The week before the end of a Lunar Cycle leads us to a completion–within ourselves. As the cycle is in its waning phase, it’s about slowing down and integrating all that has transpired over this past month. All that has manifested from out of your own psyche into your experiential awareness.
In other words, whatever has been happening in your life since the last New Moon on August 16th is now being deeply processed and integrated into your subconscious as food for body, mind, and soul. This month began with a New Moon in Leo with Venus retrograde and the infamous “Game-Changer,” Uranus, involved.

For many, the theme has been about confronting deeply personal relationship issues that may have crept up as subtly as a lightning bolt! The now point of the waning last quarter half-moon arrives one week after the peak of the Pisces Full Moon and one week before the Virgo New Moon. It’s the mid-point now, where you may witness a “crossroads” arrive on your path or a pivotal point in the cycle that represents the need for reflection and, optimally, a redirection of your focus and awareness. This redirection often has something to do with the need to shift your perspective in some crucial way. How are you looking at the things unfolding in your life? How could you benefit from seeing things differently?
It’s essentially about opening up to a different way of understanding what’s going on in your life and expanding your point of view. We are always in a constant fluctuating state of expansion and contraction. We seek truth and value and incorporate and ground it into the self. Then we hit our own stagnancy and limitation, and in comes the need to expand and allow growth to continue. Stability and flow, eternal sisters.
This week will lead us into the Dark Moon phase, where we are guided to surrender to the unknown and let go before the new beginning yet again. One of the major events this week is Venus completing her retrograde cycle.The Venus cycle. Venus represents the desire to connect, relate, and partner. She is the Muse and all that provokes desire and inspiration. She is associated with the feminine, love, beauty, and the pleasures of the physical world.
Venus takes about eighteen months to travel a complete orbit around the Sun. For forty days during that time, it will go retrograde. During that time, it is considered the period where Venus goes into the Underworld of her own psyche (and perhaps that of others), as Persephone, Venus’s own shadow. From playful Muse to the Guide of Hells – of the psyche. The “hells” of course, are not literal but hypothetical in reference to the subconscious realms and that which has been buried, denied, oppressed, repressed, rejected, and abandoned.
The Venus retrograde time is about returning and reclaiming what has been lost from the heart, which threatens to steal your inspiration. This time represents that part of us that desires to go into the dark mystery. As Venus now ascends from out of the Underworld, we too, are rising into greater light and awareness from all that we have confronted and gained throughout these past forty days within our relationships.
We are in what’s called the shadow period. The time it takes for a planet to come out of the retrograded degrees and move into fresh new territory. For Venus, that will play out over the next month. We can imagine it like a slow walk from out of the Underworld through the bardos before the release.
This week sets the stage for the upcoming Virgo New Moon conjunct a Mercury Retrograde. That is a powerful emphasis on mental functions, implying in so many ways that the great healing right now is in the mind.