War and Peace
Astro Notes for Libra Season (September 22-October 23, 2026)
Everyone looks forward to Libra season, right?
Libra is the Venus-ruled sign of peace, love, and harmony. Its season comes with beautiful Autumn days (in the northern hemisphere), leaves turning golden, and a lovely balance of day and night. It’s a time of year that reliably brings a sense of grace, calm, and poise.
Right?
Hahahahahaha.
Forgive my black humor, but this year’s Libra season is a little horror show, where once-banished ghouls crawl out from the underworld and turn our idyllic autumnal countryside into a bloody personal battlefield.
OK, I’m being dramatic, but I have my reasons.
Libra season this year is dominated by a Venus retrograde journey that begins October 4 and ends November 13. In my experience, Venus retrogrades are often emotionally arduous because they confront us so personally about matters of the heart.
What do I really value now? What is my true heart’s desire? Who do I really love? Where have I compromised the truth of my heart for security or approval?
These can be tough questions to answer at any time. And this Venus retrograde is taking place in Scorpio, the most intense, unrelentingly honest sign of the zodiac. Venus retrograde in Scorpio is a truth-seeking missile aimed at the most private corners of our hearts, demanding honest disclosure of our secret desires.
Unnerved yet? Just a little?
Wait, there’s more.
On the very day Venus turns retrograde, Mars (the God of War) forms an exact opposition with Pluto (the God of Hell). As you might guess, this meeting is always a riot. This dynamic is intensified and made more personal through a T-square with Venus and Mercury. Yes that’s right: newly retrograde Venus in Scorpio is simultaneously in a tense stand-off with the forces of defiant aggression and uncompromising power.
What could possibly go wrong?
Oh, and meanwhile, the mild-mannered Sun in Libra (which could have played the role of peace-broker) is being opposed by Saturn in Aries (sorry, no).
Why oh why did I schedule my dental repair work for this weekend? (True story.)
I honestly don’t know why I’ve adopted this tone of cynical humor for these Notes. (Can you tell I’m secretly relishing it? I guess my Venus retrograde journey has already begun…)
If I put on my evolutionary astrologer hat, however, there is in fact a discernible meaning to the madness.
The universe is not simply being sadistic. Every transit, no matter how brutal it may seem on the surface, serves a purpose.
During the last two years, we’ve experienced three once-in-a-lifetime astrological sequences that unambiguously signify our passage into a fundamentally new archetypal landscape: the unprecedented concentration of major planetary sign changes from November 2024 to July 2025 — like a forceful push out of a cosmic birth canal into a new era; the conjunction of Saturn and Neptune at 0 degrees of Aries in February this year, a profound symbol of global new beginnings that last occurred about 6,000 years ago; and the rare and auspicious ‘Barbault’s Basket’ in July, hailed by some as ‘the most beautiful configuration of the 21st century.’
We may have very mixed feelings about the new reality we’ve entered, but there’s no turning back. We’ve already crossed the threshold.
Now we’re entering a period of assimilation, in which the relational patterns and emotional contracts that belong to our old identity need to surface to consciousness. It’s like we’re playing catch-up on a personal level with the recent onslaught of global change. Before we can move forward into this new archetypal landscape, we’re being asked to look honestly at something much closer to home: the desires, relationships, loyalties, and compromises of the heart that may no longer belong to the person we are becoming.
This Libra season may therefore be less about maintaining the peace than discovering the conditions under which real relationship is possible. Although this task may involve a severe emotional test, there is something profoundly liberating about finally admitting what our heart knows to be true. If we’re courageous enough to risk exposing the truth of our heart, we stand to gain a degree of personal fulfillment and freedom that simply wasn’t available to us before. Indeed, we may finally find our personal lives coming into alignment with both our deepest aspirations and the evolutionary codes of the emerging era.
That may just be a prize worth getting a little bloodied for.
