She was Love. Then Transformation. Then a Demon. The sculpture never changed. Suddenly, life can flip its meaning. New perspective comes. Something changes. With Venus Retrograde in Scorpio. Maybe it’s stagnancy that now goes. A door to the spiritual that opens—one that before felt closed. A life that was never fully paid. A karma sensed, but never explicitly seen?
In these last letters, we have identified the need for a far more conscious relationship with Lucifer. We identified Status Envy as our generation’s curse. I, for one, would not wish to diminish for one second the impulses and insights that come from interaction on these platforms. When this incessant digital diet of dopamine and digital images seems so precarious; What price do we pay, and how can we value this life anew?
Luke 11:24–26, describes a spiritual “vacuum” that happens when a person is only seemingly “cleansed”, living in an outwardly conventional “good way”, and yet fails to fill their life with purpose for something more dynamically positive.
“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.”
Rudolf Steiner speaks of these “seven other spirits more wicked than itself (…) because the soul is now possessed by a far more systematic and hidden form of evil.”— Rudolf Steiner, From Jesus to Christ (Lecture VII, 1911)
The goddess of Venus is the ultimate Gatekeeper of these questions. With Venus in retrograde, in Scorpio, a secret, revealed by the house it transits in your birth chart, is gestating beneath conscious awareness in the soul. This secret is spiritual, whispering through these still months and carrying something important for your life’s purpose. This we may well have intuited.
But this will be the final Scorpio Venus Star Point of our lifetime. And my question is: do we yet understand the spiritual challenge of our time; Does the Venus Scorpio goddess yet speak in a way we can properly follow and comprehend?
If the current direction remains obscured, retrace the house transit in your chart. Compare the last 5 Venus retrograde Star Points and check for past reflections of the 8-year cycle.
The Shape of the Threshold
The image of the goddess Ishtar helps us work with Venus as the Scorpionic goddess of the spiritual threshold. Like a Gatekeper to the spiritual world.
I will ask you one question here, metaphorically, from Lucifer; and one from Ahriman.
I want to pose to you Lucifer’s question first, hidden in the folds of status anxiety and envy:
· “Have you measured the parts of yourself that you need to unlock; the parts of you that refuse to acknowledge not only the challenges of thinking in the digital age; but action in it?”
And while this is fermenting, I would like to pose Ahriman’s question to you:
· “Have you seen how your habitual intellectual musing hardens into a kind of socio-karmic prison, maintained by your identification of intellect as the only measure of life?”
Once we know the stakes Lucifer and Ahriman have pitched, we have to rise to greet the goddess and speak with her. The goddess, with her black, time-worn eyes. Look first to the beige stone image. You will see each aspect of thinking, feeling, and willing is duplicated symmetrically like a mirror. The thinking part, the owls, is the head that takes flight in the spiritual world; the lions are the elemental power that centers the I around the heart; and the measuring rods are the tasks of life the goddess holds until we are ready. This is the spiritual, karmic task for this life. They call them “measuring rods” that the goddess holds.
The Lesser Guardian of the Threshold
Now look to the superimposed image. The goddess as she once was painted: red and white. Ancient Venus mythology mirrors this Scorpionic journey into the underworld and her resurrection. During the descent, Inanna sheds jewelry, status, and every familiar symbol of identity In these 40 days of the retrograde, the goddess enters this Scorpio descent. We have a symbolic personal meeting with the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold.
Seen anthroposophically, this goddess, Venus in Scorpio retrograde, is our sentient body. We can reflect on Mary Magdalene as a source for how these seven layers are overcome:
- External Status: weighing emotion according to worldly visibility
- Voice Expression: weighing influence by the control of others
- Subjective Interpretation: weighing events in relation to an abstract self
- Charming Outer Life: weighing status by the use of polarity
- The Appearance of Dignity: weighing ideals by model pictures of goodness
- The Powerful Rhetoric: weighing power by cleverness
- Bodily Defense: The maintenance of comfort over transformative life force
They are less a contemplation on Mary Magdalene as a scarlet woman of “sin” traditionally as in the church. Rather, the prostitution needs to be seen esoterically. Astrally (the scarlet we note is the moral contradistinction to white we see in the Burnley Relief image of Ishtar/Venus):
With each layer we pass through, the seven chakras of the etheric body, nourished by this sentient part of the astral body, are released and transformed as the journey continues. By the end of October 2026, this process will be mirrored collectively. This means fully realizing a task for humanity—not just a subjective one, but a karmic life task. Each of the above can be replaced with a more natural, organic, and honest etheric counter force.
The shadow, the lower Guardian of the Threshold, is what normally runs your life choices. The traits in others that disturb you most are the very ones you need to own. Unconscious wounds are dark. Isolation, however it expresses itself, is there for us to dwell on these dynamics. These are often uncomfortable mysteries. Because suppressed karmic purpose turns toxic.
My question is this: Is there a poison we have all unconsciously eaten of in our society. A curse that renders the spiritual silent?
What would you call it if you had to essentialize it?
The Stagnation of Consciousness: The Geometry of Matthew 8
In Matthew 8, Christ comes down from the mountain—a profound picture of the spirit incarnating into dense earthly matter. Yet, as he enters the town, we see how the opposing spirits of life lame the consciousness of those who have grown sleepy to the spirit.
It’s worth reading the whole Matthew 8 chapter in connection with this work. Consider what any true impulse can do for any affliction of the I, astral body, etheric, or physical body.
- The physically sick, utterly depleted by the relentless friction of materialism.
- The etherically sick, denying their own hidden attachments to comfort and safety.
- The astrally sick, paralyzed and unable to claim their true life task.
- The sleeping “I”, lacking even the basic faculty to recognize the spiritual world.
This Venus Retrograde is our collective Matthew 8 moment. The descent into an underworld. It demands that we strip away the familiar patterns we use to justify our desires. In spiritual circles, these blockages manifest clearly. We see dynamic spiritual impulses reduced to a consumer village mentality—where people are too tethered to property, funds and social status to even know what a radical impulse for the world might require or look like. Yet Christ in Matthew 8 shows: spiritual power over all life
Jesus Calms the Storm (Matthew 8:26): “You of little faith,” Jesus replied, “why are you so afraid?” Then He got up and rebuked the winds and the sea, and it was perfectly calm.
This verse comes in the middle to help show that there is no affliction of the body, karma, or society that cannot be transformed, because, properly understood, Christ is exemplifying power even over the sentient body, the most visible of the bodies to the human senses.
And because of this: in Mathew 8, Christ shows the Centurion with the “greatest faith”; the most radical form of comprehension of this mystery, of healing at a distance, is by the power of the Word, precisely because the Centurion did not look to secure his own worthiness; he looked to his role, his task. He looked purely at what was needed to serve the life before him. It shows Christ may work into the very deepest aspects and makeup of matter, even the most hardened Romanized forms of social life. That one might think were sealed off to Christ’s power.
Holding Patterns of Fear & Hidden Life Tasks
Most karmic patterns are maintained by one form of Fear or another. Such fears can be debilitating to the karmic life task. They create various degrees of confusion. They maintain hypervigilance about how one is seen; worry about whether God and the spiritual may really provide for one’s material life; and defensiveness, as the desire to protect oneself from earthly matter. Silent social envy and status anxiety.
- Fear of Man;
- Fear of Circumstance;
- Fear of Contamination
And not to play those games is deemed “foolish”. Once the body as much as the social order, can be seen from outside with Christ, our lives are not bound to appease the dictates of convention. True creative life may then arise.
“If Lucifer is the True Christ, and Ahriman is the Karma of Lucifer; then Ahriman is the New Christ; Because Christ is the True Lord of Karma.” @Tom Mellet
A truth lies in this statement. It is helpful to all our economics newsletters here. Rudolf Steiner prophesied that in our time anthroposophy would become Ahrimanised. But this is often misinterpreted as meaning we should reject and defend against technology and media. But no, this would be to not really fathom what is being said esoterically.
Attributed to the Koberwitz agriculture course, Countess von Keyserlingk asked Rudolf Steiner the following in 1924:
“Humanity has gone very badly astray, hasn’t it?”
Steiner replied: “Yes, one can certainly say that.”
She then asked: “But what, then, is to become of humanity at the end of the century?” (meaning our time)
And according to the account that has been handed down, Steiner replied “in a tone of despair”: “I don’t know either — but Ahriman, too, is a part of Christ.”
“The Journey to Byzantium — The Palladium of the Victory” (Die Reisen ach Byzanz – Das Palladium des Seiges) Johanna von Keyserling (published post-mortem, often attributed to her estate or edited by M. von Miltitz).
The possibility of a new occult geometry – seeing an etheric counterspace hidden in a digital matrix – is what we are showing in these articles through bringing together economics with star work and biographical karma work. Matthew 8 reveals the geometry of karmic social life and its transformation. It maps a path from the depths of matter to Christ’s work within them.
Venus retrograde in Scorpio shines a light on this precise part of the Bible. It highlights how the four bodies reflect karmic dynamics and link to initiation. The whole chapter, Matthew 8, is a meditation not only on Scorpio but also on the social aesthetics of karmic work. In any dark night of the soul, or trial of karmic destiny, we should recall Job’s lesson alongside Matthew 8.
“And the Lord turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends: also the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.” (Job 42:10)
A Model of Biography: The 11th House Challenge
Rudolf Steiner heralded for us with the Mystery Dramas and his own personal karma a social task for anthroposophy. With Pluto in Aquarius until 2044, this generational, silent “Curse of Envy” will reveal its inverse hidden gift. The first stage is our personal, subjective life challenges that often conceal our true-life karma and trial of destiny.
Let me be transparent and model a process everyone can do by looking at the house placement of the Venus retrograde transit. Mine is in the 11th House, Aquarius, my relation to peers and the group and wider social impulses. You’ll see that, for me, anthroposophy is a manifestation of Uranus conjunct my Midheaven in the 11th house (traditionally ruled by Aquarius; in my natal chart, and from 1972 to 1984, in Libra), and it trines Venus in my 3rd House. So this sense of working within an anthroposophical community has always been my life task, so to speak. But it lay concealed within my more materialistic life path.
How did it lie there, unseen at first?
For over 14 years, I worked in a language school, working with all kinds of people from all over the world, including corporate banks, law firms, tech companies, artists, and pharmaceutical companies. A fully Aquarian social impulse, one might say. And, because I was there so long, I became somewhat senior in the company. And I slowly gained a kind of subcultural power, through my role teaching and training teachers: to the somewhat begrudging indifference of my managing superiors.
When and emotionally management introduced zero-hour contracts, they structured a system that favored transient staff over the more experienced educators. It was a silent economic exclusion designed to force senior teachers out. Thrust into this dynamic, I became a leader in an institutional civil war—the direct activation of my Uranus on the Midheaven.
And this is the challenge of the Venus Scorpio retrograde transit of the 11th House: to carry a socio-spiritual impulse in a Uranian and Scorpionic way—requires social tact.
But more deeply, it is courage to walk an uncompromising path; to model something new, where spiritual life and indeed moral earthly life is not hidden or made mute in conformity.
The Meditation of the Owls, Lions, and Rods
RS “The third portal that one must pass through is the Portal of the Sun. And there we must, when we reach this portal, undergo yet another experience. At the Portal of Death, we perceive a winged angel’s head; at the Portal of the Elements, we perceive a lion; at the Portal of the Sun, we must perceive a dragon, a fierce dragon. And this fierce dragon we must truly perceive. But now Lucifer and Ahriman together try to make it imperceptible to our spiritual vision.” Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Development, GA 157, 2 March 1915, Berlin, The Three Decisions on the Path of Imaginative Cognition: Loneliness, Fear, Dread
When we seek to understand this threshold experience through meditation, we confront what Steiner described as the three decisions on the path of imaginative cognition:
Loneliness, Fear, and Dread.
The Ishtar relief was originally painted in stark white and red.
One may take this image as a kind of meditation on observing yourself spiritually.
Look to the body of red to the right. With an inner spiritual experience of “red”, it holds us awake and conscious, ready for meditation. And then we notice white, like an etheric blank canvas. We still our mood in Peace. Notice the balance of red and white. Appreciate it. Now, look at the two owls. They are not completely identical. Yet, they are symmetrical and linked to each other. They are still independent beings.
In meditation, I saw these two owls as my I in the spiritual world, “watching” my own thinking. This “watching” forms a duplicate copy, giving you an awareness of your existence as two separate beings of thinking. This experience brings Loneliness, because you are as if dead to the physical body—creating reality out of pure thinking while carrying your life and feeling just a breath away below you. As Steiner describes in the above lecture, Lucifer habitually hides in this experience of the winged head of thinking.
Our feeling life responds directly to such a thinking exercise. We watch that too. it generates Fear and Dread. It creates two responses in the ego, mirrored by the two lions at Ishtar’s feet.
Ahriman hides our subtle egoism—the prideful feeling that the spiritual world exists merely to serve our personal patterns of thinking and feeling. We rarely check how thoroughly we permeate the spiritual world with our own self-experience. Like a lion’s roar of dominance extending out all around.
To feel free, to experience it, I had to take a third standpoint, refusing to over-identify with either owl’s thinking, or either duplicate feeling stream exclusively, and let both content streams fully die by observing their isolation from the wider standpoint of myself, my I in the spiritual world beyond.
Finally, look now to the relief’s third duplicated image: the two measuring rods held firmly in Ishtar’s hands. This is the realm of the Will—the ultimate staging ground where Lucifer and Ahriman test the soul simultaneously.
When we return from the spiritual world to normal life, a veil of forgetfulness instantly falls over our experiences. We often trip over the threshold, misjudging what occurred in one of two ways: we either dismiss spiritual experiences as inconsequential, or we worship our experiences and insights by holding them up to ourselves as insights to repeat, consolidating them instead of moving out wider to gain another spiritual perspective and context, and to patiently wait.
Both such false paths invite an Ahrimanic hallucination—either tinged by self-doubt, claiming “I have seen nothing” when we actually we have known a wider context, or insisting “I am able to explain everything” when we cannot; and we are still clearly dealing with preliminaries of the reflexivity of the I; still not fully grasping the cognitive process of creativity. We end up taking one-off experiences as things to remember and care for, and so make them idols to ourselves. In his exemplary side lectures on the life of the soul, Steiner importantly describes the problem of “sham logic” that focuses exclusively on refining the cognitive process of the soul:
“Whoever has learned to move cognitively in the spirit often sees in the refutations of this knowledge its strongest evidence; for it becomes clear to him how in the soul, step by step, the refuter chokes down his fear of the spirit, and how in choking it he creates this sham logic.” Rudolf Steiner, On the Life of the Soul, GA 36, IV. The Human Soul in Courage and Fear
The threshold always seems impenetrable. Yet every time we enter the spiritual world through meditation, at some point we have to progress by consciously picturing that very feeling of impossibility. Reflexivity here means we must imaginatively create the very block itself in consciousness to overcome it. When you recognize this blocking mechanism as an activity of your own I, you break through.
How do these inner trials and tests of cognition manifest in life?
When I do these exercises, looking at my own biography and working imaginatively with these thoughts, I see the fallen, materialistic veil of my karmic task. This is one copy-duplicate. For me it was leading something like an insurrection at a corporate company. Now, when I try to comprehend and envisage the “true task,” I get a second duplicate. This was my 2018 lesson. The rejection of that role. But this is still not actively positive. The life body, the etheric, has to ripen for you to see the true dynamic karmic task. The Venus retrograde cycle takes 8 years to return.
If consciousness does not achieve reflexive self-knowledge, karma holds sway.
Socio-Spiritual Choreography
October 25 of 2026 shows an interesting example of Venus in the anaretic degree of Libra, the sign she rules. 29 degrees is where a sign’s lessons culminate.
Libra, ruled by Venus, is the sign where, macrocosmically, etheric light appears in karmic binds and links. Venus backs into Libra just after the midpoint of the 40-day, 2026 retrograde. She remains concealed in the Sun’s glare through the final days of October, then is reborn as the Morning Star. One part of spiritual awakening is seeing bodies and physical reality from the inside out; time becomes space to move in. The things said, the patterns established, and the unspoken methods by which two people create spiritual power between them can be read spiritually—not in our sensual way, but with moral color, sight, and sounds.
In Matthew 8, we could say the presence of Christ is found right there where a new life path is acknowledged.
When we speak of the initiation process going through Crisis, Delay, Silence, and Destruction, we are looking at the strength needed to walk the path with Christ in our times. The retrograde can change the way a new karmic life task reaches you.
With experience of the spiritual world, what is felt as “Safe” emerges in a new definition; perhaps as “Stuck”; and what was felt previously as “Unforeseeable” might be seen as a “Clear and New Way Forward”.
Consider this: After the crucifixion, Mary and Lazarus John continue their work in Ephesus. Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathea go north to present-day France and Britain. Karma receives a new impulse. During this Venus retrograde, as the whole process mirrors the Crown of Thorns and the Crucifixion, a life plan may still be tied to a particular person or outcome, though the deeper wish and actual task can become clearer through this Venus retrograde journey.
Know your 8-year lesson emerging
There is a temptation to Ahrimanically squeeze lessons out of this Venus retrograde time; to make spiritual life clarify everything before any change is even felt. The Luciferic test is to, as always, pass by and not engage; to melt back into the usual responses. New insight comes from new reflection on any new content, then comes rest, then digestion, then new action.
See the duplicate copies of your thinking in meditation; let them be lame just as they are. See the doubles of your feelings. Let them be sick too. They are often empty and fake, masking true impulses. Let the death process remove them completely. Then see the life task you took on in biography and character. And whether it fits going forward.
Venus last traveled retrograde through this Scorpio–Libra territory during October and November 2018. The eight-year cycle is a chance to recognize the lesson the earlier chapter was trying to teach (reflected through the five Star Point dates of the last five Venus retrogrades – see previous letters). An old dynamic can return. And essentially, it will pose the two questions of Lucifer and Ahriman we viewed at the start.
“The farther we descend into the depths of our own life and allow our feelings to resound with our experiences of the outer world, the more we cut ourselves off from universal being. A true individuality will be the one who reaches up with his feelings to the farthest possible extent into the region of the ideal.“ — Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom (GA 4)
Is part of you still lost? Venus remains retrograde in Libra until November 13. Earlier feelings, connections, and decisions may look different in light of the wisdom you’ve gained since October began, especially when familiar dynamics return. Your response might surprise you. Let it. Venus stays in Libra until December 4. Venus’s return to Scorpio matters. This December, Scorpio will welcome back a Venus who has traveled through the underworld.
What new path in life does this way come?
Mercury goes retrograde on November 4. The lens above includes how the sentient body, through astronomical Venus, relates to Occult Mercury, and how the two flip. I have begun exploring their relation to the Resurrection Body more thoroughly in previous Patreon articles.
We have to wait for all these date stamps to complete and light up. And this is one of the greatest esoteric lessons: to learn awe and reverence for divine timing. The deepest occultism is love of the stars, combined with an occult understanding of the mysteries of the sense world, because only they can chart the paths into the depths of matter.
Scorpio is the sign of the initiation chamber; its dynamism, as a worldview, speaks of the most dangerous transformations: encountering death. Instead of an unconscious Lucifer and Ahriman, when we behold them and work with them spiritually, we see the sentient body and the sentient soul act as a door to the etheric world. These are not abstractions but when slowly understood, templates for all and anyone to make specific to themselves.
Our impulse here with anthroposophy does not disengage. Our generation’s task is the overcoming the Ahrimanic hypnosis of our times. The last two letters were about the silent curse of envy. Through these reflections, we are growing into something we might be much more enthusiastic about than that. We are imagining a way of life after our societal curse has lifted. Once we truly appreciate the stars, we see a beautiful etheric world full of order and harmony: that tells us something indelibly rich.
The goddess and the stars are silent only when we are passive. When we are active, we speak the karmic task we decide to carry creatively back to them.
A true taking hold of karma toward freedom; may create new coordinates. This is what lights up any time-limited experience of only darkness.
Note to lead thumbnail Image: The Burnley Relief Ishtar association and the association of Lilith with owls in later Jewish literature such as the Songs of the Sage (1st century BCE) and Babylonian Talmud (5th century CE) is derived from a reference to a liliyth among a list of wilderness birds and animals in Isaiah (7th century BCE):
An interesting alternative ESV to verse 13:
Isaiah 34:13 Thorns shall grow over its strongholds, nettles and thistles in its fortresses. It shall be the haunt of jackals, an abode for ostriches. 14 And wild animals shall meet with hyenas; the wild goat shall cry to his fellow; indeed, there the night bird (lilit or lilith) settles and finds for herself a resting place. 15 There the owl nests and lays and hatches and gathers her young in her shadow; indeed, there the hawks are gathered, each one with her mate. (ESV)
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