The Other Side of Loss

Venus Retrograde in Scorpio and the Descent into Desire

Venus is preparing for her retrograde journey through Scorpio and Libra, and I want to speak about loss. Not because this retrograde promises that something will be taken from us, but because the first decan of Scorpio carries an ancient teaching about attachment, grief, desire and what becomes visible when something we have held onto can no longer accompany us in the same form.

In tarot, the first decan of Scorpio is associated with the Five of Cups. A figure stands before three overturned cups, looking toward what has been spilled. Behind him, two cups remain standing, and further in the distance there is a bridge leading across the river. I have always found the bridge to be one of the most important symbols in this card. The grief is real. Something has been lost. Scorpio does not ask us to turn away from that reality or cover it with premature positivity. But the loss is not the whole landscape. There are still two cups. There is still a bridge. There is still another shore.

This is one of the great initiations of Scorpio. We learn about attachment through allowing ourselves to care deeply. We learn about merging through intimacy, and through merging we eventually encounter the possibility of separation. Love brings us close enough to life that we become vulnerable to grief, disappointment, abandonment and death. Yet these experiences also have the capacity to take us beneath the surface of what we thought we wanted. Underneath one desire we may discover another, and underneath that another, until we begin touching something much closer to the true movement of life within us.

So the questions of this retrograde are not simply What am I losing? They may be: What is this showing me? What am I afraid of losing? What have I already lost but continue to hold onto? What does my attachment reveal about what I truly desire? And where has survival become entangled with love?

This particular Venus retrograde intensifies these questions because Venus makes three squares to Pluto across the entire retrograde cycle. I see them almost as three gates of the same initiation: the encounter, the descent and the return.

The first Venus–Pluto square arrives during the pre-shadow, before Venus has even stationed retrograde. This is the first initiation. Something enters the field and reveals where the underworld door might be. Attraction can intensify. An old fear can become visible. Something we thought was settled may begin moving again. A relationship, desire, value, financial reality or attachment may suddenly carry more charge than before. Pluto does not necessarily create the material. It exposes the depth that was already there.

At this first gate, I would ask: What has suddenly become charged? What am I trying to protect, possess or prevent from changing? What am I terrified might be taken from me? Where am I negotiating with truth because part of me still believes my survival depends upon keeping something exactly as it is?

We do not need to answer these questions immediately. The first square may simply show us the entrance. Something flickers at the edge of consciousness and Venus continues walking.

Then she turns around.

The second Venus–Pluto square occurs during the retrograde itself, and this is the descent. We return to the same territory, but now we are no longer standing at its entrance. We are inside it. What appeared initially as attraction, conflict, grief, longing, jealousy, fear, attachment or desire may reveal another layer beneath it. This is where Scorpio asks for an unusual kind of courage: not the absence of fear, but the willingness to look directly at what frightens us.

We need a fire in the lantern for this part of the journey.

And I think that fire is desire.

Desire can illuminate the path toward the mystery we have gone underground to retrieve. Instead of immediately asking how to satisfy desire, suppress it or attach it to another person, we can become curious about where it is pointing. What are you actually asking for? What lives underneath you? What part of me have you come to awaken?

This is where intimacy becomes particularly revealing. Can intimacy survive what is revealed? Can I remain present when another person cannot fulfil the role I unconsciously assigned to them? Can I allow relationships to rearrange themselves when truth requires a different form? Where has survival affected my ability to be fully present, to receive love, to trust, or to connect without grasping?

Venus wants to bring together. Mars, the traditional ruler of Scorpio, knows how to cut and separate. Somewhere between these two movements lies one of the deepest mysteries of relationship: learning how to unite without disappearing into one another, and learning how to separate without destroying love.

The retrograde descent can therefore expose places where intensity has been mistaken for intimacy, attachment for devotion, being needed for being loved, possession for safety, or longing for destiny. Pluto brings us close enough to these structures that we can feel what they are made of. And sometimes we discover that what we are desperately trying to preserve is not love itself, but a structure we once built around love in order to survive.

This is where the Five of Cups becomes such a powerful guide.

If our eyes remain entirely upon what has fallen, we cannot see the bridge.

Turning around does not mean denying the grief. It means allowing grief to complete its movement enough that our field of vision expands again. The two standing cups do not replace what was lost. They reveal that life has not ended where our attention became fixed.

Then comes the third Venus–Pluto square, during the post-shadow. Venus has emerged from the underworld and is moving forward again. Now the question changes. We are no longer asking only what was revealed or what needed to die. We ask: What did I retrieve?

What do I know about my desires now that I did not know before? What am I no longer willing to abandon myself in order to preserve? What has become more precious? What attachment has loosened? What truth survived the descent? What can I now love more freely because I no longer need to possess it? And most importantly: what wants to be lived differently now?

This is the return from the underworld. The purpose of descent is not to become endlessly fascinated with darkness. We go down because the darkness holds what could not follow us into the life we learned to survive. A buried desire, an abandoned truth, a piece of our own vitality waiting beneath the layers of protection. We descend to meet it, and if we are willing, to carry it back into the light.

And this is why curiosity matters so much during Scorpio initiations. Curiosity keeps the lantern burning when fear would rather turn around. It allows us to approach difficult material without immediately making it an enemy. What are you showing me? Why does this hurt so much? What is underneath this fear? What does this attachment protect? What desire has been buried beneath it?

There is something paradoxical about the fearlessness Scorpio asks from us. It is not becoming fearless. It is becoming willing to walk while fear is present. To look at the wound without becoming the wound. To feel grief without making grief the entire landscape. To enter the river of emotion deeply enough that it begins moving again.

Because sometimes our deepest desires are already pulling us away from situations, identities and futures that can no longer contain them. This can create the painful threshold between past and future where the old world has lost its life but the new one has not yet acquired form. The nervous system may experience that space as danger and reach backward toward what is familiar, even when what is familiar is no longer true.

This is one of the deeper teachings of the Five of Cups: loss can become a passage into liberation without requiring us to call the loss good. Grief does not need a spiritual justification to become transformative. What breaks our heart can also break open a structure that had become too small for the life moving through us. An ending can uncover a desire that was buried beneath all the energy it took to keep something alive after its truth had already changed.

Scorpio teaches us to become intimate with these endings. To notice when a form has completed its purpose. To learn, again and again, how to die to what is no longer true.

Transcend. Transform. Transmute.

The three Pluto squares give us three opportunities to practice this: first to recognize what has been activated, then to descend into what lies beneath it, and finally to return carrying whatever truth survived the journey.

The spilled cups are real.

So are the two still standing.

And so is the bridge.

The question is whether, when the time comes, we are willing to turn around and see it.

Keep the lantern burning.

There is something in the dark worth retrieving.