Exclusively for Vogue Scandinavia's Society members, astrologer Clarisse Monahan of Venus in Retrograde charts each month's most powerful cosmic shifts, breaking down exactly how to understand, navigate and benefit from them
At the moment, I’m reading John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice with a friend in some misguided attempt to challenge myself intellectually. Clocking in at roughly 600 pages, it’s perhaps the most important work of Anglo-American political philosophy of the past 60 years. True, the prose is crushingly dull (“The notion of pure procedural justice is best understood by a comparison with perfect and imperfect procedural justice”... yawn). Beyond the impersonal prose, however, the ideas are rather dynamic, kind of like a late-1960s Chanel gilt-chain sautoir: austere in the vitrine, but suddenly alive across the décolletage.
Rawls’s main concept is justice as fairness. Put very simply, a fair society is one in which we'd agree to its basic rules before knowing where in that society we ourselves would end up. We might be working eternally in fashion PR, or we might own the conglomerate that employs our overworked and underpaid agency. Or we might be sewing the garments for the conglomerate (and be even more overworked and underpaid). In other words, we shouldn’t get to design the game knowing which hand we’ll be dealt once we start to play.
Libra season (September 22 to October 23) is basically Rawlsian. During this time of year, the Cosmos is asking us to practise a similar kind of justice: to imagine fairness before we know which side of the scales we'll end up on. This requires fair terms of cooperation, impartiality, and reciprocity. All quintessentially Libran traits.
Librans are notoriously indecisive, forever weighing one option against another, seeing the merits of this position, then that one, then backtracking to the first
Clarisse Monhan
But, of course, those Libra scales can also be Libra’s undoing. Librans are notoriously indecisive, forever weighing one option against another, seeing the merits of this position, then that one, then backtracking to the first. Yet I would say (as would Rawls… and the Universe) that there’s a virtue in all that vacillation. It reminds us that our own interests are not the only ones that carry weight.
Now, Libra is ruled by Venus, the planet of attraction, sociability, pleasure, and harmony. The issue: Planet Love will be going retrograde midway through the season. Oops. From October 3rd, Venus will be compromised. Why? Whenever a planet goes retro, its influence gets wonky. In the case of Venus, this could mean life challenges related to Venusian themes: romance, love, beauty, and our charm factor.
Libra is associated, as well, with the 7th House of Relationships and Partnerships, a zone of the chart that emphasises the Other. This season indicates a time to set intentions around listening to a business partner who might not get a say – or a hubby who, because of your strong/domineering opinions, rarely gets his way.
While the retrograde involving Venus is the major transit of Libra season, it’s by no means the only one. The coming weeks will offer plenty of opportunities to practise all that Libran weighing, negotiating, and recalibrating. Here’s your full timeline: