Venus turns retrograde approximately every 18 months, appearing to move backwards through the sky from our perspective on Earth. Astrologically, this is traditionally a period for reconsidering relationships, values, pleasure, money and what we find beautiful or worthwhile.
In October 2026, Venus began her retrograde journey in Scorpio before returning to Libra later in the cycle. The retrograde runs from 3 October to 13 November, with Venus squaring Pluto in Aquarius on 20 October.
And that last detail matters.
Scorpio is associated with intimacy, vulnerability, desire, attachment, power and the things we might prefer to keep hidden. Pluto, its modern planetary ruler, brings questions of control, transformation, loss and the forces operating beneath our conscious awareness.
A square between Venus and Pluto symbolically brings these themes into tension.
Where does love become possession? When does devotion become self-abandonment? What happens when our need to be wanted becomes more powerful than our ability to recognise what is actually good for us?
These aren't comfortable questions.
But perhaps discomfort is sometimes the beginning of honesty.
This isn't a prediction that your relationship will fall apart, that an ex will return, or that something terrible is about to happen. Astrology doesn't have to become a doom-filled forecast to be meaningful.
Instead, we can use this symbolism as an invitation to examine the emotional patterns that shape how we love, what we pursue and what we struggle to release.
And for that, we need to descend.
Persephone: The Girl Who Became Queen
In Greek mythology, Persephone is the daughter of Demeter, goddess of agriculture and the harvest.
Her story begins with a descent she doesn't choose.
Hades, ruler of the underworld, takes Persephone to his realm. Her mother searches desperately for her, and the natural world suffers in Demeter's grief. Eventually, a settlement is reached: Persephone will spend part of the year in the underworld and part with her mother in the world above.
The pomegranate seeds she eats become central to the terms of her return.
There are many ways to read this myth, and we should be careful not to romanticise the violence at its beginning. Persephone's story is not simply a tale of a young woman finding herself through adversity.
But it does leave us with a powerful image: a goddess whose life becomes divided between two worlds.
Persephone is no longer only the daughter who belongs to her mother. She becomes a queen in her own right, with a relationship to a realm that others fear to enter.
She acquires a new identity, one that cannot simply erase what came before.
The descent changes her relationship with herself.
And this is where I find the myth particularly interesting through the lens of Venus retrograde.
How many of us have identities built around being loved, wanted, needed or chosen?
The good partner. The desirable one. The person who keeps everyone happy. The one who makes the relationship work, even when it costs them something important.
What happens when that identity no longer serves us?
What happens when we discover that being chosen by someone else isn't the same as choosing ourselves?
Sometimes a relationship, an ending or a period of profound change confronts us with the parts of ourselves we've neglected in order to belong.
The descent isn't necessarily something we would have chosen.
But what we discover there can change the way we understand ourselves.
Inanna: Seven Gates Into the Underworld
Inanna's descent is a different story, preserved in ancient Sumerian literature.
Inanna is a powerful goddess who decides to enter the underworld, the realm ruled by her sister Ereshkigal.
At its seven gates, Inanna is required to surrender an item of her clothing or divine regalia. Piece by piece, the symbols of her power and status are removed.
She arrives stripped of the things that marked her as a goddess of immense authority.
She is judged, killed and suspended in the underworld. With the intervention of the god Enki, her restoration becomes possible, but her return comes with a cost: someone must take her place. The story ultimately draws her husband, Dumuzi, into this exchange.
It's a striking and unsettling myth, and one of the oldest surviving literary accounts of a goddess's descent into the realm of the dead.
What fascinates me most is the passage through the gates.
Inanna doesn't get to negotiate her way through by insisting on who she is. Her status doesn't exempt her from the laws of the underworld.
At each gate, something must be surrendered.
And symbolically, this is rich territory for a Venus–Pluto transit.
What are the things we believe make us powerful, lovable or worthy?
Our beauty? Our independence? Our desirability? Our ability to keep everything under control? Our reputation for being the one who never needs anything?
What happens when those things are no longer available to us in the way they once were?
Who are we when we cannot rely on the familiar ways we have learned to secure love, approval or belonging?
Inanna's descent asks us to imagine a journey in which our usual protections are gradually stripped away.
Not because we are worthless without them, but because they were never the whole of us.
What Venus and the Underworld Have in Common
Venus is often associated with the things we want to attract: love, beauty, connection, pleasure, harmony and abundance.
But desire has a shadow.
We can want love and fear intimacy. We can crave independence while feeling terrified of being alone. We can say we value honesty but find ourselves avoiding the truth when it threatens a relationship we desperately want to preserve.
We can mistake being needed for being loved.
We can confuse intensity with intimacy, jealousy with devotion, and sacrifice with proof that a relationship matters.
None of this makes us bad at love. It makes us human.
But these patterns can quietly shape our choices until we begin to mistake them for who we are.
Venus in Scorpio, particularly in a tense aspect to Pluto, offers a symbolic opportunity to look at what might be operating beneath the surface of our desires.
Not to shame ourselves for what we find.
Not to turn every difficult feeling into a pathology.
But to become curious about the bargains we make in the name of love.
What do we give away to feel secure?
What do we hold on to because the alternative feels unbearable?
And what might become possible if we no longer needed to repeat the same bargain?
The Underworld Is Not a Self-Improvement Project
I want to be careful here.
Shadow work has become something of a fashionable phrase, and sometimes we approach our inner lives as if every uncomfortable feeling needs to be excavated, analysed and transformed into a lesson.
But descent isn't always productive in that sense.
Sometimes grief is simply grief.
Sometimes we need to acknowledge that something hurt us without rushing to explain why it happened or what it taught us.
Sometimes we are not ready to emerge with a shiny new identity and a list of lessons learned.
And that's okay.
The myths don't offer us a neat little checklist for personal growth. They give us stories about encounters with forces that cannot be controlled by ordinary means.
Inanna cannot simply command the underworld to obey her. Persephone cannot return to her former life exactly as it was.
Their stories remind us that transformation is not always a tidy, conscious process.
We may understand what has changed only after we have lived through it.
So, What Is This Venus Retrograde Asking Us?
I wouldn't assume that everyone is about to experience a dramatic relationship revelation. Nor would I treat this transit as a reason to make impulsive decisions about love, money or commitment.
But I do think it's a useful time to become more honest about the relationship we have with desire itself.
What do you want, beneath what you think you should want?
Where are you negotiating away your needs to preserve a connection?
What feels like love, but might actually be fear of loss?
Where have you confused being chosen with being valued?
And what parts of yourself have you left at the gates because you thought they would make you harder to love?
You don't need to answer all of these questions. You certainly don't need to force an ending or manufacture a breakthrough.
Let the questions do what questions sometimes do best: open a door.
Returning From the Underworld
Neither Persephone nor Inanna returns to precisely the same place, in precisely the same way.
Their myths don't offer a simple promise that everything will be better on the other side. They show us a changed relationship with power, identity, loss and the world to which the goddesses return.
Perhaps this is one of the deeper symbols of Venus retrograde.
We revisit old desires, familiar attachments and the values we have built our lives around. We may recognise patterns we hadn't noticed before, or discover that something we once wanted no longer feels quite right.
And perhaps we begin to understand that self-worth isn't something we can secure once and for all by being beautiful enough, desirable enough, useful enough or loved by the right person.
It asks for a different relationship with ourselves.
One that can survive disappointment. One that makes room for vulnerability without surrendering our boundaries. One that allows love to matter deeply without making it the sole measure of our worth.
The underworld doesn't necessarily take everything from us.
Sometimes it reveals what we were carrying that was never truly ours.
And sometimes, after the descent, we return with less certainty about who we are supposed to be — but a much deeper understanding of who we are.
Perhaps that's where the real work of Venus begins.