Saturn Retrograde in Libra and the Via Combusta Venus Themes Come Up For Review

Saturn retrograde, 17 to 10 degrees Libra - January 26, 2011 to June 12, 2011

"This is not your standard Neptunian-glossy, Hollywood-manufactured love and relationship, either. This is Saturn in Libra dispositing Pluto in Capricorn love. It's gritty business. Remaining Neptunian illusions about love and togetherness are unceremoniously stripped, a big part of which being the money drying up, and people stop being able to fake it."

This is what I wrote after Saturn first entered Libra in June 2010 and moved into cardinal t-square formation. It remains relevant, as difficult as it is to hold relationships and relationship dynamics under the cold, hard light of day without Neptunian buffer.

Neptune is messing with us on multiple fronts this far into tail-end Pisces, and following its familiar siren song is a surefire false path designed to waste time we don't have time to waste.

Saturn has just dipped into the early Via Combusta degrees of Libra and gone retrograde. Until June 12, we're doing backtrack restructuring of the relationships (and relationship issues) that have come into focus since October 22, 2010, post-cardinal t-square summer. Things shifted in a big way this past summer. They got very real very quickly. And during this retrograde, we work on getting our legs solidly under us with the partnerships we find present in our lives after the dust has settled.

Jupiter is back in Aries, heading to its final incendiary square to Pluto in Capricorn February 25, and the themes stirred this past summer of movement, forging out way out of the muck, dynamism, action, new territory and survival in the face of brutal Pluto in Capricorn corpo-governmental oligarchy intensify.

There is a necessity here to work together with those compatible with us in whatever ways will catalyze win-win forward progress, especially along structured career lines.

Banking on glossy potentials and wished-for outcomes remains perilous. Concrete, here-and-now, show me my return on investment.

The themes of the most recent Venus retrograde through the Via Combusta degrees of Scorpio and late Libra also remain potent until May/June 2012 when Venus retrogrades again in Gemini.

Because Saturn is in Libra and Venus is considered by most to be the ruling planet of Libra, Venus' transits through the signs until October 2012 add a crucial layer of influence to our successful dealings with Saturn in Libra. Venus in whatever sign it is transiting is referred to as the dispositor of Saturn in Libra.

Regardless of the sign Venus is transiting, though, until the next Venus retrograde in Gemini, the overarching thematic flavour of our relationship work has been set to "Scorpionic deep" and "cut the crap." There is a necessary ruthlessness here, a clarifying realism, with an impetus to intricately rebalance and restructure especially the subtle energetic and vibrational levels of relationship.

We're working for and carving out a new level of justice - energetic justice - in our relationships "related to the hidden energy exchange (Scorpio) between the sexes, which includes money as well as misuses of sexual energy. Huge issues, culturally reinforced for millenia."

Scorpio is a healing energy. It intuitively knows where the trouble is and gets right to work, divining and digging to trigger multi-layered release points. It isn't just treating symptoms, either. Scorpio knows it's either go deep or go home, and it puts forth immense stores of energy to go to the mat for people, driving right to the root of the problems that keep them locked up, inauthentic, programmed, and less effective than they could otherwise be.

Scorpio digs the poisoned thorns out - and if it's masterful enough, it gets them all.

But Scorpio's mastery is also it's downfall. Here's where the betrayal aspect of the sign comes into play. Scorpio is a liberating energy, an almost magical transformer of all things oppressive and stagnant and intolerable - and its emotional, psychological and psychic currency is woefully undervalued. Quite often, it's used and abused with little to nothing offered in return. It's left holding the bag with nowhere left to put the shit.

What Scorpio does is mostly in the energetic realms, and because so few people have developed the sight to see this type of energy work, people take it and run. Often, they take it and run right back into the same unhealthy patterns and dynamics Scorpio was expending so much energy to extricate them from in the first place.

Moving out of the ass-burning, should-have-known-better depleting and into the vital and mutually sustaining. Choosing carefully when and how to apply the potent Scorp medicine. Determining the most worthy recipients - and ensuring they are ready and willing to take full responsibility for what is given. This is Scorpio territory, and this is a major theme embedded in our Saturn in Libra relationship work.

"We're in the midst of a five-year gutting, restructuring and energetic rebalancing process in relationship that will not reach ultimate completion until the end of a period of mutual reception between Saturn in Scorpio and Pluto in Capricorn when Saturn leaves Scorpio September 2015...Our collective progress out of the Pluto in Capricorn rubble hinges on the successful rebalancing and restructuring of relationship constructs and dynamics, especially related to the ways men and women interact."

So all these tricky, winding, hidden dynamics are being brought back into play for a Saturnine sober second look during the Saturn retrograde in Libra.

We've got a blazing opportunity now until spring of 2012, infused by the Via Combusta Venus retro, to forge through and beyond complex layers of relationship dynamic detritus and half-decayed constructs that will constrain us, keeping us from the love that will truly nourish and sustain, if we allow it.

More on the Via Combusta Venus retrograde review later...