and then the other one that’s similar is Marina Abramovic was born very close to Spielberg, also with Cancer rising and Venus in the 5th house, but it’s retrograde, and she also ends up focusing on art, but doing it in her own way of performance art. 

SB: Yeah. You know, people are living similar notes when they’re kind of born in these clusters. 

CB: Yeah. So here’s her chart; she was born November 30th, like a few weeks before, with Venus still retrograde in Scorpio, and so the difference between those three – that’s one of the things that’s interesting is just to do the comparison studies and to note obviously the differences between people’s lives, but then also sometimes the weird ways in which they’re similar as well, especially when they have the same rising sign. 

SB: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. 

CB: All right, so I want to move onto the next section now, which one of the themes that comes up when we’re talking about Venus and Mars is the topic of, like, gender. And gender politics is sometimes a really prominent one I noticed coming up with some people that had Venus retrograde in Scorpio. 

So my first example of this is an academic named Teresa de Lauretis who is really prominent for doing work on gender theory, and she’s actually renowned for having coined the term “queer theory” in academia. So let me share her chart. So I don’t have a timed chart for her; I don’t know if a time is available, but just going off of the birth date, it’s November 29th, 1938. And it’s a Venus retrograde in Scorpio at 22 Scorpio conjunct the North Node at 17 Scorpio. And interestingly, just like a week before she was born, there was a solar eclipse in the sign of Scorpio. So she’s still in the window like, a week after where she was born in eclipse season just after a Scorpio eclipse, which is pretty fascinating. And as I said, she was an academic, and she did a lot of really important work, especially in the early 1990s, not just coining the phrase “queer theory,” but also establishing some of the foundational texts on feminism and lesbian sexuality. And she originally came up with the term queer theory to serve as the title of I think it was like, a conference in February of 1990 that she organized at the University of California Santa Cruz. And what else, what else? I have all of these notes. She had a really important book in 1994 which I thought was important; I think it was earlier in the year, but that’s still the obviously a Venus retrograde in Scorpio year. And it was titled The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. And from what I was reading, it was saying that the text acts as a bridge between traditional psychoanalysis and radical feminist thought. And she tried to create or delineate a model of “perverse desire” by pushing back against clinical narratives to build a comprehensive theoretical framework for lesbian sexuality and subjectivity. And she’s the one where I had that sort of synopsis that I was reading where it was saying that she was arguing that otherness and marginality are not just being about excluded from the center, thinking about the concept of detriment, but also that they’re also positions from which the dominant cultural narratives can be critically examined and also subverted. And that she would look at this in the context of cinema by analyzing how representations can create and reinforce marginal positions. And so I thought that was really interesting how sometimes, like, one of the takeaways I was getting from that is how you can sometimes by being in the margins and being outside of the mainstream or what’s central or what’s let’s say normative, by stepping outside of that, you’re sometimes able to better see and critique what those central or normative ideas are, because you’re able to get a better objective analysis of that. And I think that’s what comes sometimes with planets in detriment, or sometimes planets that are retrograde, because they tend to be outside of the mainstream or non-normative, or they tend to be outside of their own element in some way, which is fundamentally what a planet that is in the sign opposite to its domicile represents. It’s a planet that’s away from home that’s traveling or is even in exile where it’s in a foreign land that it’s not from and that it doesn’t resonate with initially. But in that position of initial uncomfort, it can sometimes critique the dominant sort of cultural narratives in different ways. And for her, this was especially as a lesbian was critiquing the way that queer people were characterized or how queer sexuality was conceptualized by mainstream thought during that time period. 

SB: Yeah. I think when you showed her chart, the thing that stuck out to me on why she can speak so well to the marginalized experience is just that not only does she have Venus in Scorpio, she has Mars in Libra, and then she also has Mercury in Sagittarius. So it’s just like, and then Saturn in Aries, which isn’t detriment but still, just speaking to that marginalized experience, like, consistently over and over again. And especially having the, you know, the Venus and Mars switched, just putting that pull of Mars acting in a Venusian way and Venus acting in a martial way, and just, you know, hey, guys, there’s not one way to do this. Actually, what if we turn it on its head and think of it completely different? And speaking to it with that also Mercury in detriment. 

CB: Totally, I love that. That’s such a great point that she has, like, three planets in exile or in their antithesis or in that element of being the outsider, but therefore having such a sharper view of what’s normative versus non-normative and an ability to critique or even subvert some of those things that we’re taking for granted. 

SB: Exactly. Exactly. 

CB: Yeah. So — 

SB: Great find. 

CB: Yeah. And I’m sure there’s, like, other people – because I’m out of my depth here, so I’m sure other people that are more familiar with her work, which is very dense and interesting, could point out much more interesting additional things that I’m overlooking or not aware of, which is in reality true of any one of these examples that we’ve used today. But we kind of find as much as we can and present the things that we find most interesting or compelling. But if anybody else knows any other interesting things about her work, definitely let us know. Sadly, she just passed away earlier this year in February of 2026. So in a year that Venus again is going retrograde in Scorpio, I’m sure there’s a lot of people looking back and evaluating and sort of celebrating her work in different ways. 

SB: Yeah. Like a review because of a loss and a separation, again, which – but yeah, if people have more depth and knowledge and nuggets, like, please comment them and let us all share in this glorious study. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. 

All right, in looking for other Venus retrograde in Scorpio people, I found another example of Jessica Valenti who was born November 1st, 1978. I don’t have a timed chart, but there’s a very large Scorpio stellium that’s, like, Sun, Uranus, Venus retrograde, Moon, Mercury and Mars all in Scorpio. And hers is a really cool case, because her career is really dedicated to very sharply dissecting some of the darkest facets of gender politics especially, which includes things like reproductive rights. Like, she’s a major advocate for and defender of abortion. She also focuses on things like rape culture as well as modern misogyny. And she first became known as the founder of this really important blog called Feministing, which she did from 2004 to 2011. And as a result of that as well as her books, she’s become really widely recognized as one of the most influential modern writers on feminism in the digital age, especially in the context of 4th wave feminism and feminist discourse on the mainstream internet. 

So some of her books in particular, because she has, like, these different eras, but even just like, reading some of the titles of her books you can already see the Venus retrograde in Scorpio themes where her book in 2008 was titled He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut. Let me find the subtitle of that, because that was actually – and the subtitle is And 49 Other Double Standards that Every Woman Should Know. Another one that was really interesting I was listening to the audio book of last night was titled The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women. Let me close the chart. I thought that was really interesting because of the way that she was really dissecting, and again, pointing out and shining a light on common assumptions that are taken for granted in society, but things that are weird, frankly, or things that society takes for granted as myths that are weird. Because that one came up in another context where was it – yeah, it was actually ‘78, so that’s actually really fascinating. 

I noticed recently that the movie Halloween came out and was hugely popular during the 1978 Venus retrograde, and what was interesting about that movie is that I was reading that it created the – or at least it set up and helped to popularize – the modern paradigm of in like, horror tropes in the 1970s and ‘80s and early ‘90s the like, the last girl horror trope in movies where you have a central female protagonist who due to her, like, purity or moral purity survives to the end of the movie and doesn’t get murdered, where every other girl or person in the movie gets murdered because they have either done drugs or they have sex or they do other things that are viewed as morally un-pure, and then they don’t make it to the end of the movie. And of course, some of those horror tropes later would get subverted in subsequent generations. But for a period, that was a really common one. So it’s actually ironic then that she was born under that retrograde and then ended up writing this book critiquing that as a broader weird thing in society, you know? 

SB: Totally. And just that pileup in Scorpio, just diving deeper and deeper and deeper to all the ways these double standards are playing out in our culture and how these ideas of gender can be questioned and ideas of women and the ideas of sex and what’s wrong and right, and you know, what is okay and where that can be hurting us. It just feels very, very Scorpio Venus-coded with that Scorpio pileup just kind of staying in that one place. 

CB: Yeah, totally. And very intense and like, she’s very assertive. Like, I don’t know – because I don’t want to frame it as militant. Like, militant is part of the keyword, but I don’t want to frame it in a negative sense. Like, she’s very forthright and direct about her views and about rejecting things that she sees as bad in society, especially bad when it comes to gender politics and assumptions and things like that. So the purity myth was one of those, like, in the part I was listening to, she was talking about how especially it was more common in the 2000s, but like, young girls growing up going to purity balls and dedicating that they would stay virgins to their father or something like that, which was like, really bizarre that things like that exist. So that was one of her book topics, but she also wrote in ‘16 a book called Sex Object: A Memoir. In 2024, she wrote a book Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win. And then also in 2008, she coauthored a book titled Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power in a World Without Rape. And then in 2020 coauthored a book titled Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World. 

So you know, just to give a broad scope of the different things that she’s focused on, there’s a lot of different nuances and a lot of other things. But those are some really core things that I think are really important and striking in terms of how, you know, traditionally Venus and Mars are the two planets that have to do with gender because of their association with both sex and sexuality, but also with the differences between men and women in different ways in terms of how astrologers identify gendered components, let’s say, in any way to whatever extent that you can in a birth chart. But sometimes when Venus and Mars are prominent, some of those themes that have to do with gender can be more focal in different ways in a person’s life. 

SB: Yeah. And I think this also just kind of focuses on that critiquing culture and that, like, really being that voice to speak on and review on why are we doing that? And thinking also with Venus in Scorpio with our values – like, what are we rejecting to be closer to our values? Which I think she amplifies with just saying, “I’m rejecting these things that are hurting women; I’m rejecting these things that aren’t good for the general culture,” because these may be outdated stereotypes with gender.

CB: Absolutely, yeah. And also this theme that I’ve seen come up vividly with Venus retrogrades in Scorpio – just like, feminine rage of really terrible things happening, and then women just becoming angry about it and fighting back and pushing back forcefully against things that are wrong. And it’s like, we saw that eight years ago with the Venus retrograde in Scorpio during the Kavanaugh hearings where it’s like, there’s this guy that’s up for the Supreme Court justice, and then a woman comes in and testifies that he allegedly assaulted her in college, and then he still becomes a Supreme Court justice. And then the amount of just, like, rage that came out of that as well as that being, like, a year into the Me Too movement ushered in this unprecedented amount of women into Congress during that midterm in November of 2018 as a result. Where it’s now in 2026, we’re seeing a repetition of similar themes happening today, but sometimes, like, when that energy is built into a person’s birth chart, sometimes they can embody that in ways that are, you know, in this instance really productive. But like, harnessing it and directing it in a productive manner is really important. 

SB: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Definitely put to a more productive manner than the next example. 

CB: Yeah, and that was actually the segue is I think she did a very good job of it. The person who has not is the next example I found that had Venus retrograde in Scorpio is Andrew Tate. And this one’s a little outside of the range; he was born with Venus having just stationed direct in Scorpio five days earlier on December 1st, 1986. And Venus stationed direct conjunct Pluto, and it’s also copresent with Mercury in his birth chart. And so this one’s a little bit more relevant now over the past few years, because this person has become so prominent in society, although part of his reputation is, like, you know, coercing women into sex work and teaching violence against women, basically, has been part of his platform. And initially he came to prominence by being, like, he was in combat sports and he was in the UK show Big Brother in 2016. But then he ended up parlaying that into building this massive online following by explicitly self-identifying as a misogynist and positioning himself as a sort of like, lifestyle guru for disaffected young men and has essentially become I think the poster boy for toxic masculinity in modern times, I think, at this point, right? 

SB: Yeah. Absolutely. And like, talking about going another way with the culture – like, hey, instead of fighting these things that we may think are wrong, it’s like, I’m actually gonna lean all the way into it in another extreme type of way. And I think that, you know, just the prominence of that, like, you know, who is victimizing women is also showcasing there where part of his brand is somehow always having women around, but in these nefarious, darker, very controlling type of ways, which I think is unfortunate but shows the range of a placement. 

CB: Yeah, for sure, especially with like, Pluto being right there. Those issues of control. Because he basically built this empire financially by teaching young men that wealth, physical dominance, and control over women especially was the only valid measure of success. And he frequently tries to frame women as, like, male property. He claims that depression is not real. And he often even mocks – goes as far as to mock victims of sexual assault. 

So over the past decade, we’ve seen – I’ve seen so many thinkpieces about how him and other people like him have sort of radicalized this large demographic of younger men towards more misogynistic worldviews, which then you see these reports of teachers and people that run schools reporting, like, increased sexual harassment and aggressive behavior from young men in schools. So it’s kind of – obviously, this is an extreme negative example, but it’s illustrative sometimes of the inversion and the dark side of some of those energies which sometimes we’ve seen come out in like, we’ve seen in extreme instances of like, serial killers with Ted Bundy or we’ve seen people playing serial killers or obsessives as artists. But then in this instance, we’ve seen women fighting for women’s rights, but in other instances, there’s this other inversion of somebody who’s taking all those dark themes and then actually doing them in practice in some way. 

SB: Yeah. Like teaching, oh, actually, control, actually hurt – that is actually how you should connect to women, which is one way to take the placement or the archetype, but not the healthiest or I think productive or a lot even legal way to do it. 

CB: Yeah, exactly. And so he kind of built his empire around the exploitation of women, and a lot of authorities – because he’s in, like, huge legal trouble in like, three different countries at this point, and he’s currently in jail. But authorities – investigators – have detailed how he used the so-called “lover boy method,” which is a technique in human trafficking where he would emotionally manipulate vulnerable women into romantic relationships and then isolate them and coerce them into doing, like, online sex work for his webcam ring. And so I’m not gonna go into all – I think all – it’s probably sufficient in terms of going into all the details of that, but recently he’s been – he’s up for charges in Romania. Because he moved to Romania and famously boasted about going there because he didn’t think they would enforce sex trafficking laws, but then they arrested him and it turned out that he was wrong. And then he’s also charged in the UK with, like, 59 total counts of terrible things related to trafficking and exploitation and things like that. And then he’s also currently in custody after being arrested in Florida in 2026, and he’s trying to fight extradition, I think, to the UK at this point to face those charges. So obviously this Venus retrograde right now that we’re in the midst of right now is very important to him as a recurrence transit. 

SB: Yeah. And just showing another case of, like, where we saw with Ted Bundy and Joe from You just using that attraction level of being more… Like, seeming more palatable but not what it seems like is on the surface and actually having malicious intent to harm. 

CB: Yeah. And using love or appearance or things to control or manipulate somebody in a dark sense of, yeah, sometimes the darker side of attraction and a sort of lethal attraction where you can have this toxic element to relationships sometimes which there’s different – there’s a whole spectrum and range of, but this is like, the most extreme version of toxicity in relationships of somebody that’s exploiting and using people. And then, yeah, there’s definitely a lot of other different variants or gradients to that kind of archetype. 

SB: Yeah. Exactly. Using Venus and attraction to cause harm, once again. 

CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, so let’s move from that section. I think that’s good. There’s a whole other, like, range I’m sure I could have gone into, but I just wanted to give a taste of some of the gender politics things that can come up with Venus retrograde in Scorpio. 

I wanted to move on and do a little section on, like, true crime and justice, because that was something that came up in the last one that I did a month ago – the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in history – but there was some striking examples of that natally. And one of the ones that I know that you researched extensively was the birth chart of Tonya Harding, right?

SB: Yeah, the Ice Queen herself! Yeah, part of my lore was also just kind of working for the promotional campaign of I, Tonya, so kind of have a personal relationship with her. But seeing that she’s a Cancer rising with Cancer at 17 degrees, and then that Venus retrograde is happening in her 5th house and games and sports and like, competitions in that way, was a big part of her as a professional ice skater, and how much she broke the rules despite being an incredible skater, but just kind of did not fit the classic dainty soft ice skater that they were looking for. Instead, she was working class; she didn’t have any money. Her costumes were handmade. She was, like, smoking and cursing and used songs that they weren’t used to and just doing the, you know, this 5th house competition of making art in such a way that broke the norm of the ice skating world. 

CB: Yeah. I love that. That’s so fascinating. Like I hadn’t watched that movie I, Tonya until the other night, and it was really good. Like, I was really surprised, because when I read that it was a comedy, it didn’t make any sense. But it’s like a dark comedy where they frame the people – either the conspirators or the people that ended up carrying out the attack on Nancy Kerrigan – as just like, bumbling idiots, which was really funny but it also was a deep character study at the same time about the context in which she grew up in and where she came from and having an abusive mother and coming from a rough background and being in abusive relationships with her partner, which ultimately culminated tragically. It was really interesting study, but a lot of it – yeah, it came back to that Venus retrograde in the 5th house, which is the place of games, of sports, for example, do show up in the 5th house. And in her case, it did very prominently. 

SB: Yeah. And I think that even just knowing her, like, consistent emotional struggle with not only her abusive partners but starting from that with her mom and kind of what we talked about earlier of, like, this type of toxic dynamics can start off earlier with the mother and how her mother was very abusive and threw a steak knife at her and basically kind of was, like, one of the ways where she was kind of denied that care or that connection very early on. And it kind of rippled throughout her life. 

CB: Yeah, and she was definitely one of the ones where really issues with the mother and mothers issues were the most prominent, although it’s tricky because it’s like, she has like four different things in the chart that are all headed that way. It’s not just like, Venus retrograde in Scorpio, but it’s like, the Moon is almost exactly conjunct Saturn in a night chart, so it’s getting maltreated. Pluto is conjunct the degree of the IC in Virgo pretty closely. There’s a Mars-Uranus conjunction in the 4th whole sign house. It’s just like, over and over we’re seeing some challenging things with the parents coming up, and that yeah, was really a major one for her where certainly at least the movie was framed as her mother being very abusive. And I think didn’t the actress win an Academy Award for that role? 

SB: Yeah, the mother. She did. She did win that Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. 

CB: Which is amazing. She was amazing in that film in that role. 

SB: Yeah, she was hilarious. She was just quite a character. And then I think Allison Janney who was playing her mom. But I think that with that chart and her story, too, what’s also really fascinating is that, you know, as a Cancer rising her 7th house is Saturn. And so like, her partner bringing in the problem, but also, like, the Moon being the mother and having that mother be partnered but also difficult, and that rippling with her very contentious relationship with Jeff Gillooly, who was she had a very abusive – like, they called the cops on her because they were fighting so much – type of relationship. 

CB: Yeah. And that was really vividly depicted in the movie, and I think was really important aspect sometimes of things if that’s the extreme end of toxic relationships is like, experiencing violence in relationships as the worst version of that, which is a major theme in her case. 

SB: Yeah. Absolutely. But then there’s like, the incident, which is also what I think most people know about Tonya Harding, which is — 

CB: Yeah. 

SB: Do you want me to go into it, or? 

CB: Yeah, take it from here. 

SB: Yeah, so basically there’s another skater named Nancy Kerrigan, and what happened was they had kind of almost did a – which shocked the skating world – like, someone came in and attacked her on kind of Tonya’s behalf. And that kind of rippled out because, you know, ice skating is such a place of decorum and very upperclass sport traditionally. And so even to have that violent act that ends up, you know, ruining her whole relationship with the sport is just another tragic act of that showing care – like, we want you to win, and so we’re gonna bloody out your competitor. 

CB: Yeah, that was crazy. One of the things I learned from the movie that I didn’t know was that her and Nancy Kerrigan were competitors, but they were also, like, friends because they would often be traveling to the same places together and would be roommates and stuff like that. And that suddenly made sense to me of why Tonya Harding had, like, Cancer rising the ruler of the Ascendant is the Moon in the 11th whole sign house, the place of friends, but it’s applying to that conjunction with Saturn in a night chart. And ultimately, this person who, you know, I don’t know to what extent, but on some level might have been treated as a friend or colleague at some point during their career in the early ‘90s, suddenly somebody attacking her and trying to end her career, basically, by hitting her leg and almost breaking her kneecap I think is what they were going for. But luckily they missed, and she was able to recover from it. But then as a result of that, the Skating Association not just banning Tonya Harding from skating after that, but also banning her from even coaching, which I didn’t know that it had gone that far, that she was completely exiled eventually from the sport of skating which she had spent her entire life training for up to that point. 

SB: Yeah. And just thinking, like, she was one of the best in the world, one of the best skaters in the world. And to go from that and that almost exalted position with the Moon in Taurus, and end up being still exiled from this community was a major blow to her and like, her whole career. And so I think that that was one of the most striking things, because like you said, 11th house is – maybe they’re not the closest of friends, but the 11th house can be like, you’re in the same groups together. You travel in the same circle. Like, we know each other; it’s not like we’re completely don’t know each other. We’re both skating. We’re both in these rooms together. And so just how that kind of – she kind of had to live out that exile existence and have to be brought into this place where she, you know, going from the best in the world to, like, never being able to participate is kind of heartbreaking and almost also with that film, again, making you sympathize with the villain. Because I think a lot of people would just kind of see, like, Tonya as a straight villain. But then you see her backstory and you understand her story, and she becomes this more sympathetic, tragic figure. 

CB: Right, exactly. Yeah. That was one of the ones I had in mind where I was thinking about that now that theme keeps coming up of like, when you do humanize somebody who’s otherwise been villainized, you know, what is the perception of them and how does that render or alter the judgment in terms of the final analysis of if they’ve done a crime or been involved in a crime or what have you? And they kind of, like, danced around that a little bit in the movie in terms of, like, did she know or did she not know what her partner and his accomplices were trying to do or carried out. But yeah, understanding her background and humanizing her more as opposed to what she became, which was just this caricature or this sort of like villain in the 1990s in some ways. 

SB: Yeah. And just thinking about that Saturn right next to her chart ruler, the Moon, and just being that partner bringing her kind of downfall in that way is just another heartbreaking story of how that can play out. And yeah, it definitely humanizes her and made me feel like heartbroken that that was kind of taken away. You know, her resource of how she made her living and all she knew for so long. 

CB: Yeah, especially because she tried to get away from him a few times and did leave him or break up with him, but then they were, like, sort of temporarily back together, and he is involved in carrying out this act that then completely ruins her life. But then he got off relatively lightly in the end, where that was one of the points the movie made was that he got – he did, like, a handful of months in jail or what have you, but then he was out and free, whereas her – she was permanently for the rest of her life exiled from the one thing that she had in her life that she was really good at and then spent a lot of time for years after that trying to just, trying to get by not being able to do that one thing she had spent her entire life training for. 

SB: Yeah. Another way where she see the female victims in this fascinating way of who gets the brunt of the punishment. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. And then one thing I didn’t know until I was researching and reading the Wikipedia and other articles while I was watching the movie was apparently, like, later that year in September as the Venus retrograde in Scorpio – because this all happened in 1994 – so she’s exiled earlier in the same year that Venus went retrograde in Scorpio, which is another one of those examples that we’ve seen a bunch of where for some reason, it’s like, the year that Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio as a repetition is sometimes activated in its entirety. And that’s still like, a thing we need to understand better at some point, like, when the thing happens during the exact retrograde versus in the sort of larger vicinity of it. But apparently later this year, I didn’t know that there was, like, a sex tape of her that was released that her former partner may have released it or negotiated with Penthouse to release it. But apparently this was one of the first major celebrity sex tapes in history, which then started the trend of that happening with other subsequent celebrities over the next decade or two. But then it was a really unique turning point in terms of that becoming a common thing, and the Venus retrograde in Scorpio was in her 5th house, which can also be associated with sex and sexuality sometimes. 

SB: Yeah. Yeah, that was so interesting when you pointed that out, because it’s just a whole ‘nother element to this house, that it can be also sex and doing such a private act, you know? Like, connecting in this almost scandalous way where, like, again, Venus retrogrades, Venus Scorpio can be scandalous. 

CB: Yeah, exactly. And like, initially she reportedly was horrified, but then I was reading later that it said something that her and her former partner split profits from it evenly was later reported. So I don’t know what the truth of that is ultimately in terms of how that happened. And then that would subsequently over the next decade or two become one of those weird things where sometimes you had cases like once that happened and was successful, the publisher of Penthouse who I think I found out had Venus retrograde in Scorpio – yeah, he was born December 17th, 1930, four days before Venus went retrograde in Scorpio. So again, it’s another one – yeah – those cases of so the publisher of Penthouse at the time that published that sex tape had Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and then he used that template the following year in 1995 to publish the Pamela and Tommy Lee sex tape that was stolen from their house that was a wedding tape and was published without her consent. And then over the next decade, there would sometimes be debates about the release of celebrity sex tapes and the question sometimes about when it was authorized versus when it was not authorized, and the ambiguity sometimes surrounding that being a weird thing. 

SB: Yeah. Exactly. Just having that consent piece kind of also be thrown into question. And when is she consenting? When is it just another exposure or malicious act where you’re taking something that should be more connective and beautiful – like, making love – and then it’s also kind of being villainized and hurt and used as a weapon against you? 

CB: Exactly, yeah. Consent is, like, a huge theme here that comes up over and over again in different ways with some of the Venus retrogrades in Scorpio. And then also as we were talking about that she’d had this one thing ripped away from her – her ability to skate – and that was her primary profession and career. And not even being able to coach is, like, crazy after that. So I can imagine for many years her struggling to figure out how to make money and how to support herself and how to pay back restitution and things that she owed and other things like that and just being in a pretty rough position. 

SB: Yeah, I think she became a boxer. Like, a professional fighter at some point too. And so just kind of even going back into that gamifying and making a spectacle or some sort of performance of the fight is, I feel like, also a bit more Venus Scorpio coded. 

CB: Totally, yeah. And then later, though, I saw – like after the movie came out – I saw Nancy Kerrigan doing interviews and being like, hey, I’m the victim. I was the one that was actually attacked. And then that discussion coming up again as well of, like, who is the victim, and when a perpetrator is humanized, but like, what is the boundary between that and just some of those interesting questions that come up again in this instance very vividly right there. 

SB: Yeah, because even though Nancy was the victim, in this story – like, I, Tonya – it was kind of like, well, she was fine. Like, her hardships weren’t like my hardships, and that’s kind of what happens when we put the villain in charge of telling the story. You know, your sympathies change, and I think that’s a retrograde of where your sympathies can change with that perspective shift. 

CB: That’s a really good point. Yeah, changing sympathies and changing perspectives on people during the course of a Venus retrograde is very common. 

SB: Yeah, exactly. 

CB: All right, I think that’s good for that one, yeah? 

SB: Mm-hmm! 

CB: Okay. So moving on. Another one that’s in, like, a true crime vein or area is the chart of Natalee Holloway who was a famous – a young woman who disappeared and was murdered while she was traveling away in another country on vacation. And it became this huge in the late 2000s media criminal case, basically, and a whole media spectacle. It became one of the first big missing persons cases that was treated like a sort of media circus in some sense when she disappeared. 

So she was born October 21st, 1986, at 2:41 PM in Memphis, Tennessee, with Aquarius rising and Mars right there on the Ascendant in a day chart, and she has Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the 10th whole sign house. And it was a really tragic case, basically, because she was away on this trip. She has the ruler – like, Venus itself is ruling the 4th house of home and living situation and the 9th house of foreign travel, and it’s in the 10th. And she’s basically murdered by this guy while she’s traveling in a foreign country. But her disappearance in 2005 became one of the most intensely publicized and heavily covered missing person cases in the modern era, basically, and in the past few decades. And she ended up being, it’s believed, because he later finally admitted it, murdered by a man named Joran van der Sloot. But he famously kept getting away with it for years, and they couldn’t pin the murder on him. But then he later ended up, like, killing other people basically and going down for those murders. And it was only recently – I think in like, 2023 – that he finally confessed to her murder like, 18 years later. But it was, yeah, a really tragic and sad case. 

SB: Super tragic. I mean, yeah, you already pointed out the Venus rules the 9th and the 4th, and I think just like, in the Venus retrograde process, she disappears. Venus disappears from the sky, and also kind of living out that archetype of this missing woman and even just the Sun in the 9th being in this foreign place and conjunct the South Node that rules the 7th house. And like, this partner is hard to pin down in this story, which makes the story so loud. But yeah, just really putting this almost true crime story into the public news of kind of like, one of the first big cases like this. 

CB: Yeah, exactly. And one of the reasons I thought it was important because I learned in the episode I did last month that one of the first big cases like that – I think in the 1930s – the Black Dahlia case happened under a Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And it was one of the first big cases like that, of a murder and a mystery surrounding that. And it becoming, like, sensationalized in the media basically, which is part of what ended up happening with the Natalee Holloway case. 

SB: Yeah. Very tragic. 

CB: Okay. So the next one just to mention brielfy is the chart of Oscar Pistorius, and this is supposed to be an accurate time but I’m not sure if it’s true. But just with the birth date, it’s October 22nd, 1986. He may have Aquarius rising like Natalee Holloway did, but Venus is retrograde in Scorpio at five degrees just three days away from stationing. It’s conjunct Pluto. And then Mercury and the Sun are also in Scorpio. And he was a famous athlete who was known as the Blade Runner because he had a condition where he didn’t have – he was missing his legs, and so he used, like, blades that were attached to his legs and became a runner. Like, not just in the Paralympics, but also started competing in major runs and became a really prominent athlete. But then he had this incident where he shot and killed his girlfriend, basically, and then went to prison. And he claimed and maintained that he woke up in the middle of the night and he thought there was an intruder and then shot for some reason into his bathroom, which ended up killing his girlfriend accidentally. But the police and the authorities believed that they had a fight, basically, and that she was hiding in the bathroom and that he shot her through the door and she ended up dying. So he ended up going to prison for it, and it was this really tragic case of somebody that was really prominent and had a promising career as an athlete but then, yeah, had a downfall as a result of this incident or this potentially toxic relationship. 

SB: Yeah. It’s just the publicization of it and just, like, being in the 10th and kind of ruling the 4th, but it being an incident that happened at the home. But yeah, just kind of very sad parallels to the previous case. 

CB: Yeah, exactly. So moving on, I wanted to end this section with a more positive example, not just of like, criminal cases but also themes of justice. And I found another Venus in Scorpio one conjunct Jupiter, which is the Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson who was born with Venus at six degrees of Scorpio conjunct Jupiter in Scorpio and copresent with Neptune on September 14th, 1970. And this was about a month after – or I’m sorry, it’s a month before, because it’s September, so it’s earlier in the Venus retrograde. It’s a month before Venus would station retrograde in Scorpio. But it’s still tied in with that cycle, so this is like, a direct and more positive version of that and an inversion of that where it’s somebody who’s fighting for justice, basically, even on the margins of things where she’s often known over the past few years after becoming the first Black woman who’s a Supreme Court justice, she’s often writing the dissenting opinions because it’s an overwhelmingly conservative court at this case. So she’s often the one voicing strongly the dissenting opinion against many of these cases that have been coming through the Supreme Court. And in that way, we see some of those themes coming up of, like, marginality and things like that and being able to critique those things even when you’re not in the majority.

SB: Yeah. Just with even that Mars with Mercury in Virgo. It’s like, writing dissenting opinion for the marginalized Venusian exile person. 

CB: Yeah, exactly. And it’s like, I looked at her secondary progressions, because one of the things that’s like, you know if a person’s born before the retrograde, then it means at some point by secondary progression their Venus will turn retrograde and this happened for her in this period around, like, 2004, 2005, 2006. And it seemed like she was making this really important turning point in her career, especially when she did a stint as a federal public defender. She became an assistant federal public defender in Washington, D.C., and then this ended up being really important in terms of her confirmation eventually as a Supreme Court justice – the fact that she had worked as a public defender at some point with some really important cases. And she had also done some really important work in terms of like, sentencing and trying to institute more fair rules for sentences rather than the existing rules which were extreme or unnecessary in some cases. 

SB: Yeah. Like being able to kind of come in and critique and say, like, hey, this isn’t right and come in from the other way. 

CB: Right, exactly. Yeah. So that’s a more positive case in terms of seeing that dynamic that we keep going back and forth in, which is like, sometimes we have extremely challenging cases, and other times we have extremely positive cases. And the same underlying themes are present in both, but it’s a matter sometimes of how the person chooses to actualize those themes and whether they choose to do it in a constructive or a problematic or destructive way. And obviously, that comes down to other factors like, you know, how a person is raised, the environment in which they’re raised in, but then also it has to do with choices they make at the same time. 

SB: Exactly. Exactly. Thank you for, like, ending on a more positive one. I think that was needed. 

CB: Yeah, as like, a palate cleanser to balance things out. Because it’s like, we don’t want to give the wrong impression – like, the point I think you and I both talked about a lot before this is just wanting to give the full spectrum of different possible manifestations to really understand the different possibilities. 

SB: Yeah, especially if you like, read the ancient texts. You know, they’re not necessarily giving the most lenient – they’re pretty harsh in some delineations, so I think it’s cool that we can come in and say, like, yes and it can be a little bit more – it can be used positively too in someone’s life. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and that was something I was met with with this research is just, like, seeing like, oh, okay – sometimes some really challenging stuff does come up because you’re doubling up on both detriment as well as retrograde, which are two traditionally challenging things. And so it’s like, we have to acknowledge that and be cognizant of that possibility of more negative manifestations happening. But then also the reality of, you know, perfectly normal people living – having those placements and doing good or in some instances even really admirable things like in this instance. 

SB: Yeah, mitigations exist. 

CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, let’s move onto the next section. I wanted to talk a little bit about music and some musicians that have Venus retrograde in Scorpio just to give people a little taste of some of the themes that come up. And the first example you had was of Halsey, right? 

SB: Yeah, I think Halsey has this Venus retrograde in her – or it’s 14 days before the retrograde. But she has it in her first house, so it’s very loud. She even in her appearance, you know, she’ll often have these wild hair colors of blue and pink and uses she/they pronouns, often breaking gender norms, being both bisexual, bipolar, and biracial, which I think a lot of people don’t realize. And that even just in her own identity feeling certain level of otherness because not necessarily presenting as Black because she’s so white passing. So not being able to fully identify in the Black community, but also not quite being a fully white person either. So just kind of also speaking to that, you know, and we’ll see that a little bit more in Drake, too, but just that otherness in identity and kind of embodying these themes and also with her some of the music that she makes is just so loud, with one of her top songs being “Bad At Love.” So very much kind of speaking to these forces. And even with understanding how much of it shows up in her identity and her name is, like, originally is Ashley, and Halsey came from being the name of the street that she would visit with her boyfriend who was 24 when she was 17, and so – in Brooklyn – and that was like, somewhat of a toxic relationship as well and kind of cementing that into her identity and kind of constantly in her music exploring themes of as we said struggle love, of kind of these abusive relationships that don’t go as easy and are definitely hard. 

CB: Right. That’s incredible. That’s so literal. Like, having her first top five hit be literally titled “Bad At Love.” 

SB: Yeah. And having that, you know, even her scandals of her partner cheating on her being kind of also speaking out very loudly, because when G-Eazy cheated on her, she came back on SNL and had the stage covered with “Ashley, I cheated” and then all of the places he cheated on her onstage and kind of putting that as a very big, you know, that difficulty in relationships being very front and center to her identity and how she knows of herself. 

CB: Wow. That’s incredible. And you found a really striking repetition in the 2018 retrograde, right? 

SB: Yeah. Her song “Without Me” that came out on October 4th, 2018, that was the day before Venus stationed retrograde, and it was her first solo number one single that hit the US Billboard Hot 100. So that retrograde recurrence, like, became a huge turning point for her in her career. 

CB: That’s so incredible. Like, that’s such a great example of that principle. It’s like, if you were born with or near the Venus retrograde, when it repeats important stuff happens. And it’s like, crazy to see Halsey have that happen, being born in 1994 under that retrograde or near it, and then having the repetition in 2019. But then it’s like, we saw Penn Badgley being born in the 1986 retrograde, and then he had that recur – the same one – in 2018 and have his big moment. And then it’s like, you have Jenna Ortega born in the 2002 Venus retrograde, and then have the repetition in 2018 be a turning point for her. It’s like, that principle is so striking, but when you see it zoomed out of all these different people having this one retrograde in let’s say 2018 be the crucial turning point for all of them, it’s just really, I don’t know, breathtaking. 

SB: No, a hundred percent. Especially since I think that, like, you know, a few of these folks have the Venus-Jupiter too. So kind of like, making it larger than life in some ways. I think that with Halsey specifically in her music, she just keeps playing it through her art and kind of dealing with these things of unhealthy relationships and addiction and also with her album If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, and that album cover – literally having her like, postpartum body sitting on a throne, being very, very literal with how it kind of plays out. And just how loud she can be about the cases she cares about, whether that be, you know, LGBT rights, and having to be able to speak as an advocate on, like, women’s bodies and women’s health because she ended up having a miscarriage and that kind of vulnerability being kind of thrown in her face because her struggles with getting pregnant and even having to have an abortion, and you know, being open about these causes and being an advocate for the women who don’t necessarily fit the conventional mold is also very, very loud in Halsey in everything she does. 

CB: Yeah. That’s really interesting about the motherhood piece as well as the, you know, pregnancy and miscarriage and that being a theme as well. 

SB: Yeah. It’s huge, but I didn’t want to spend too much time on these, but I just felt like those were some of the loudest pieces that we keep seeing with those just exploration of their, like, that struggle love, that difficulty, that prolonged hardship in the Venusian spheres being explored in art. 

CB: Definitely. All right, and then another really prominent one that’s not fully retrograde but it’s really close is Usher, who was born like, three days before a Venus retrograde, right? 

SB: Yeah. So Usher is a Virgo rising, and he has Venus in that 3rd house. And like, I think one of the things that kind of comes up with him is just being raised by that single mom, having to have very questionable close friends, which is another 3rd house signification. So like, one of the things that has been recent controversy is him doing his tour with Chris Brown and even at a young age being in technically somewhat custody with Diddy, who if we want to talk about a salacious figure with women where we are exploring those themes, I think Diddy would be a huge thing. And like, at his – when he just turned really young, around like, 13, he goes and goes to Puff labor camp and is living with Diddy and seeing all the debauchery at that young age. And it kind of being part of his formative years, and when he first – his first single, “Think of You” came out in 1994 around that retrograde, you know, some of the criticism was that it was almost too inappropriate for someone his age and how would he know about this stuff? But then you realize that he’s hanging out with Diddy, and it starts to make a little bit more sense. 

CB: Yeah. So his first album came out in August of 1994 when he’s only 15. And like, right after that, Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio as a recurrence. 

SB: Yeah. And so like, that being a major turning point for him and having to kind of one of his interesting things with Usher is that controversy doesn’t quite seem to stick to him. But it’s just being very close to him, and that close proximity in the 3rd house being very, very fascinating to see because he has had infidelity scandals in the past and he has had scandals of him knowingly giving women or exposing women to sexually transmitted diseases like herpes and being like, getting sued for that and having big payouts in some cases. And kind of like, those types of things don’t seem to stick to him, but you know, my guess is, like, maybe in this retrograde at this final Venus starpoint, maybe that’s gonna come. Not to say I don’t like Usher’s music; it’s very catchy and fun. But I think that that is a thing that we keep seeing with just the people in his orbit coming up. And so another way, like, Venus Scorpio retrograde can kind of recur for people in a different type of house section and knowing music and how you express yourself in that 3rd house and his music being, like, sexualized and kind of having certain themes. 

CB: Yeah. That was how, at least when I was growing up in the late ‘90s and 2000s, him having that Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the 3rd house and just being associated with R&B but also sort of more sexy type songs or things like that was sort of what he was known for. 

SB: Yeah. After somewhat of a kind of very messy divorce in the late 2000s, him having a where he kind of had this like, idea of this nice family, Black man, polished type of look, and then all his kind of like, sex affairs – not sex affairs, but you know, his problems with his wife and then kind of going outside the marriage when they were separated kind of becoming more public was another kind of big Venus retrograde. Because in the 2010 OMG tour, it was considered his comeback tour, like, coming back so kind of like emerging back to prominence from scandal. So I think that, yeah, just with Usher specifically, the people who he’s around, especially since he started his music career in a choir group that was an anti-drug singing group called New Beginnings and his mom kind of changing locations and forcing him out of that group was kind of needed for his career, but also just very hard because he was very connected to those close friends. So thinking about, like, kind of the people who he’s around and who’s he’s making this art with being a very big Usher point in his story. 

CB: Yeah, for sure. That makes sense. Okay, that’s pretty good, I think, or do you have anything else for that one? 

SB: No, I think that was about it. 

CB: All right. Let’s see. One that I was researching that came up in my files for an actual Venus retrograde was Eve, the famous rapper. She was really big when I was growing up in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, because she stood out especially as a woman rapper that was connected with DMX’s label. But she was born on November 10th, 1978, with Venus retrograde at 13 degrees of Scorpio conjunct Uranus at 16 Scorpio and the Sun at 17. And what I found was really cool was – well, I found a cool repetition, but that’s actually separate, so I’ll start with the other part, which is that she became the 3rd female hip hop artist to have her album peak at number one on the Billboard 200. So that just like, goes to show that she was an early trailblazer. But what was interesting is I was watching a biography – a biopic on her – well, biographical video, and it was just talking – she was talking about and there were some quotes about how she always felt like she was treated as an outsider in rap because she was a woman, which was a more male-dominated thing in the 1990s, especially when she’s coming up. And there was this amazing quote from her where she said, 

“I never wanted to just be good for a female. I always wanted to be a good MC period. And back then, it was always, ‘Oh, you’re good even for a female.’” 

So I thought that was really striking in terms of some of those feelings, again, of exile, of being an outsider, of coming in from the margins and then having to make a place for yourself but then sometimes when people do that, they pull it off successfully and are a trendsetter and they become the first or one of the first in something that eventually becomes more common. 

And the last thing is just I found an amazing repetition, and it was within the same year but it turns out that she won her first Grammy in 2002 for the song “Let Me Blow Ya Mind,” and that was the one that was featuring Gwen Stefani, so that’s 2002, which is the same year as a Venus retrograde in Scorpio. Again, it was earlier in the year, and the Venus retrograde in Scorpio would be later in the year, so I don’t know what’s up with that and why we keep seeing the year come up even when it’s not within the retrograde itself. But get this – 2026, earlier this year, she just received her second Grammy of her entire career earlier in January of 2026. But it was actually a long overdue correction by the Recording Academy where they gave her a Grammy retroactively for an uncredited verse on The Roots’ ‘99 classic “You Got Me.” So she was, like, uncredited in that song originally, so they didn’t give it to her. But then she made this amazing statement in her acceptance speech where she said, 

“What is yours can never miss you, even 30 years later.” 

I just thought that was such an amazing quote and another example of that idea of retrograde and sometimes there being something about a delay in terms of a person’s career or a delay in terms of the manifestation, which we kind of saw with Demi Moore only recently getting a Golden Globe as her first award after, like, a long and successful career. And then in this instance, like, a retroactive award from something she did back in 1999. 

SB: Yeah, that was striking. Striking. 

CB: The only other thing – oh yeah, the other thing I meant to mention was her first hit, I think, was “Love is Blind,” and that song was actually about her young friend who was engaged in an abusive relationship with an older man. And that song went to number one. But originally, she wrote it when she was 16 years old, and she’s like, seeing her friend in this terribly, terribly abusive relationship with this guy. And so 16, of course, would be a Venus retrograde repetition in Scorpio. That means she would have been witnessing that and would have originally written that song in the form of a poem when she was having in the year of a Venus retrograde in Scorpio. 

So that was really striking, and then the only other thing was she ended up on the same label as DMX, who ironically was born eight years before her on December 18th, 1970, with Venus direct in Scorpio 17 days post-station. So just another one of those instances sometimes of, like, Venus retrograde in Scorpio people being drawn together. 

SB: Yeah. They flock. There’s clusters. 

CB: Yeah, exactly. Okay, I think that’s all I got for her. All right, so our last musician is Drake, right? 

SB: Yeah. Drake, the lover boy himself. 

CB: Yeah. The lover boy himself. So Drake was born October 24th, 1986, at reportedly 2:31 AM in Toronto with Leo rising and Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the 4th whole sign house along with the Sun and Pluto and the IC and Mercury. So he has a packed 4th house with the Venus retrograde in Scorpio. 

SB: Yeah. I think for Drake, I think one of the things that I found so striking about him was just the fact that so much of his trauma or feeling like an exile similar to Halsey, but it’s also like, part of his identity of his father being half Black, half white, and then kind of having a Black father but being raised by more of like, his white mom and then feeling kind of separation from the community and getting kind of not humiliated but very joked on that he’s less of a man in certain toxic racist kind of type of things and that trope in regard and having that kind of being part of his core wound being about his family upbringing and his ancestry and how even though it’s such a private placement, it’s still showing so loudly, especially ruling his 10th house. 

CB: Yeah, that’s a really great point, because then of course that would famously when he’d get in these famous disputes and drama with people and with other rappers publicly, that would be what they would often invoke. Like Pusha T showing that picture he did in blackface, for example, on that one single years later. Or even like Kendrick and the big song, the one that ended the entire dispute being “Not Like Us” and the whole thesis of that was, yeah, like, Drake being an outsider and coming in and exploiting hip hop and different aspects of Black culture. 

SB: Yeah, and Drake just being so stealthy in that way of starting the song “Meet the Grahams” with “Dear Adonis,” like going for his son and his family life and speaking directly and say it’s like, “Dear Adonis, I’m sorry that man is your father.” Which is just going straight to that point of whatever daddy issues that Drake has and then going to kind of speaking over him to his own son. So definitely is a known wound for him. 

CB: Yeah. And even I always thought of Drake’s example, that Venus retrograde in Scorpio in the 4th house, very literally – that like, on the cover of Not Like Us is a picture of Drake’s home, which is this very elaborate mansion which is like, very important to him, this custom built, very opulent mansion. But Kendrick inverted that and he put this Google Maps picture of Drake’s home on the cover of this all-time legendary diss track, and he put that image of sexual predator pins all over the house basically, implying Drake and the people associated with him were predators famously. 

SB: Yeah. Like saying that Drake has predatory relationships, which is a very Venus Scorpio thing. And like, even to think – I don’t think Drake is like, Ted Bundy, but just kind of having one of his common critiques is that he can feel kind of fake at points and like, wearing a mask and not being very real in certain ways by his critics. So I think that kind of what we were speaking to, like with Ted Bundy, and him wearing a mask and not being really forthright can also be seen a little bit with Drake. Not to the same extent, of course. 

CB: Right, yeah. But at least, like, accusations from critics of behavior like that at the very least. And even backing up, like, before – because so much of his public persona has become dominated by those two disputes over the past decade with, yeah, those two disputes. But like, before that, there was this era of his sort of dominance as a musician and rapper in the early to mid-2010s with this, like you said at the beginning, the lover boy persona of in his rap extreme emotional transparency, but kind of centering his music about public confessions of heartbreak and jealousy and romantic insecurity and things like that. So that that was more of the persona that he developed in both positive and eventually negative ways by the mid-2010s. 

SB: Yeah. And again, with that ruling his 10th house just kind of being known for that, like almost saying the quiet parts out loud. I think on his – and then even just thinking about how that vulnerability may be a mask for certain toxic masculinity because he has attacked women. Like, you know, Megan Thee Stallion he said like, some disparaging remarks and they’re just very consistent frustrations that people feel with him not taking that vulnerability as genuine as he may like to play it as. 

CB: Right. And then I noticed a repetition where in 2010, his very first Billboard number one hit was with Rihanna and her track “What’s My Name,” and the video for that was released November 12th, 2010. And that’s like, right in the middle of a Venus retrograde in Scorpio repetition, and that kind of launched his lover boy persona from that point forward. 

SB: Yeah. Like, just another huge turning point. 

CB: Yeah. And then 2018 was the feud with Pusha T culminated with the revelation about a hidden child being exposed that Drake had, but that was earlier in the year. But then also in the same year, like a month later, Drake released the album Scorpion in June, which is interesting because it was acknowledging his Scorpio Sun sign and traits, which he must resonate with, having such a large Scorpio stellium and naming his album that. But what’s interesting is we noticed that Eve also had an album named Scorpion from 2001 also again resonating with her Scorpio stellium. 

SB: Yeah. I think my hot take is that Scorpios represent their sign like as loudly as Leos do, you know? 

CB: Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think especially if you have, like, a big stellium. Like, it makes it – I think they resonate with it very strongly or tend to. 

SB: Yeah, absolutely. I think that also with his just lover boy persona, you can see it with some of his music kind of being in his So Far Gone mix tape, there’s this one line where he’s like, “Are we becoming the men that our mothers divorced?” So kind of like, again, speaking to that core wound of his and really exemplifying that in his work. 

CB: Nice. That’s really good. Okay, I think that’s good. Is there anything else you wanted to say about Drake or anything that we missed? 

SB: I don’t think so. I think that very much covers him and the artist music in that way. 

CB: Okay, cool. Yeah. I’m sure there’s like, a million other things that could be said or like, other deeper analysis. But that’s probably good for the music section just to give people an idea of the different sort of spectrum of different experiences. 

SB: Yeah. 

CB: Okay. So let’s move to our final section. We are in the home stretch of the last four examples, four or five examples you wanted to talk about. So the next section is a sort of mixed one of two different ones, but it’s sort of themes of, like, struggle love and also returning home as recurring themes that we saw come up, right? 

SB: Yeah. I think that with when you think of like, a Venus Scorpio love story with that Mars being separating and then people trying to come together, I think we saw this with Marina Abramovic and how she kind of made that distance to say goodbye to her lover and being like that separated feeling. So I think with these examples, you can also start to see, like, in these love stories to where there’s a separation, and that struggle love of kind of having to endure to get to it. 

CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And also, you know, Venus in Scorpio being away from home in the sign opposite to its domicile. 

SB: Yeah, trying to return to the love, return home to the love. 

CB: Right. All right, so the first one is the actor that you found, Cary Elwes, right? 

SB: Yeah, so he has Venus retrograde in Scorpio. No time, but he is an English actor, and actually my friend Ames Doyle the astrologer pointed out The Princess Bride and how he plays one of the main characters, Westley, in that film very, very Scorpio, devotional type of energy with the “As you wish” type of trope and kind of how much he has to endure to return back to his lover. And I think even with that film of The Princess Bride because I watched it for this episode, just like you watched You, we both had our homework. 

CB: Right. 

SB: But I thought it was just, you know, there’s this point where they’re in this scary forest and there’s giant rodents and fire and quicksand and this very scary hard place, but these two characters are falling back into love. And I feel like that’s a very like, they’re returning to each other, and they’re having this love story, but in this place that is so dangerous and dark and scary. And I think even though that movie is so campy and fun, I thought that really showed the Venus retrograde in Scorpio trope as a love story. 

CB: Totally. That’s incredible. Yeah, because that entire movie is about true love and the concept of true love, and then they get separated but then he comes back into her life, but he’s like, a pirate now, and he’s been trained in fighting and poisons and all these other things – like, villainous type things – but then he comes back to find her and to save her. And yeah, that’s pretty amazing. 

SB: Yeah. The other major film that Cary was in the first Saw movie in 2004. And talk about, you know, with Venus being somewhat like law and judgment and this character Jigsaw, like, putting his rules in such a bloody, visceral way. And then I think the recurrence that happened that was really interesting was that he returned to the franchise in 2010 that was released in October 29th, 2010. So that kind of like, having him return to this bigger role. Oh, and The Princess Bride was kind of filmed in the entirety of the 1986 Venus retrograde too. So kind of like — 

CB: That’s incredible. 

SB: — again, yeah! Right? Another person who very much embodies this and has these big turning points for their career in the Venus retrogrades that happen after. Especially the Scorpio ones. 

CB: Yeah, that’s incredible. I think that’s good advice, then. It’s like, if you’re an actor and you’re doing a new role and – because none of the actor – not none, I shouldn’t say, but I’m often – it’s interesting sometimes to hear actors do interviews about movies where sometimes they’ll do a movie and not really think it’s gonna be a hit, but then they’re really surprised that it’s a hit. Like, I don’t know, there’s different versions of that. But like, if you’re an actor and you’re not really sure if a film’s gonna be a hit and if you had Venus retrograde in Scorpio and then you start filming something during Venus retrograde in Scorpio, there’s a pretty good chance that that might be an important career-defining movie for you, which it turned out to be for him. 

SB: Yeah. Because things just like, are aligning back into your chart in a way that just kind of clicks. And that becomes really, really cool. I think the only other thing that I wanted to add with him was just the fact that his parents divorced when he was four, and in 1975 when he was 13 his father died by suicide. And so just another, like, kind of making the mother more prominent in that way. 

CB: Got it. Okay. Yeah, because then he’s raised by her, largely on her own. 

SB: Yeah. Exactly. But another very interesting person who kind of keeps playing out these themes that we see. 

CB: Yeah. Exactly. That’s brilliant. All right. And then another one you found is Rachel McAdams, right? 

SB: Yeah. I mean, if Drake is the lover boy, then Rachel McAdams is the mean girl, because she is one of her top films is being the mean girl in Mean Girls, Regina George, which is truly iconic. We don’t have a timed chart for her, but born around that Venus retrograde and just thinking one, another thing that she kind of falls in line for is that she’s another ice princess, which is again, like, Tonya Harding. If we think of like, an ice princess of Venus being princess and ice being kind of Scorpionic with that fixed water. But in her roles, I think, one – Mean Girls kind of broke the norm of these girls kind of using manipulation and control to control the school. She played that role so, so well. And I think that again, in this kind of Venus retrograde way in her films, the other films, like when she is in a love story like The Notebook, which is so iconic, we see that distance from lovers. Like, between her and Ryan Gosling’s character. The Notebook is basically about she’s a rich girl, he’s a poor guy; he woos her, and even the way he woos her is like, he decides he goes on this ferris wheel and he hangs one arm and says like, “Will you go out with me?” And she’s afraid of him dying, which again, can be seen as very toxic. And then having even on their first date, because he’s very persistent, they lie in the street together and it’s like, “What if we die?” And it’s just like, still kind of adding this like, life and death kind of figure, but in this very romanticized way. And then their parents separate them, and he writes for her for, like, 365 letters like every day for a year. And her mom becomes this blocker, and only seven years later do they return to each other. And I think that kind of like, again, these two lovers, similar to The Princess Bride, it just like has this separation, and they’re kind of like, for this whole movie trying to fight to get back together. And when they are together, there is this, like, fighting conflict energy where it’s like, “I love you, I hate you, I love you, I hate you,” type of thing. 

CB: Nice. Yeah, that makes so much sense. 

SB: And I think that even with the film, like, it’s told from he’s trying to remember her because – spoiler alert – she has dementia, and he’s reading to her the notebook that he made so she would remember who he was. And it’s kind of like, you know, how emotionally dedicated they are to each other and the fact that they die in each other’s arms at the end of the film. And you know, in that film also, like, Rachel McAdams cheats on her fiance for him, like returns back to the lover, there’s this big classic scene where it’s like, “What do you want? Tell me what you want!” And she’s like, “I don’t know!” Which is a very, like, Venus retrograde experience. Like, what do I want? So —

CB: Yeah. 

SB: Yeah, I think that movie is a classic good Venus retrograde film. 

CB: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s one of the most legendary romantic films of my era of the 2000s era. 

SB: Yeah. And like, even the fact that there was like, an internal love story too, because there was a point where Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams end up dating each other. And they didn’t get along at a certain point and they were fighting, and Ryan Gosling even asked for a replacement and said, like, “Do I have to work with her?” even though their chemistry read was good and kind of starting off with that conflict and then kind of going to a better place, I thought, was really really funny with The Notebook element. 

CB: Nice. That’s really good. Well, that’s good that he was early enough in his career that he couldn’t, like, I don’t know, make that happen or something like that, and that’s a good example of, yeah, sometimes tensions being productive or turning into something better or something positive. 

SB: Yeah. I think that it ended up being such a classic, and she kind of embodies that role so, so well. And I think even in the other roles that she embodies, like The Vow, which is a couple based off a true story who like, gets into this car accident and then she ends up losing her memory and forgetting him and the movie’s like, trying to get back their relationship after she lost her memories and just like, another thing of these two people – like, the love being separated and trying to go the distance and endure to get back together, which feels like, again, very Venus retrograde Scorpio love story. 

CB: Yeah, that’s incredible, especially just with her Venus being just like, 10 days before stationing retrograde. So it’s so prominent there being that stationary. 

SB: Yeah. And just like, so so loud. And I think that even in the films where it’s not as loud, like, you can even see it in the titles. Like, another film she is known for is like, Wedding Crashers, and it’s like, to crash a wedding is just like that Mars thing with the Venus thing coming together, which is again hilarious. 

CB: Totally. Yeah, even just like, the Venus retrogrades literally bookend her career because it’s like, 2002 is her first debut Hollywood film in The Hot Chick, and 2002 of course is a Venus retrograde in Scorpio year. And then in 2026, she’s honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame just earlier this year, again in another Venus retrograde in Scorpio year. So it’s like, you can’t make that up. 

SB: Yeah! And even in The Hot Chick, she’s subverting gender because that movie – she’s gone for most of it because she just turns into this old man. Not old man, but like, an older man instead of a young teenage girl, and so — 

CB: Okay. 

SB: — just even thinking of that, like, gender-bending nature of the Venus in Scorpio and the Mars-Venus of it all is just hilarious. And yeah, even also just thinking of the switches with things not necessarily going as they seem at first, but Rachel McAdams was supposed to be Lindsay Lohan’s character and Lindsay Lohan was supposed to be Rachel McAdams’ character in Mean Girls. So they ended up switching and not going with the original plan, again, because of things don’t tend to be very straightforward with these types of placements. 

CB: Nice. That’s really cool. 

SB: Yeah.

CB: Do you have — 

SB: No, I think that’s the last thing. I think the only other funny thing is that she’s like, in this movie Send Help that came out this year. And it’s just like, she has a lot of female rage for being overlooked and sexist coworkers, so that’s another movie where she’s playing out. And I think the other fascinating thing is that she kind of disappeared for a little bit in her career. Like, she went on this really kind of big hiatus, and that was after being asked to, like, strip for a photoshoot. And another way where, like, part of Inanna’s story is stripping down and disappearing. So the fact like, when she said no to that and she disappeared and that was even part of her story is just another Venus retrograde Scorpio theme for this person, who we don’t even have a time for, but we don’t have like, an accurate time for, but still is very, very loud. 

CB: Yeah. That is really loud in a bunch of different ways. 

SB: Yeah. And fun. Like, more fun, funny, fun ways. 

CB: Yeah, especially just like, even just being in The Notebook alone, if you’d told anybody she was in The Notebook and she has Venus stationary in Scorpio, like that in and of itself is just like, okay, say no more! 

SB: They can’t get over each other. They can’t move forward. They can’t have any new relationships. 

CB: No. It’s that staying power. The Scorpios, they got that staying power. 

SB: Exactly. 

CB: Yeah. All right, let’s move onto our last couple of examples. And this one’s interesting, because this is a combined couple of examples of Venus – the first one’s Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and the next one is next to it, which is direct in Scorpio, which is Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington both were born within a couple months of each other around the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in late 1986. So let me share Emilia’s chart. And they’re really well known over the past decade for being the lead characters in Game of Thrones, basically. 

SB: Yeah. Another Game of Thrones actor with Venus in Scorpio. 

CB: Right. So Emilia Clarke was born October 23rd, 1986, and her Venus is retrograde in Scorpio. We don’t have a birth time. But it’s conjunct Mercury in Scorpio and copresent with Pluto. And then interestingly – and she played Daenerys famously in Game of Thrones. So she was born eight days after Venus stationed retrograde, but then what’s interesting is then if you look at the other lead actor, Kit Harington, he was born just a couple of months later on December 26th, 1986, with Venus in Scorpio now direct post-retrograde, and Pluto in Scorpio and possibly the Moon in Scorpio – it could be in Scorpio or Libra – but look at the degrees. Venus in his chart is at 19 degrees of Scorpio direct. Look at hers. Her Venus is 19 degrees of Scorpio retrograde. So it’s like, she’s born at the beginning of the Venus retrograde with Venus at 19 degrees, and then literally the guy that plays her love interest years later when they both grow up has Venus at the exact same degree but now direct post-retrograde, which is just like, mind-bogglingly striking and amazing. 

SB: Yeah. It’s like they’re coming together at this – to this story at the same point. 

CB: Yeah. So that’s amazing. And then there’s even – it’s actually even more interesting in terms of the timing, because so the original pilot for Game of Thrones was famously shot in October and November of 2009. But it was like, a weird situation because the pilot did not go well. It was like, reportedly really terrible, and HBO made this really bizarre and unprecedented decision to scrap like, 90 percent of the pilot and to have them reshoot the pilot, which they did. And then that was more successful. So then they ordered the entire series, and HBO officially picks up the series in March of 2010, and then from July until December, they shot the principle photography for season one of Game of Thrones. So that means that the first season of Game of Thrones was, like, still shooting and eventually wrapped up shooting that first season all during the later part of 2010 when Venus went retrograde in Scorpio again, thus activating the natal placements of the two lead – what ended up being the two lead – characters, which is Emilia and Kit, or in other words, Daenerys and Jon Snow, who we didn’t really know fully were the main characters, at least with Jon at the time. But with Daenerys – you know, Daenerys is the one that’s the most interesting. And spoiler warning, because like, I’m gonna talk about some spoilers for Game of Thrones if you haven’t seen it, then don’t listen to this segment. Just skip it entirely because we’re gonna ruin it. We have to ruin it in order to talk about it. But you know, Emilia and Daenerys are the really interesting ones, especially in this instance, because she’s the one with Venus retrograde. And what’s so fascinating about that, watching the series, is like, it’s that archetype we’ve been talking about all along where Daenerys is built up where we see her backstory where she starts out as this mistreated female character, but who slowly during the course of the series sort of rises from absolutely nothing to being this really strong and powerful woman who eventually becomes the Mother of Dragons. And her whole goal is, like, Inanna trying to regain her kingdom which has been lost in some ways. And from the viewer’s perspective, because of that and seeing her entire backstory, we’re like, rooting for her for most of the series. And it’s not until later that we start to realize that we might be seeing the origin story of the bad guy, arguably, which eventually at the end it culminates that she turns into and then she’s eventually murdered by her lover, Jon Snow/Kit Harington. But it’s like, I remember watching, and it wasn’t until at some point in season three where I realized what they were doing. Because we think that Daenerys is like, the protagonist. But then at one point, she’s marching out of a city having just murdered all of the slavers, which was like, justified, and we’re sort of rooting for her. But then she’s like, marching with an army of soldiers and has three dragons, and I’m like, “Wait a minute, are they building up the origin story of a villain here, like, very subtly?” And then that turned out to be the case, I think, right? 

SB: Yeah. You caught it a lot faster than I did. When she started burning the city, I was like, “Oh no!” And that’s a lot later —

CB: Oh, that was the point like – yeah, at the very end when she starts torching – because she starts, like, she burns an entire city of civilians at the end, and that’s the point at which she’s gone crazy, which ironically she’s pushed towards because she – they built up the love story between her and Jon Snow. But then late in the series, we find out that they’re related and she’s actually his aunt. And when he finds out, he’s completely put off by that and turns cold towards her. And that becomes part of the thing that, like, leads her to become unstable and become crazy and then start torching the civilians in the city. 

SB: Yeah, and just like, seeing that female rage come up again. Seeing that kind of understanding of the victim and thinking in this time of Venus retrograde Scorpio just thinking of okay, this is our villain. Can we sympathize with the villain? Why are we villainizing? Or maybe was there something that pushed this person to it? And especially like, villainizing women and victimizing women I think kind of shows in that with her character just like, we’re actually watching a villain origin story. So yeah. Like, beautiful. 

CB: Yeah. Well, and so much so that early on, the series was so popular in the mid-2010s that a lot of women were naming their baby Khaleesi or naming their baby Daenerys. There was like, an uptick in a lot of babies named after this character because she really was, like, one of the protagonists of the show who was a strong female character. So it was interesting seeing the progression and sort of development of all that. 

SB: Yeah. And I think one of the criticisms of the show was just that it wasn’t very kind to women in the amount of sexual violence that women faced in the show and sexualization that women faced in the show, and just thinking about that again Scorpio and Venus and kind of oversexualizing and not being kind to women. And in the end, this character that we were all kind of rooting for, the show ends up not being kind to her ending. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I didn’t – and that was one of the things that kind of ruined, I don’t want to say ruined, but was – like, the last season or two seasons and especially the last season were not received well and are usually viewed negatively because they kind of rushed the ending. And there was, like, an arc with her character, but then they seemed like they just accelerated it and then they were just, like, okay, and then she freaks out and burns the entire city. But there wasn’t as much development as there should have been in getting to that ultimate conclusion where there was probably a better version of that they could have done, but for some reason they kind of like, condensed those final couple seasons. 

SB: Yeah. Unfortunately. 

CB: Yeah. So in terms of the final season, the final season actually wrapped filming in July of 2018. And HBO released a retrospective video that confirmed the premiere date of the final season in November of 2018. So basically, it’s like, in terms of repetitions for both of them, the first season finished filming during the Venus retrograde in 2010. And then they basically had just finished filming and were doing post-production during the Venus retrograde in 2018, like, eight years later. 

SB: Yeah. Just ringing and how certain shows flock the characters with Venus Scorpio or Venus Scorpio retrograde and then the show itself has that theme as well of like, were you shooting the pilot? Having major turning points for the show on these retrogrades? And yeah. 

CB: Yeah, totally. And then ultimately in one of the final episodes, like, Jon killing her, basically, by stabbing her in order to stop her from whatever she was doing, and that being again talking about toxic relationship type themes. Like, there’s an interesting example of one. Although more positively and interestingly, Kit Harington got married earlier in 2018 in June of 2018, so ironically, he got married in the year in which Venus went retrograde in Scorpio. 

SB: Yeah. Knowing that can, like, still manifest positively even if there are certain themes that are retrospectively still harsh and again difficult, not the easiest, smoothest, straightforward type of love story when you’re dating your aunt. 

CB: Yeah. Yeah, in terms of dark themes and things like that. All right, well, that brings us to our final example where we had kind of a fun one with the last one, right, which is Matt Damon? 

SB: My man Matt Damon! He was actually hilarious. He was born 11 days before Venus stationed retrograde. And he, I think – when I was looking for, when I was originally writing the book of characters who kind of live out these Venus retrograde stories, I felt like he was such a good example because this Venus Scorpio trope was in his 10th house where it’s kind of almost hard for him to hide it. And he has five degrees Aquarius rising with Venus in the 10th house with his Midheaven, and it rules over his chart ruler in the 4th house in Taurus right next to his IC. So — 

CB: Yeah. 

SB: What I — 

CB: Go ahead.

SB: Yeah, what I found with him was just the fact that I feel like, you know, and you pointed this out too, which is like, he keeps playing the same meme over and over again with him always trying to return home in his films. And it’s just like — 

CB: Right. 

SB: — Matt Damon’s just a guy trying to get home! 

CB: Yeah. There was like, this whole internet meme about it this summer after The Odyssey came out that he’s just, like, constantly in roles like that. 

SB: Yeah. Like, The Odyssey came out 2026, The Martian where he’s literally stuck on Mars, Interstellar when he’s stuck on an ice planet. You know, you named like Gerry too where he’s hopelessly lost in the desert. Kind of just like, stuck in these inhospitable places, you know? 

CB: Yeah, like, literally. It’s so funny. When it was pointed out, it’s like everyone immediately thought back to all these iconic movies in which that’s absolutely true. Even like Dogma, which was really one of my favorite movies in the ‘90s, came out in 1999 and he plays a fallen angel that’s doing whatever it takes to return back home to Heaven. 

SB: So literal. 

CB: That was a pretty good one. Or like, Saving Private Ryan, like, literally the entire premise of that movie is they send a group of soldiers in order to get this one guy to locate him and to bring him back home, because all of his siblings died in the war, and so they want to return the one surviving sibling back to their mother, basically. 

SB: Yeah. And I think that is just knowing that it rules his – like, that Venus that’s about to retrograde and is ruling his 4th house of home and just knowing that he’s just constantly trying to return home. And you pointed out just like the exile nature of it ruling the 4th and the 9th as an Aquarius rising is just like, how loudly it shows up in his work, in his filmography, and I think that the other funny thing is just another – The Odyssey – another Venus Scorpio love story. Like, Anne Hathaway has Venus in Scorpio, and so does Matt Damon, but his is about to station retrograde. And two characters who are just enduring and trying to fight off – like, Anne Hathaway’s trying to fight off suitors. Matt Damon is literally fighting off monsters just to return back to each other, and that enduring love after years and years. So yeah, I think that was just like, really, really funny when I noticed that in Matt Damon’s chart. And like, even in a real life example with Good Will Hunting first sold under a Venus retrograde. And so what happened was he – you know, they were trying to sell this film. And they sold it to this production company, and they wanted to star in it themselves, not just write it. And they said, “Okay, you have to go find a new person to sell it to.” So kind of making that first deal kind of not work, and then having to kind of pitch themselves and find a new relationship. And one of the funny things was they like, put in a fake gay sex scene between the two main characters where they just to see if people would read it. So that even, like, queer story kind of coming in again and just how that underpinned and like, it wasn’t straightforward to his success. He actually had to like, rework a lot of things, Matt Damon, to even get to that Venus and that kind of speaks to that not straightforward nature of Venus retrogrades. 

CB: Yeah. It’s such a strong and like, prominent signature in his chart that it’s really funny how it worked out that way. Because like, he has Aquarius rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Saturn in the 4th house, which I always understood to be he’s really close to his mom. Like, his relationship with his mom who’s like, a teacher or something is really important to him. But it’s also the 4th house is also the home and living situation, and then it’s like, the ruler of the 4th house of home and living situation is also the ruler of the 9th house of travel. And it’s placed in the 10th house of career 11 days from stationing retrograde in the sign of its antithesis, but it’s also conjunct Jupiter in a day chart. So it’s like, showing success there in the career. But then he literally just plays it out by repeatedly playing different versions of this theme of being away from home and trying to get back. But even in some – there’s even some other movies of, like, I have some honorable mentions, for example. Like the Bourne Identity, for example, which came out in 2002, which is a Venus retrograde in Scorpio year. He wakes up as an amnesiac who’s constantly navigating foreign countries in Europe and crossing borders while desperately trying to remember and identify – come up with his true identity and his hidden past and things like that. And one of the characteristics about the entire Bourne series is just him traveling all around the world to all these different exotic locations, especially in Europe. Or in Elysium in 2013, earth has become this ruined slum, and all of the wealthy people have relocated to a space station. And he gets radiation poisoning and then he has to get to the space station in order to get health, to heal himself. Or even like, Talented Mr. Ripley is kind of an inversion because in that, he’s hired to be a rescuer, to get – this wealthy guy hires Matt Damon’s character to go get his son from Europe and bring him back home. But then Matt Damon’s character instead decides to – he becomes, like, romantically obsessed with the son, and he decides to murder him eventually after getting jealous and steal his identity. And then he does everything in his power to not have to go back home as a result of that. 

SB: Yeah. Yeah. That’s like, so hilarious. I think even with the Bourne Identity, just like, he’s trying to return to his right state of mind, you know? Like —

CB: Right. 

SB: — there’s always – he’s not where he’s supposed to be. And I think that’s like, Venus in Scorpio is like, you’re not – he’s like, “What are you doing over here? It feels very foreign.” And I think just in his filmography, and that’s like, the nice thing when it’s happening so visibly and loudly in someone’s chart is like, you can spot it really fast. 

CB: Yeah, totally. There’s just that element when, yeah, like we said, when a planet’s in detriment of being away from home because it’s literally the furthest from its domicile it can get. And in this instance, that’s very literally manifesting in these career roles that he chooses that he resonates with for some reason or finds himself doing. But then also we’ve seen other instances throughout this of other ways in which people can find themselves away from home or on the outside of things or marginalized or in a position of outside of whatever the norm or the normative position is, and critiquing or looking at things from the outside in that way. 

SB: Yeah, because when you’re an outsider, you can just have a different perspective from everyone. And like, Venus is very, like, you know, understand that difference of perspective, I think, is just really prominent in Venus retrogrades like, also personally in people’s lives you get this new perspective. 

CB: Yeah. And that’s such an important and critical role not just in society, but just in like, the world and in nature in general. And sometimes people, by looking at the norm from the outside, can ultimately change the world by having a different perspective because for the sake of the fact that it is different, and because it allows them to see the world in a unique and sometimes beautiful way, given their background. 

SB: Oh, a hundred percent. I feel like each of these examples we did were just so special and so delightful astrology good as you may say. Like, ooh, that’s just – that works! 

CB: Yeah. This was amazing. Thank you so much for doing this with me. This was a big episode. Both of us spent a lot of time researching it, but this was incredible, and I had so much fun not just researching this with you but also talking about this with you. And thanks for, yeah, we had a big task here to try to do, like, 20-something examples today, but we pulled it off, and I think we’ve learned a lot in the process about Venus retrograde in Scorpio. 

SB: Yeah. And just how it can show up so, so differently across the gambit and how, you know, you think you see it one way, and you’re like, oh, that lines up; that’s kind of funny. But when you – just this over and over and over again, it just kind of proves this resonance. So if anyone has these placements, you can probably start seeing these turning points and start understanding your life in this different way and how you may be even playing out these tropes in your life because they show up somehow. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. And hopefully, you know, we’ve shown the extremes as well as the spectrum. But hopefully that’s given people an idea of some of the different ways that it can manifest. I’m sure there’s lots of other ways that we didn’t get into. There’s a bunch of actually example charts that we found that we didn’t cover here; we just tried to pick out some of the best – the 20 best – examples. I’ll probably do, like, a separate episode for The Secret Astrology Podcast for patrons where I cover some other bonus examples of Venus retrograde in Scorpio that I didn’t get into here. But I think we’ve done a pretty good job of just showing how it can work out. And in your book, you dive deeper into the basic meaning of Venus retrograde in Scorpio and also help people to connect it relative to their rising sign, which I think is really important, and thinking about what house this Venus retrograde is happening in, and therefore what part of your life might it manifest in, I think, right? 

SB: Yeah, and really thinking about tangible ways you can actually work with it and think about it and journal about it, because especially with this one that we’re currently in, like, Mercury’s also gonna station retrograde. So having, like, journal prompts or things to ponder in your journal instead of crashing out very publicly, you can just write it in your journal and understand your story in a way where after the 40 days, you can be like, “okay! I have some thoughts that I can,” but you know. When you know what’s going on, it makes it a little bit easier. 

CB: Yeah. I like that. And that’ll be really applicable to other retrogrades too, because it’s like, I learned so much from the last two Venus retrogrades – first the one in Leo in 2023 and then the other one in Aries and Pisces. And a lot of that’s come in handy here, so I hope people can learn a lot from this Venus retrograde. They can learn a lot from your book and then apply that to other future ones if people are watching this in the future. 

SB: Yeah. I think that this just serves as an archive, especially with this being kind of like, almost – this being the last Venus starpoint in this time period. It’s almost like we’re coming in at the last point and being like, “Hello. This is it.” 

CB: Yeah, that’s crazy to think about, that this is the last time that Venus will conjoin the Sun while it’s retrograde and all future ones after this point will instead take place in Libra. So it’s like, something about Venus retrograde in Scorpio that the world has been experiencing either through events or through nativities over the past century is sort of like, locked into this point. But it also will become in retrospect once everything moves to Libra, like, this era in history that was very distinctive in some ways for some of these Scorpio themes. 

SB: Yeah. And these people kind of play it out loudly and show this time period of when this will happen that we won’t necessarily get again. 

CB: Yeah. And they contributed something to the world or they left an imprint or they pushed the world in a direction in different positive or negative or neutral ways that are distinctive and important as we move forward into history and as a society and everything else. So that’s really cool and really, really beautiful. 

SB: Yeah. I think so. 

CB: All right. Tell me more about your work. What’s your website? Do you do consultations and other things like that? 

SB: I do do consultations! My website is SkyeAstrology.com. You can buy the book; it is a physical version and an ebook version. I’m open for readings. I’m doing special Venus retrograde readings, so I kind of give people all the tools they need to understand their story. But if they, you know, want a helping hand – which is a very Venusian thing to, like, add another person to help understand their story and go on this journey – I’m there! We can work it out together. And yeah, I also do electional astrology reports and things like that, so yeah. Here for consultations and electional astrology and everything Venus retrograde, especially in Scorpio. 

CB: Awesome. Good. Yeah, well, people should definitely get the book and definitely having a consultation is good just in terms of having a guide sometimes as you’re going through this, especially like Inanna descent into the underworld sort of process. Sometimes that can be really useful to have a guide to help you understand and contextualize it in your life, because sometimes somebody that’s studied Venus retrograde a lot like you and I have can see things about how it’s working out in a person’s life objectively from the outside that sometimes it’s hard to see when you’re living inside of it. 

SB: Yeah, and then see how it plays into this bigger story, especially because this Venus retrograde kind of leads into this Mars retrograde we’re having at the beginning of the year. And so even when you understand, like, this is where I’m going to understand what I want, and then the Mars retrograde is like, how I’m gonna put my energy or change my energy to go what I just understood in the Scorpio area of my life. So it’s like, it all weaves into this bigger story that, you know, is nice to have someone who’s more objective to like, take you through. Especially because this one is a little bit more intense with the Pluto squares and stuff. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. 

All right, well, I think that’s it. Thank you so much for joining me today. This was a lot of fun. 

SB: It was so much fun! Now I understand The Astrology Podcast way! 

CB: Yeah, you’ve gone through the entire journey and the descent into the underworld of the inner workings of The Astrology Podcast and you’ve emerged on the other side, renewed and with much more wisdom and as the morning star Venus on the other side. 

SB: I feel fresh. 

CB: All right! Me not so much. I need to go lie down and take a nap. It’s been a long, long month. But this was great. Thank you so much for joining me, and let’s do it again some time. 

SB: Yes, please. Thank you for having me. 

CB: Cool. All right, thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.

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