Venus in Capricorn Cycle January 1990, 1998, 2006, 2014 and 2022

by Daniel Giamario, edited by Cayelin K Castell

On January 15, 2022  Venus began a new 584 day “synodic” cycle.* Depending on your location and the visibility of the horizon, Venus appeared brightly and dramatically just before sunrise over the Eastern horizon. This is called the Venus heliacal rise, meaning to rise with the Sun.

The Sumerians, Babylonians, and Meso-Americans, among many others, began the Venus cycle with the heliacal rise. Experiential and shamanically oriented astrologers, who literally follow the hermetic dictum, “As Above, So Below, As Without, So Within,” also use the visible earth-centered Venus cycle as the basis for interpretation and archetypal awareness.

This article was first written for the Venus cycle that began on January 22, 1998. We are now 16 years from that time. Much of this article still applies.

Venus represents the world feminine principle: the goddess for women, and the animas, or internal source of creativity and eros, for men. In Shamanic Astrology, the suggested imagery for the Capricorn Venus archetype is: the responsible woman administering her domain, the elder, the matriarch herself, she who knows and implements the law. Capricorn is the archetypal “overtone” for the entire 584 days following the January heliacal rise of Venus. A nearly identical Venus cycle occurred 24 years ago with the heliacal rise of Venus, on January 25, 1990, at 25 degrees Capricorn. T* years ago Venus rose in Capricorn on January 20, 2006.

The previous Venus cycle from June of 2012 to January of 2014 was in Gemini. Gemini and Capricorn overtones are quite different. Whereas Capricorn expresses as the tribal elder, responsibly administering her domain, Gemini is the eternal youth, trickster, heyokah-coyote woman.

Some suggested ways to work with this cycle are as follows. Gain awareness and celebrate the seven or eight Venus/Moon conjunctions in the morning and evening skies. Create ceremonies for the underworld times. Notice how this works in the lives of friends and clients. See for yourself if it works to use the seven chakras.

We welcome your feedback as these are the times to drape new stories and a new mythos on the planetary cycles.

.*Note: “Synodic” is from the Greek word synodos, meaning meeting. In this context the word synodic is being used to indicate the cyclical meeting of a planet when it returns to a given starting point as seen from the Earth, in this case heliacal rise to heliacal rise.