The Dance of Venus
Inanna's Descent — A Nine-Month Initiation into the Underworld · December 2026 – August 2027
The path of the Feminine is danced by the stars and written in stone.
As Venus, the Morning Star, descends toward the horizon, She compels a deeply subconscious process that dismantles the false ego and clears static and distortion from the energetic field. Mythologically, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, walks Her descent to meet her Sister, the Dark Goddess, in exile.
As above, so below.
Venus, Inanna, Soul and Psyche, Feminine Consciousness descending as one.
This is an invitation to plumb the depths of the psyche and descend into the dark.
Allow that which no longer resonates to dissolve into pure consciousness.
Each month, Venus meets the crescent Moon and opens an energetic gate; a portal through which the creative, intuitive, Feminine aspect of consciousness may empower and activate our light bodies.
Timed by the monthly Venus–Moon conjunction, The Dance of Venus holds sacred space for nine energetic initiations, as immortalized 4000 years ago in the world's first written myth, The Descent of Inanna.
Inanna, Queen of Heaven, turns her ear toward the Great Below and chooses to descend into the Underworld. At each of 7 gates, she surrenders a vestment, a sacred power or divine ME, until she stands naked before her own Shadow, her Sister in exile, Ereshkigal.
This is not loss. It is initiation.
The psychospiritual process the Venus cycle facilitates continuously guides us to unbecome: to clear layers of conditioning, decolonize the mind, denounce domination culture, and liberate the Feminine.
Nine months of descent is 9 months of alchemical dissolution.
What dies in the dark is who we are not. What is reborn is more You; integrated, embodied, more capable of wielding Her power.
As above, so below: the Venus cycle as a sacred descent.
Venus transiting the Zodiac, a mermaid plumbing the depths of the psyche.
Inanna descending into the Underworld, the Goddess leading humanity's metamorphic unbecoming.
WHO THIS IS FOR
Women in their 40s and 50s, standing at the threshold of midlife.
For those who have felt successful doing what they were supposed to do, only to realize it wasn't quite what they wanted to do.
What looks like collapse is actually initiation. What the world calls a crisis, your Soul is calling you Home.
You climbed the ladder: did what you were supposed to do, achieved what you thought you wanted, and found it strangely hollow.
You feel the aridity beneath so-called success, the sense of performing a Self that is not quite you.
The wisdom of your body is speaking and you are ready to listen.
The Feminine polarity, the felt, instinctual, primal knowing, is asking to come Home.
The Dance of Venus will meet you there.
Spiritual Alchemy is not for the faint of heart! To descend is to be stripped energetically naked, gate by gate, bowed low at the entrance to the Underworld. This is a surrender of the small, conditioned, false self… not a self-improvement plan.
WRITTEN IN THE SKY
The Venus cycle writes the calendar for our descent.
The Retrograde Info Session
Saturday, October 24, before The Dance commences in December, revel in a single, complimentary gathering tied to Venus retrograde (October 3 – November 14, 2026) and Her meeting with the Sun in the metamorphic Underworld, when Venus vanishes from the evening sky to be reborn before dawn.
This session stands complete on its own: the story of Inanna, the
shape of the Venus cycle, a sound meditation and a first taste of The Work.
It also opens the door.
Those who feel the call are invited to descend into Self as Venus descends in the sky, and Inanna descends in consciousness. Meet Venus in her disappearance. Stay for the entire descent, or for an initiation into the season.
Those who answer the call to descend within 1 week of the retrograde info session, by October 31, will receive special "Evening Star" pricing for The Dance of Venus.
Those who answer the call to descend within 1 week of the retrograde info session, by October 31, will receive special "Evening Star" pricing for The Dance of Venus.
THREADED THROUGH THE DESCENT
The wisdom that holds us.
Three women's work threads through this nine-month initiation, creating a safety net for your unbecoming, unraveling, unfurling.
PSYCHOLOGY
Maureen Murdock
Wrote The Heroine's Journey as an answer to her teacher, Joseph Campbell, who once said, "Women don't need to make the journey." Murdock mapped the descent, not a call to adventure, but a wound: a spiritual, egoic death, where the hard-won boon rings hollow and what was cast off as weakness is reclaimed as power. These stages are woven into each of our initiatory gates.
MYTH
Sylvia Brinton Perera
A Jungian analyst who wrote Descent to the Goddess, reading Inanna's fall as the exact initiation Murdock's "daughter of the patriarchy" requires. Her core insight: wholeness cannot be climbed toward, only descended into.
LIVED
Becky Shanks
My own descent began at 38, compelled by retrograde Venus meeting my natal Mars, a Nodal return, and transiting Pluto squaring my natal Pluto, conjunct my Libra Ascendant and North Node. …Astrospeak for the perfect storm for death and rebirth in service of the Soul.
Around age 40 during my 5th Venus return, I began studying the Venus cycle and the Sumerian myth The Descent of Inanna.
The mythic stopped being metaphor when I realized the timing of my Dark Night of the Soul correlated to the rise and fall, the movements of Venus, my ruling planet.
Full essays regarding Maureen Murdock and Sylvia Brinton Perera await in Go Deeper. Dive in; their work is foundational for this sacred container.
THE SIGNS & THEIR GODDESSES
The Pantheon of the Descent
As Venus transits the Zodiac, She expresses every facet of the Feminine from Aries to Pisces, Aphrodite to Kali. At each monthly portal, adorned in the archetypal robe of the astrological sign Venus is transiting, the Goddess of the Gate, Guardian of the Threshold, presides — a pantheon to be invoked, gate by gate, in ceremony:
Persephone and the Threshold. Sekhmet in the Underworld. Artemis pierces the Third Eye. Saraswati sings open the Throat. Kwan Yin melts the Heart. Freya arms the Solar Plexus. Hathor wakes the Sacral. Isis grounds the Root.