Venus has now entered Sagittarius, leaving behind her exile and venenum in Scorpio, a word whose root lies in her own name. Venenum once meant a love potion before it came to signify poison, revealing the ambivalence of attraction and peril that belongs to her nature. She rises from the eighth house, the realm of shadow and symbolic death, into the ninth, Domus Dei, the first of the transcendent houses upon the upper arc of the zodiacal wheel, pointing to the Godhead. This marks her passage from fixed water ruled by Mars to mutable fire ruled by Jupiter, exchanging the dominion of the nocturnal malefic for the guidance of the diurnal benefic. The nocturnal and feminine planet, cold and moist by temperament, is now beneath the authority of the warm and dry Zeus. Between these two benefics arises a dialogue of love and wisdom.
But Venus in Sagittarius is peregrine, possessing no dignity by triplicity or sign. She entered it five days after her Morning Setting, ending her cycle as Phosphorus and becoming invisible beneath the solar beams. The process of combustion has begun and will intensify until the Capricornian cazimi of January. During this passage, the planet of love and desire undergoes purification by fire. The wound inflicted by the Sun inaugurates an alchemical transmutation: the copper of Venus is melted and refined in the mutable fire.
This is the living representation of Arcanum XIV, Temperance, associated with Sagittarius on the Tree of Life, where the forms become conscious will. After her symbolic death in the fixed water of Scorpio, it now follows the restoration of harmony, the refashioning of love as a lucid intelligence rather than a possessive passion of the depths. Among the four cardinal virtues, Temperance is the one that governs desire through reason, preserving the middle point where passion becomes measure and harmony replaces excess. In the Tarot it becomes an alchemical act, where opposites are reconciled and impulse is refined into lucidity. It is the instant when love rises from its subterranean depths and awakens as the intelligence of the heart.
The cazimi in Capricorn will also involve Mars, not only the Sun, so Venus is approaching both the gold of the solar principle and the iron of the martial one. The conjunction of these three metals – gold, iron, and copper – constitutes the classical trinity of alchemical work, through which the soul is tested by conflict and purified by light. However, this operation still lies ahead. For now, Venus depends entirely on Jupiter, her dispositor, who is exalted in the cardinal water of Cancer but retrograde.
This Jupiter, dwelling in the lunar depths of the nadir, is reflective and introverted, reviewing his nature within the womb of the Moon. Moreover, there is no Ptolemaic aspect between mutable fire and cardinal water, so the ruler and the ruled stand in silence. The fiery ascent of Venus is governed by a regent turned inward, and the tin of Jupiter, heavy with moisture, affects not only her copper but also the gold of the Sun and the iron of Mars, which share her current sign of Sagittarius.
The second half of her Sagittarian journey will bring increasing tension, since Venus will form three square aspects to the bodies in Pisces: the North Node, Saturn, and Neptune. These are all under that same exalted yet retrograde Jupiter in Cancer. The pilgrim of fire will meet the resistance of mutable water, and the conflict between ascent and dissolution will define the trial. Venus, standing in the Mercurial bound of Sagittarius, will meet a square to the Node that will demand clarity about the direction of desire and the purpose of union. In the Martial bound, the clashes with Saturn and Neptune will confront her with the distance between ideal and reality. The result is a double purification: wounded and invisible, Venus is burned within the Jupiterian fire while her ruler undergoes revision in the lunar sea. Love becomes a spiritual craft, the copper polished by burning suffering until it mirrors the light of the Sun.
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