Venus in Scorpio: Walking the Underworld Depths with Isis, Thoth, and Jean Michel

This story starts with Cacao on the threshold of a new chapter and I want to share this sacred moment with you. Like most of us, I take time daily for ritual and meditation, but on some days the devotion goes deeper and I hold a personal ceremony. This was one of those days—a ceremony held with the intention of welcoming Ruk'u'x Ulew Cacao back into my world, marking the beginning of a whole new personal chapter.

The morning began with my sacred space calling for cleansing. Afterwards, I sat in my usual spot in front of my altar mat and listened for guidance. I have had a living altar running that has been dedicated to and overseen by Sekhmet for most of this year, and what I heard in the quiet was surprising and magical.

I have to admit, I was expecting to hear Cacao’s spirit first, but when I closed my eyes, it was Isis and Thoth who appeared. The penny dropped: Isis as Venus, Thoth as Mercury. They were anchoring into my sacred space for my personal interpretation of the celestial movements into the watery depths of Scorpio.

The Inner Sanctum within my heart that I built for Sekhmet opened its doors, and Sekhmet welcomed them in. Thoth entered first, and Sekhmet joked, "There isn't much space in here," as my naos—the holy heart chamber—expanded to hold him.

Then Isis appeared at the threshold of the naos, gazing at me. As I watched, Sekhmet and Isis merged into one. A ripple of raw energy moved through my entire body.

With the inner-world changes complete, I followed guidance to reorganise my physical altar to hold the exact energies required for this next phase of sacred work. Letting my human expectations lead me, I went to open my cacao flask, but another voice stopped me. It was Cacao’s spirit.

She told me to take the unopened block of cacao I had brought in to honour her, and place it directly beneath the altar items to complete the new arrangement. The moment I did, words began flowing through me. I reached for my pen, and this is what came through...

"The Many Ways to Die"

There are many ways to die, the toughest, yet wisest is to lose yourself completely. When the old that is not required is bound so tightly to the old that is required, there is nothing to do but die.

To transform, transmute, one must dissolve, one must return to elemental form and be shaken from one shape to another. Only then can the old that is required rise and return.

The beauty though, is that the rise is now stronger than ever, for when one has been shaken; they come back unshakeable.

When one has died; they become eternal.

Do you see? Life is a series of deaths.

 Have a feast day for your old self the needed & not. Shake, move your body, and close your eyes to see the particles rearrange themselves.

As you do, notice that something is missing; it is the presence of fear, because death and dying are now known.

Rebirth yourself into your inner-world, cradle yourself as the babe that has arrived in a new world. Grow and live with the many lenses over your eyes that have taught you so much.

Only then can dying drop away, becoming a single breath, a night of sleep, a change in life's path; A completion of who you were that now knows not to hold on so tight because its job is complete, and that it will never be gone, just transformed.

That is the real beauty of dying you see - from what was, what is, has become.

The Watery Venus in Scorpio Depths

We are stepping into a profound cosmic landscape. Venus diving into Scorpio is Isis descending into the underworld—the archetypal journey of searching through the dark, gathering the shattered pieces of Osiris, bringing them home, and allowing the old form to dissolve so the true magic can rise. 

It is the courageous willingness to go into the deepest waters to face what needs to be seen, nurtured or transformed, and let what is dead fall away.

But this time, Venus doesn't walk the dark alone. She walks alongside Thoth (Mercury in Scorpio) - the embodiment of the Higher Mind, Universal Truth, and Divine intellect.

When your desire, heart, and subtle bodies (Isis) descend into the dark accompanied by your absolute Higher Truth (Thoth), the entire nature of the inner-world changes. You are no longer stumbling through the dark in fear, panic, or emotional chaos. 

Thoth holds the lantern of unshakeable clarity. You cross the threshold no longer unfamiliar of shadows, and as an initiate who has walked this path a thousand times before—this time doing it through the lens of your Soul - with total mastery, quiet authority, and clear vision.

Venus entered her retrograde on Saturday 3rd October in Scorpio until 24th October where she then sits in the same position in the sky as the sun-called a cazimi-and the middle point or heart of her retrograde. She continues her backwards movement but from 25th October until 13th November she will sit in Libra. She crosses the cusp or threshold whilst re-evaluating her inner-world.

Mercury turns retrograde on 24th October until 13th November staying in Scorpio where he has been since 1st October, rather than shifting signs like Venus. But he is there, with her, holding the torch of her deepest inner wisdom like a lighthouse for her to return to.

Simply put, Scorpio will intensify this descent. We will feel everything that our own inner Venus-Isis and inner Mercury-Thoth go through more deeply.

Both Mars and Pluto rule Scorpio, and there are many moments through this journey where these planets position themselves with one another to intensify the journey even more.

The way I see it as a Scorpio myself - Scorpio isn't ever trying to be intense; it is just deep, deep water. And water that deep doesn't understand "hot water" or "cold water", to Scorpio it's just deep familiar expanse of water, and there is so much of it that it just is.

There has been a lead-up to this descent over the last couple of weeks, perhaps you have felt it? A sense of a standstill, all planets do that before they turn retrograde. Within that standstill, there is a moment to gather from within yourself any wisdom about what it is you are going to walk through this journey with. Don't worry if you haven't felt it, you can pause and reflect at any time through this journey, in fact, doing so often will help you navigate your inner risings and divings.

Venus is about our values, our relationships, love, femininity, and those Taurus and Libra traits—from the material side of spending money on things that make us feel good, to the Libra element of balance, fairness, and reciprocity. Depending on who we are and what we are going through, there will be areas of life where one or more of these themes will really stand out.

But this isn't just a retrograde for Venus, it is her time to move from her place in the sky as the evening star to the morning star, when she sets on the Western horizon, she returns from the plunge into the watery inner-world rising in the East after what needed to drop away and dissolve has done so during her cazimi.

And there is more. This Venus retrograde, and shift from evening to morning Star is also at the threshold of her Star-point changing. This happens every 8 years so we can learn a lot by looking back to what happened for us in 2018 to see what may be rising again to re-evaluate, deepen, sharpen and rise from within you.

Mercury is the messenger of the gods, and for me, he is undeniably Thoth. Thoth is one of the oldest gods, which is why he represents universal truth—he is there at the beginning of time, holding the knowledge of everything. He knows what messages to bring and when. People often talk about Mercury retrograde as a time to avoid signing contracts because it is so mind-based, but here we have Venus and Mercury together. They are holding hands like the heart and the mind, bringing higher love and wisdom together as they dive into the deep, intense waters of Scorpio.

I was born on the Libra-Scorpio cusp at 4:50 a.m. on the 24th of October, and Venus and Mercury are my birth chart rulers. So this is a very, very potent and visceral celestial journey for me. Those with more Venus and Mercury in their chart, or more Scorpio (ruled by Pluto and Mars), will feel this deeply, but everybody will feel it in some way.

Since the moment that my Altar and naos invited Thoth and Isis inside I have felt a very visceral shift taking place. Everything that both Venus and Mercury represent has been churning in my lower cauldron, the ingredients changing, the wounds healing, the arrival of 'what is to come and become' slowly rising like steam from the soup of my life. Have you felt your own version of it too? It isn't quite clear but its there. The question is how deep are you prepared to surrender into the waters to discover what is there to be transformed?

The Descent Begins:

Sometimes there are unmistakable events and happenings that help us to surrender to what we wouldn't usually be prepared to go through. This Venus retrograde caught me off guard with something that has quite literally torn my life apart, right in the middle of writing this piece. If you notice the mood change, my apologies.

After spending the morning writing this on Saturday 3rd October with the intention of completing it by the afternoon, I took a break to move my body and realised that I hadn't seen Jean Michel all day. My grumpy old man cat (16 years old), but loyal friend and companion. He has been with me since 2010, when he arrived out of the blue outside my mum's neighbours house with all of his fluffy fur shaved off, except his tail and mane.

I decided to go and check up on him - he is usually over at one of our elderly neighbours houses, he likes to keep them company. When I arrived they told me they hadn't seen him and I started to worry.

After calling and looking in all the usual places, I went up to my bedroom to call from the window like I sometimes do. I spotted him straight away in our next door neighbours front garden and my heart stopped for a moment as I waited to see if he moved. He did. But when I went to get him, his left back leg was in a very bad way.

He purred and looked at me as if he was so happy to see me. After a gruelling few hours of vet visits and less and less good news, I decided bringing him home with pain relief instead of risking anaesthetic and x-rays due to his heart and age. The pain relief seemed to help and he carefully stood to eat some food. But then, I turned around to see him lying down. He let out a meow like I'd never heard before and took his last breath.

Venus, Scorpio, Mercury, why did you take him from me? Why today? What are you trying to show me?

Sitting here after little sleep and in the depths of grief that I can only liken to losing my Mother, I know that it is both/and.

Jean Michel left me on this day to remind me that I must let something go, a cruel feeling lesson in this moment. He left two Venus cycles after entering my life. He also left for his own reasons. His own descent that he needed to take by leaving his physical body.

I'm broken and vulnerable again - exactly how one needs to be to descend as deep as the skies are asking us to.

I made a declaration yesterday, did the universe respond by taking his life? Did he play the role of Mercury-Thoth and deliver a message I am yet to decipher? Here is the declaration I made before finding Jean Michel:

I'm taking this opportunity to bravely acknowledge and speak into the world that what I want to die is this part of me that continuously tells me that everything I'm sharing isn't really going to have an impact—when it does. There's a part of me that knows that, and that's the part that will rise through this journey.

I was driving to school with my daughter this week, and she wrote this amazing poem about one of our cats, Jean Michel. We were talking about it on the way to school because I was so proud of her, and I just wanted her to know how spectacular it really was. I said to her about coming back to my own work and how I need to be brave like she was in writing that poem and just putting my words out there—sharing my truth just for the sake of doing it because it's something that lights me up. I told her that I write things and then tell myself that nobody really wants to hear it. I asked her, "Do you do that?" And she said no. She's a very quiet girl, so much going on inside, but she said she wouldn't care what other people think. If she believes it, she would say it or write it.

In that moment, she felt like Venus guiding me, Isis guiding me, Hathor guiding me, Nekhbet guiding me. Because if my daughter can sit there and be that brave at 11 years old, then why can't I? Her poem was about someone she loves, it was her beautiful innocent and sacred perspective of the life she leads and the feline beings she has been accompanied by her whole life.

As somebody who has this ability, has this wisdom, and loves to support people to discover what they have within themselves, of course I need to vocalise that about myself. I do it in the private space of my sanctuary, and I love it. Yet, it's not really doing the world any good if I keep it within these closed doors. I think that's what Sekhmet has been teaching me this year, and I think that's why she merged with Isis to remind me that I can do this.

ts time walk this underworld journey with courage, truth and unshakeable heart, like Sekhmet, Isis and Thoth. You see, I'm tired of my own unhelpful behaviour of thinking that my voice, my views, and my wisdom isn't going to be useful. That is the old part of me that really needs to die, and that's what I'm going to take through this celestial journey.

No matter how many times we walk the journeys on our life path, we will always move through cyclical patterns of growth, loss, change—death and rebirth. If we do so with our eyes on more than the human journey, we can learn the blueprint of the path: the framework behind it all. It can show us a map that both stays the same and changes—your body, your sacred vessel, and your deeply-expansive inner world.

You don't need to know the answer or have the right, perfect intention of what you're going into one of these journeys with. You can't even guess what is right around the corner. You just need to have that feeling and that knowing that this is going to transform you—that the things that are going to die will do so, and the things that need to rise will do so.

I may have been given more grief to move through, but I have also been given the Divine Alignment of my latest co-creation - Inner Worlds and Gateways. A six week journey through the sacred subtle anatomy of who we are. The timing of this journey will accompany you all the way through the Venus & Mercury - Isis & Thoth celestial event.

If you would like to navigate your inner-worlds and embody wisdom about who you are, then join me on this journey: Inner Worlds & Gateways.

Please note that I have changed the days and time from Thurdays at 7pm to Fridays at 10am.

With love from the rawness of my Heart,

Gemma x