The Venus Transit

A few of you have asked what my take on this time period is and so, belatedly, I am doing so..

We are very used to the Earth eclipsing the Sun's light to the Moon at a Lunar eclipse as we pass between the two, or the Moon eclipsing the Sun's light as seen from Earth at a Solar Eclipse, when they line up directly in front of one another.  The size and distance of those planetary bodies fit across each other perfectly.  Mercury transits across the face of the Sun about 13 times each century.We are less familiar with the  transit of Venus across the face of the Sun, eclipsing a little bit of the Sun's light, as it occurs only in pairs every 8 years and then not again for another 100 years, the last time being this week June 5th-6th.

Venus' orbit around the Sun is inside ours and every 19 months Venus makes an inferior conjunction with the Sun, that is on the same side of the Sun as we are. Over the course of 8 years if you were to plot those conjunctions you would see that they form a pentagram in the sky, returning to the same place every eight years.  The first inferior conjunction and the last are very close to the same degree of the zodiac. Eight years ago on June 8th 2004, the conjunction was at 17 Gemini, this year it is at 15 Gemini.

We are living through this special time when this rare event is occurring.  The last time we had this 8 year cycle was December 9th 1874, and December 6th 1882.  The next time this phenomena will occur is December 11th, 2117 and December 8th 2125, always occurring in Gemini or Sagittarius.  We have inferior conjunctions every 8 years but we do not always have Venus transiting or conjoining or eclipsing the Sun, because her orbit can take her just above or below the face of the Sun and not directly in front of Him.

As to what this means..firstly Venus has to do with love, relationships, money, values, self esteem, what we are attracting to ourselves, our aesthetic sense, our artistic side, how we are relating to one other, what we desire, who and what we love.  If you go back to June 2004 and remember what was going on in your life then and reflect on what is happening in your life now regarding those Venusian matters you might notice some differences.

I let go of a long term live in relationship in June of 2004, or started the process by sleeping alone. These last 8 years have been a process of increasing my own sense of self worth.  This was not a conscious decision then, that that was what I was doing, but I knew that I could no longer live with the pain I was experiencing. It is only in reflecting back that I can see that that is what was happening.  Maybe there is something in your life that has increased in value, surely Facebook, which was not even a company then, and the national debt have.

These 2 dates June 2004 and June 2012 become bookends for a section of our lives that might have increased our capacity to love ourselves, another or some possession either more or less so, finding a new set of values to live by. The process that began then will have some sort of resolution or sense of accomplishment now.  Is it significant that we have been conscious adults through this time?  Significance comes from our perception of it.  It is one thing to watch the transit across the Sun but another to read into and reflect upon how these astronomical events can mirror our own evolution.  One of my favorite quotes attributed to Socrates through Plato is: "An unexamined life is not worth living".