“Tending the fire of Vesta” (1519) by Antonio Allegri Correggio (1489-1534). Fresco. Camera di San Paolo, Parma, Italy.
This winter our threshold crossing into the new year is marked by a handful of significant astrological events. These include the third, final square of Saturn and Uranus with their conflicting demands for stasis and change on December 23rd, and Jupiter entering its native sign of Pisces on December 28th, signaling a qualitative shift in how we will be drawn to seek meaning through May of 2022.
A less grand but equally important celestial movement in the inner sky is Venus in Capricorn turning retrograde on December 19th. Her retrograde dance occurs every 18 months, signaling a time in which reassessing our values becomes a priority. To what and with whom do we want to devote our time and energy? What do we find beautiful and worthy of our attention? What is the state of our self-value? What do we really cherish? Venus poses all these questions, beckoning us to slow down so to consider the presence or absence in our life of what we truly find important.
This Venus retrograde in Capricorn invites turning our attention to the inner hearth, to assess how well our value-fires are burning and what fuel they need to be kindled anew. It suggests being at the altar of the goddess Hestia, whom the Greeks and Romans worshipped as the living flame upon the hearth that burned day and night. In the Olympian zodiac Hestia rules Capricorn, which underscores the interior and meditative dimension of the sign.[i]
Hestia is a style of consciousness concerned with focusing our awareness inward and going deeper. Kindling the flames of interior space Hestia sanctifies turning inward. This requires patience because this Venus retrograde signifies a period of slowing down and turning back so to sort, retrieve, and discover what matters to us now. Hestia and Capricorn are both touched by the Senex—the aging authority who values slow processes that lead to wisdom. We may find ourselves facing a pile of ashes, recognizing what once carried our spark has in fact burned out. We may find that how we relate to a loved one needs reimagining. We may be faced with how we have been living in accord with values that are not our own but our family’s or the collective’s. That Venus is dancing beside Pluto when she turns suggests that part of what we may come to see and reckon with are husks that offer no fuel to our fire and must be let go.
Retrograde counsel includes pausing to be receptive to the shifts that are underway. At the altar of Hestia the goddess beckons presence rather than action. We could say that this goddess calls us to sacrifice our impulse to do and relinquish the allure of busyness and needing making things happen. Hestia consciousness is not attuned to doing, rather to a deep attentiveness to what is arising. At times we must cover our eyes to prepare for, and fully receive, an emerging in-sight.
In this dark I rest,
unready for the light which dawns
day after day,
eager to be shared.
Black silk, shelter me.
I need more of the night before I open
eyes and heart
to illumination. I must still
grow in the dark like a root
Not ready, not ready at all.
—“Eye Mask” by Denise Levertov
Resting in the darkness may be just the medicine we need at the end of a long and trying year. As Hestia’s flame burns quietly in our interior hearth, beyond its immediate pool of light, soft darkness holds us.
Hestia’s meditative strength can be imagined in many different ways. There are all sorts of practices to help rediscover your Venusian values and feed your fire including journaling as an excavation to uncover what is alive with its energy and what is not. The warm attention of a close friend in long conversation can make for the right kindling of insight. Being out in nature can allow the inner world to reveal itself in syncopation with your beating heart under the open sky.
Hestia personifies the power of containment, which I’ve previously described as “the necessary condition for the slow gestation of being the occurs in the deep recesses of one’s virginal interiority. This indwelling is the precondition for action rooted in authenticity.”[ii] The potential of this period is a renewed clarity around what truly matters if we are willing to mask our eyes from the world’s 24/7 light-filled demands and listen for the knowing that wants to be heard.
At the end of her retrograde on January 29th, Venus will conjoin with Vesta, the asteroid bearing Hestia’s Roman name which is represented by a flame. As an astrological principle, Vesta symbolizes exactly what I’ve shared here—that to which we are devoted and dedicate our precious and limited resources of attention, time and energy. The astrological and mythic synchrony is breathtaking. These two goddesses will clasp hands and slowly, gracefully, dance together for over a month into early March. These may be days where our renewed sense of what matters, where we find beauty and what we love becomes part of the foundations for building and moving ahead (Capricorn), grounded in our values.
Come on into this house of mine,
Hestia,
be gracious towards my song.
Notes
[i] In the Olympian zodiac 6 goddesses and 6 gods rules the signs as opposed to planets. See Ariel Guttman Mythic Astrology (2004), Rupert Gleadow The Origin of the Zodiac (1968).
[ii] Safron Rossi, The Kore Goddess: A Mythology & Psychology (2021), p. 70