The Honey Thief

On Venus Cazimi, the Solar Eclipse in Scorpio, and the Sweetness of Survival

Last week I opened an almost-full jar of raw honey before a bath, and after ladling some out for a face mask and licking the remainder from the spoon, the jar slipped out of my hands, hit the counter, and crashed onto my kitchen floor. There I was, naked, with the water running, and honey everywhere.

That’s what it feels like to live in the liminal space between today’s Venus Cazimi in the final degree of Libra (exact at 5:17 pm EST) and the Solar Eclipse at 2 degrees of Scorpio this coming Tuesday (exact at 6:49 am EST). It’s like getting one last ecstatic orgasm before your lover walks out the door forever. So much sweetness everywhere, but if you reach for it, you might get cut by broken glass.

I’ve been trying to write this post for days, in fact, and on at least two occasions I’ve worked outside, stalked by honeybees that I respect deeply and will not kill – but I’m also deathly afraid of their sting. The Venus archetype is loud, as is the Scorpio energy.  

The songs in my head the last few days are Echo and the Bunnymen’s Lips Like Sugar and Bjork’s State of Emergency as we move from Libra to Scorpio. Libra, ruled by Venus, is often mistakenly assumed (often by those with Libra planets) to be steeped in sensuality. But it’s less about what the body can do and feel, and more about capturing beauty – Libra is the Venus we freeze in bronze upon museum pedestals. It’s meant to be admired, less so to be touched. Taurus wants to roll around in the mud with us and lick the honey off our skin. This business might be too messy for Libra, and for Libra season. But as we dive into the waters of Scorpio and its Taurus shadow starting on Sunday, the dark, erotic underground beckons.

This past week the Times ran a story about the clitoris and the way the medical community has neglected it, or better said – pretended that it didn’t exist at all. Although the piece itself was problematic (one of the sources is a notoriously abusive figure who’s known for harassing sex educators) just seeing it there – the word “clitoris” in the paper of record, with a Georgia O’Keefe like image at the top of the page – made me suck in my breath. We’re getting somewhere even as we pause at the precipice of losing everything, I suppose.

For weeks I’ve wanted to write simply and specifically about pleasure in this space. About simple pleasures. About the pleasure of simplicity.

But as we enter what is arguably the most fraught, overwhelming, activating astrology of the entire year, this moment is frankly too complicated for me to keep it simple. One day soon I’ll share pleasure tools for pleasure’s sake, but for now, let’s dive into the rest of October’s hot mess of stars, with these current events in the background:

·      The killing of Mahsa Amini and revolution in Iran

·      Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine and the threat of nuclear war

·      The destruction of American democracy/the rise of global fascism

·      The end of bodily autonomy in America (and the beginning of it in Iran)  

·      Dangerous conspiracy theories amplified by autocrats

·      Christofascists targeting Jews, LGBT and BIPOC humans

·      Climate Change

·      Covid still out there, stalking us

·      Inflation and poverty

These urgent matters each call for much more than a bullet point. And yet as much as these issues may seem distinct, I’d argue that they’re all tied together by a singular thread of impending dread -- the outer bands of America’s Pluto Return. Pluto’s transit through the 2nd House of the USA (using the Sibley chart) continues to lash us like sharp sideways rainstorm pooling in a flood under our feet, one that was unleashed by an earthquake that also caused a tsunami. Relentlessness is the best way to describe what it feels like.

Unfortunately, we’re not anchored as we head into world-altering planetary ingresses in March of 2023. I often think about the fact that the Declaration of Independence was signed the last time Pluto was in Capricorn 246 years ago, but it moved into Aquarius in 1778, during the Revolutionary War, and the tumultuous years that followed. The Industrial Revolution began when Pluto was in Aquarius, and Mary Wollstonecraft wrote The Vindication of the Rights of Women.

I don’t know what that means for us now, but hope that we might be able to make it mean something good – using people power. We have tasted resistance to entrenched authority since Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008 – the Arab Spring, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, to the Iranian revolution happening right now. So there is some optimism for us, as a species, if we don’t fuck it all up in the next two weeks (looking at you, Putin, and at all the American insurrectionists vying for authoritarian power here.)

Eclipse season can sometimes feel like we’re in a weird time warp, like we’re moving in slow motion or someone hit our fast-forward button and lost the remote control. It can feel like we’re skipping from dimension to dimension without having dropped any acid. One of the gifts of an eclipse season like the one we’re entering now is that it really shows us that we’re not in control of much but the way we feel. That’s the essence of Scorpio – the trust wound. That sense of emotional vulnerability that makes us feel like we need to kill to protect ourselves or the people we love.

As scary as this sensation is, it’s a necessary lesson that can center us for better times. You can’t control when someone you love dies. You can’t control when a lover might leave you. You can’t control when you’ll be stalked by grief from a loss that happened a long time ago. But you can control how you respond, in the moment, to the echoes of trauma in your body.

Anxiety heightens during times like these, but we can learn to increase our vagal tone through deep breathing. If fear grips us we might remember that we can use orgasm as medicine to quell it, just for a moment. We’re already in the portal of a roiling cauldron of chaotic energy, with game-changing astrological events unfurling all around us.

During the previous Scorpio-Taurus eclipse season last spring, the Dobbs decision was leaked. As we plunge into the depths of this eclipse portal, the loss of Roe looms large and we have to literally save democracy in order to preserve our bodily autonomy. Eclipse portals always feel like some sort of state of emergency (I always think about triple-Scorpio Bjork during eclipse season) but I don’t remember one in living memory that felt like this, like we’re all standing on the edge of the world at the end of history.

With the Venus Cazimi at 29 degrees of Libra we also get a rare, world-shifting Venus Star Point. With Venus so loud right now, women’s bodies and our rights are front and center A cazimi happens, technically, when the Sun comes into a conjunction with a planet, and Venus cazimis happen several times a year. What’s so exceptional and rare about this one is that it falls on the anaretic degree of Libra – a karmic point. Saturn goes direct on Saturday as well, reminding us that the Saturn-Uranus square that gave us the January 6th insurrection is still very much in orb. Then on Sunday, Venus and the Sun enter Scorpio hand-in-hand, on the edge of obsession.

All of this, and I’m not even getting into the Lunar Eclipse in Taurus on November 8th – Election Day – visible over North America, where it will be felt most. I’ll cover that in depth in another post. But suffice it to say, this eclipse, one of the Saros series 136, happened near elections in 2004, 1986, and 1968, when ultra right-wing governments came into power in the US. Vote as if your life depends upon it, because it does. The state of emergency isn’t just a feeling this time.

A question I get asked often is “How are you handling it?”” and the answer changes with the cycle we’re in, but right now it’s about creating sacred rituals to honor my body, finding love even in the empty spaces, by forgiving ex-lovers, dancing, and doing my urban version of prepping, which involves having a game plan for my family, renewing my passport, making investments in my community and mutual aid (plus a lot of Luna Bars and cat food.) If I didn’t live in NYC and had a yard or outdoor space, I’d be thinking about gardening.

Noticing where Scorpio lives in our natal charts is a simple way to tune into where a trust wound might be reopening for us, and offering this wound the love it deserves and the balm it requires.

How are you feeling? What are you doing to prepare? What senate or house campaigns are you volunteering to get out the vote for? Tell me in the comments.