AR1944, the massive sunspot discovered on the Sun, sent out a powerful X-class flare yesterday that was many times larger than the one in this image, which was taken in May 2013.

We’re just four days from Venus’ vibrational union with the Sun, her first in Capricorn since January 2006.  An eight-year cycle in our relationship with the Cosmic Feminine is drawing to an end in the next four days.  On Saturday, our Star will turn its radiant fire on all that is irrelevant and superfluous about how and why we love. The field will be cleared for a new structure to contain and nurture what we love and value most.

Her conjunction with the Sun marks the halfway point in Venus’ vision quest, which continues until January 31.  It takes place in a sky with the greatest massing of planets in Capricorn since January 1995.  And it will be just 10 days after a Capricorn New Moon, when the Sun and Moon were conjoined with both Pluto and Mercury.  That power-packed New Moon inscribed the year 2014 with the world-changing potency of the Pluto-Uranus square, and the profound and ancient energy that both Pluto and Venus awaken in Capricorn.

As Venus approaches our Star, one of the largest sunspots to be seen on the Sun in years has turned its face towards the Earth.  Sunspots are vortices of the transformational high-frequency vibrations.  Called AR1944, this one is teeming with the powerful flares with which the Sun seeds our star system — including our own consciousness. Some of the dozens of dark cores in this tremendous sunspot are three times the size of Planet Earth. Yesterday, AR1944 sent out a powerful X-class flare, many times larger than the one in the image below, taken in May 2013.

Our Star is signaling you and me and our entire Cosmic community with energetic information about the great shift we are all moving deeper and deeper into. Venus will be receiving more of the details on Saturday. All of us are about to begin a new cycle in our relationship with Love.

The transformative power of the retrograde vision quests of Venus has stirred the human heart, soul, and imagination since the days of the ancient Sumerians who called her Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth.

The Transfiguration of the Goddess: The Chart for the Venus-Sun Conjunction

In the chart cast for Washington, DC at the moment of the exact conjunction, which occurs at 7:24 a.m. EST, Venus and the Sun are rising — a most auspicious sign.  Squaring Vesta, the priestess and widelky squaring Mars.  In the exact conjunction and as long as she remains within 17 minutes of the Sun, Venus will be transfigured with incandescent clarity.  Wherever we have 21 degrees of Capricorn in our birth charts, we will feel this moment of metamorphosis.

Luna will be sending Venus the powerful support of a trine, from the last minute of the last degree of Taurus.  The sign of the fertile, abundant earth is one of the two signs that Venus rules. From her other sign — Libra — Mars will be squaring her.  The unprecedented eight months that the Cosmic Warrior — who, we should never forget, the Goddess of Love found irresistible — is spending in Libra appears to be a kind of re-education.

Pointing to the purpose of this conjunction, and its work in our consciousness, is the Scorpio Midheaven.  It’s situated on the midpoint between the North Node, and its evolutionary energy, and Saturn. The presence of the planet that the astrologers of the ancient world called the Guardian at the Gates on one side of the Midheaven and the North Node on the other tells us a great deal about the power of this meeting between Venus and the Sun:  If we follow its call to us, we can create something enduring that will anchor the evolutionary purposes of these times.

The Cosmic Feminine and the Transformational Journey

The ancient astrologers of Sumer, a region of city-states in what is now Iraq, were the first to see in the cycles of Venus a distinctively feminine energy of transformation and regeneration.  Later forms of the descending and returning goddess Inanna were Persephone and Prosperina.

Strikingly, both of the asteroids bearing the energy of the later goddesses are now closely conjunct in Capricorn.  They are on either side of a triple conjunction with Psyche, who was the first woman to be made divine in the Deep Time when the boundaries between worlds were far more transparent than they have since become.

Unlike the male heroes and warriors who were became immortal, Psyche was honored not for her feats of prowess.  In fact, she failed at the tasks that were assigned to her.  What softened the heart of the Divine was Psyche’s willingness to follow her heart, even when it meant attempting the impossible.  Perhaps Venus herself now calls each of us to do the same.

Like the Moon, Venus has played a pivotal role in the squares of Uranus and Pluto that are creating the transformational vortex that is reshaping our lives and our world.  The first of their seven vibrational clashes, in June 2012, occurred less than three weeks after Venus passage across the face of our Star, the closing act in a once-every-130-years phenomenon.

Walking Inanna’s Path in the Modern World

As we have passed through the successive initiatory gateways opened within us by Uranus and Pluto, many of us have found ourselves traveling the ancient path of Inanna.  That was name the Sumerian people called Venus.  In the retrograde vision quests that take Earth’s sister planet beneath the Earth’s horizon every 19 months — rising again, reborn, on the opposite side of the sky — the Sumerians saw the outlines of a life-restoring journey by the planet they regarded as Queen of Heaven and Earth.

Inanna’s journey to the Underworld to meet her dark sister, Erishkegal, where her fate was to hang, a rotting corpse, on a meat hook, is the oldest story on Earth recorded in the earliest form of a book.  It is also the oldest story of a Divine Being descending into the Underworld to undergo a profound transformation, from life to death to rebirth — and thus to regenerate life itself.  

This is the great journey now taking place within each of us, in a Cosmos charged as never before with the energies of transformation.. Today, the Goddess within moves towards the point of her transfiguration.