Treasures of the Deep
Astro Notes for Scorpio Season (October 23-November 22, 2026)
Scorpio season begins this year at almost the exact mid-point of the 40-day Venus retrograde journey that began on October 3rd.
On the day the Sun entered Scorpio (Friday October 23), Venus met the Sun in a conjunction (cazimi) at 0° Scorpio. This marks a symbolic moment of rebirth, after which we begin to slowly emerge from the underworld with a renewed clarity about what we truly love and value.
The main story of Scorpio season is therefore the continuation and deepening of the very personal journey of the heart that began during Libra season.
When the Sun enters Scorpio, everything tends to intensify.
The Sun radiates conscious light wherever it shines. In Scorpio, it illuminates the depth dimension of the psyche, revealing that which has been hidden, buried, or forgotten. Scorpio brings the intensity of presence and searing honesty needed to stay with uncomfortable truths without flinching. Such an encounter is inherently transformative, as the energy once devoted to keeping aspects of our nature hidden or repressed becomes free to move in more creative and life-affirming ways.
The day after Venus’s cazimi, Mercury also turns retrograde in Scorpio. This creates the unusual situation of having both Venus and Mercury moving backward at the same time, with Mercury following Venus into the depths of Scorpio. This brings the mind’s attention into the same deep waters the heart has been swimming in over recent weeks. We may now seek to understand what really happened in past situations involving deep intimacy, sexuality, shared resources, and power. If something went wrong, we may be drawn to revisit those experiences and investigate their root causes.
This is unlikely, however, to be a pleasant stroll down memory lane. As Mercury moves backwards through Scorpio, it forms squares with the South Node, Jupiter, and Mars in Leo. We may experience a tension between the part of us that wants to penetrate beneath the surface and uncover uncomfortable truths, and a part that wants to defend our pride, protect our version of events, or simply move forward without dwelling on the past. Alternatively, these dynamics might play out in our relationships — one person wanting to have a serious conversation while the other prefers to minimize the issue and move on.
While Mercury moving retrograde in Scorpio is potentially stirring up uncomfortable truths, Venus re-enters Libra, offering a crucial counterbalance to Scorpio’s intensity.
How do we find a new equilibrium in relationships that have been disturbed by what we’ve discovered? Mercury is still looking for the truth, while Venus in Libra is looking for a way to live with that truth in relationship.
The deeper invitation of this Venus retrograde may not simply be to reconsider which relationships belong in our lives, but to evolve our relational capacities. We may be learning how to acknowledge difficult truths without losing our generosity toward one another’s perspectives. This more mature way of relating may be an essential part of how we bring our personal lives into alignment with the more integrative possibilities of this new era.
Another significant turning point arrives on November 13, when Venus and Mercury both station direct on the same day. We’ll likely experience this as a noticeable shift in the season’s energy, as our attention begins to turn outward again and we start moving forward in our lives with renewed clarity about our direction, especially in relation to the deeply personal questions of the heart we’ve been exploring over the preceding six weeks.
A word about intense transits, of which this Scorpio season has more than its fair share.
There really, truly is no such thing as a bad transit. Or a good one, for that matter. There is the eternal, ever-changing, unfolding now, saturated at every moment with the intelligence of the whole. From this view, each transit provides precisely what’s needed for the evolution of consciousness, both for the individual soul and the world soul.
It’s natural for us to prefer pleasure over pain. Our ego/personality self can’t help but approach astrology from the perspective of “what’s in it for me?” We look forward to the uplifting, expansive transits and steel ourselves for the challenging ones.
But we are more than our egos. Our deeper nature is not separate from the intelligence shaping the moment. Embracing expansive and challenging transits with equal openness and trust is not only an affirmation of faith in the intelligence of the cosmos, but also in the innate capacities of our own soul.
This is how astrology becomes a spiritual practice rather than a prop for the separate self.
My experience is that when I fully lean into the energies of any transit, even the intense ones, something feels right about it. It’s wonderful of course when a magical transit comes by and exciting doors of opportunity swing open. But just as we realize that we can’t always eat chocolate cake and ice cream, part of us understands that we need a variety of experiences to develop as a soul.
And the truth is, none of us can know in advance which experiences will prove most significant for our growth.
There’s an invitation this Scorpio season to be fully present to the journey into the depths of the heart, and to face what we find there with as much honesty and kindness as possible. There are treasures awaiting us in the depths that can only be unearthed through our willingness to descend.
