The Dance of Venus
A Nine-Month Initiation into the Underworld · Jan–Aug 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,
descends to meet her Sister, the Dark Goddess.
As above, so below.
Venus and Inanna, Soul and Psyche, Feminine Consciousness Spiral As One
From the Great Above She opened her ear to the Great Below.
From the Great Above the Goddess opened her ear to the Great Below.
From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below.
My Lady abandoned heaven and earth to descend to the underworld.
Inanna abandoned heaven and earth to descend to the underworld.
She abandoned her office of holy priestess to descend to the underworld.
—The Descent of Inanna, circa 1700 BCE—
The Dance of Venus is an invitation to plumb the depths of the psyche; to descend into the dark, and allow all that 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 polarity of consciousness may empower and activate our light bodies. The Dance of Venus is a monthly {VIRTUAL} offering intended to bring awareness to this unconscious process; to make the unseen seen.
Timed by the monthly Venus–Moon conjunction, The Dance of Venus holds sacred space for nine energetic initiations, as immortalized by the Sumerians 4000 years ago in the world's first written myth, The Descent of Inanna.
The 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.
John Martineau, The Kiss of Venus
This is not loss. It is initiation.
The psychospiritual process facilitated by Venus continuously guides us to unbecome: to clear layers of conditioning, decolonize the mind, denounce domination culture, and liberate the Feminine.
What dies in the dark is who we are not. What is reborn is more You: integrated, embodied, more capable of wielding Her power… Nine months of descent is nine months of alchemical dissolution: Venus transiting the Zodiac, a mermaid plumbing Scorpio's murky waters of the subconscious. Inanna descends into the Underworld, the Goddess orchestrating the heroine's journey.
What Looks Like Collapse Is Initiation.
What the World Calls a Crisis is Your Soul Calling You Home.
WHO IS THIS FOR?
Women standing at the threshold of midlife.
You feel unfulfilled. You have what you thought you wanted, and it feels strangely hollow.
You feel the aridity beneath so-called success, the constriction and slow simmer of performing a Self that is not quite you.
You feel FINE: fucked up, insecure, neurotic and emotional. Apathetic and moody, your lust for life is seriously lacking.
You are constantly bored, grieving what was, wondering if this is all there is, while worrying about the future.
You no longer sleep at night because you are too busy solving the world’s problems instead.
You feel existential concern, emotional overwhelm and burnout, preoccupation with relationships, career, appearance.
You are isolated, lonely, bummed out and seeking a community of like-minded women who are doing The Work.
The wisdom of your body is speaking and you are ready to listen: you have been diagnosed with an inexplicable illness or chronic dis-ease.
You crave rituals of devotion and renewal: tend to the garden of mind, nourish the temple of body, purify the waters of emotion.
You are ready to surrender what you should be doing and what you need to do, so you might discover what your Soul desires from life.
The Feminine polarity, your felt, instinctual, primal knowing, is asking you to come Home.
The Dance of Venus will meet you there.
Spiritual Alchemy is not for the faint of heart! To descend is to strip down, gate by gate, bowed low and energetically naked at the entrance to the Underworld. This is a surrender of the small, conditioned, false self, not a self-improvement plan.
THE INVITATION
From the Great Above, she opened her ear to the Great Below.
Saturday, October 24, 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 intention setting; 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.
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 both the Dark Night of the Soul and midlife unravelling correlated heavily to the rise and fall of Venus, my ruling planet.
PSYCHOLOGY
Maureen Murdock
Wrote The Heroine's Journey as an answer to her teacher, Joseph Campbell, who 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 achievments rings hollow and what was cast off as weakness is reclaimed as power. These stages are woven into each of our initiatory gates.
MYTHOLOGY
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.
PHENOMENOLOGY
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.
*Full essays regarding Maureen Murdock and Sylvia Brinton Perera await in Go Deeper. Dive in; their work is foundational for this sacred container.
The Pantheon of the Descent
THE SIGNS & THEIR GODDESSES
As Venus transits the Zodiac, she expresses every facet of the Feminine from Aries to Pisces, Aphrodite to Kali.
Presiding over each monthly Venus-Moon conjunction, adorned in the astrological archetype of the sign Venus is transiting, beckons the Goddess of the Gate and Guardian of the Threshold — a pantheon invoked, as Inanna descends, gate by gate:
Persephone ushers the Threshold. Artemis pierces the Third Eye.
Saraswati vibrates open the Throat. Kwan Yin melts the Heart.
Freya guards the Solar Plexus. Hathor wakes the Sacral. Isis re-members the Root.
Sekhmet alchemizes the Underworld. Aphrodite Urania adorns the Goddess.
The Dance of Venus
On October 24, at inferior conjunction in Scorpio, Venus passes directly between Earth and the Sun.
Through the autumn months, the planet of relationship, currency, beauty, rises in the pre-dawn sky. On January 4, 2027, Venus reaches greatest elongation, her pinnacle height and full radiance as Morning Star, then begins to fall toward the horizon.
Morning by morning, Venus descends, lower and lower through the winter, spring and summer, until she meets the Sun at superior conjunction in Leo on August 12, 2027. Venus disappears from view altogether, as the Feminine archetype is purified in the light of the Sun.
When Venus passes behind the Sun, she is farthest from Earth and navigating her longest disappearance from view — some 40 days in the dark — and the depth of her descent… the Underworld itself; the place where Inanna meets the Dark Goddess, Ereshkigal, her sister who exists outside the patriarchy. Struck down, turned into a corpse, hung upon a peg. Inanna dies in the heart of the lion, where she is sprinkled with the water and food of life. Then she ascends.
This is the medicine the Dance and the descent teaches: not conquest, but being with, presence serving as the “terrible empathy” that consecrates grief, and so returns a woman to her own dark, generative Source. What is surrendered in the Underworld is surrendered for keeps. What returns is not the old Self restored, but a woman regenerated, restructured, reborn, carrying an authority that no longer answers to any conditional external source.
The Nine Gates
January 2, 2027 — September 25, 2027
The Dance of Venus commences January 2, 2027, celebrating the Venus Cycle, embodying the Heroine’s Journey, ritualizing Inanna's descent into the Underworld. The dates below, the monthly Venus–Moon conjunctions, delineate our time together. They are not placeholders… they are natural time.
The portal of initiation opens in Scorpio, the sign of transmutation, death, rebirth. Venus is a brilliant crescent at maximum height in the morning sky, preparing to descend. The psyche consents to leaving the daylight Self: the roles, the competence, the life that works. The Heroine feels the pull of the Great Below and chooses it, the first separation from the life she has created. And like Inanna, you open your ear to the Underworld and turn willingly toward the dark.
Fully adorned, She chooses to descend.
VENUS AND INANNA EMBARK ON THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY
Identification with the Masculine
January 2, 2027
Venus in Scorpio · Crown Chakra · the Gate of Authority
Venus is high and bright in the morning sky and farthest from the Sun, as our descent begins. At the crown, the emblem of who you are at the top, the Heroine releases borrowed authority: the internalized voice of the fathers and the rules about who she is permitted to be. As Inanna surrenders the crown of the steppe, you give up the symbol of sovereignty-from-above. This is the first yielding, and the most difficult.
The Road of Trials
January 30, 2027
Venus in Sagittarius · Third Eye · the Gate of Perception
Venus is descending toward the horizon. In Sagittarius, the Heroine meets ogres and dragons on the journey of life. Little knowings collected and worn like jewelry, the ego that must be right, thoughts that veil the truth. As Inanna surrenders the small lapis beads from Her neck, you lay down the small certainties strung one to the next into a tidy story of what's real. What returns, unstrung, is raw seeing.
The Boon & Its Hollowness
February 27, 2027
Venus in Aquarius · Throat Chakra · the Gate of Communication
Venus continues her descent, sinking lower and lower in the morning sky. At the throat, the Heroine surrenders the voice that performed: the agreeable, achieving voice that won success and cost her Self; the decree others hooked onto her; words once latent, truths left unspoken, the voice withhold, doubled at the breast. As Inanna surrenders the twin egg-shaped beads from Her breast, you surrender the performed voice so the true note, the frequency and vibration that is yours alone, can finally resonate.
The Death of the False
Apr 3, 2027
Venus in Pisces · Heart Chakra · the Gate of Compassion
Low in the sky now, separating from the Sun, Venus reaches Pisces, and the heart's armor softens in the waters of consciousness. Inanna surrenders her breastplate, as the Heroine awakens to the aridity beneath success, the emptiness that achievement could not fill. Release the wounds of betrayal, blocks to feeling, the life that cost you your Self, the armor of needing to feel wanted.
Healing the Wounded Masculine
May 4, 2027
Venus in Aries · Solar Plexus · the Gate of Personal Power
Venus continues to descend in the morning sky. In Aries's initiating fire, the Heroine meets the Masculine within, the inner Mars. She separates her power and will from the baggage that belongs to others: the empath's armor, the anger and fear she has carried for the world. Inanna's surrenders her ring, the seal of sovereign will, worn on the hand that grasps and commands. What is truly hers, she keeps; the rest, she lays to rest. The distortions of the Masculine are disarmed, your will returned to devotion.
The Gate of Creativity
May 29, 2027
Heroine's Journey · Yearning for the Feminine
Venus in Taurus · Sacral Chakra
Just above the horizon, Venus is at home in earthy Taurus. The Heroine feels the urgent yearning to reconnect with the Feminine she left behind. As Inanna surrenders the lapis measuring rod and line from her hand, you lay down the rod that measures and ranks: the ruler held against your body, your desire, your creativity, your worth. The old guarding of the wombspace releases — artistic blocks, neediness, the shame that drove desire into hiding — and flow returns: creativity and eros cultivated through pleasure, rest and the body's natural rhythm.
Healing the Mother/Daughter Split
July 3, 2027
Venus in Cancer · Root Chakra · the Gate of Manifestation
A sliver above the horizon, at the very edge of visibility now, Venus enters Cancer, the Great Mother and maternal line. The Heroine heals the mother/daughter split: the severed belonging, fears of survival, wounding of the I Am presence. As Inanna surrenders her royal robe, the last covering falls: the veil that says, "I am someone. I have a place. I am a queen. I am a daughter.” There is nothing left to defend, just a living body on Earth, reclaimed as sacred ground, honored as an expression of the Divine.
Descent to the Goddess
July 31, 2027
Venus in Leo · Earth Star Chakra · Meeting Ereshkigal
Venus meets the Sun in its home sign, Leo, the sign of the lion and Inanna's ancient emblem. Inanna meets her death: struck down, turned to a corpse, hung upon a peg. She meets Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, her sister and Shadow. To meet Ereshkigal is to face the disowned Dark Feminine, the rage, the grief, the raw generative power the patriarchy taught you to fear in your body. She cannot be fixed or fled, only witnessed; the false Self surrenders.
Into the Heart of the Sun
August 11, 2027
Venus Meets the Sun in Leo · the Seeding
After the final gate of descent, before her return as Evening Star, Venus vanishes into the Sun. This is the Underworld: Inanna hangs on Ereshkigal's hook to rot, stripped of her divine power. We meet her here in sound and stillness, resting in the dark womb of the Great Below as the crystal alchemy bowls hold the emptiness. In that space, we set intentions: what is dying and what seeds carry us toward rebirth. On August 11, Venus meets the Sun at 19°07′ Leo, merging with the fire of the Solar Feminine.
BONUS CEREMONY
Integration of Masculine and Feminine
September 25, 2027
Venus Rises in Libra · the Reclamation
Venus emerges from the Underworld as Evening Star in her home sign, Libra, after 40 days in the dark. What Inanna surrendered to the Underworld is transmuted and reclaimed. As Inanna recovers her royal robe, you take back what you might have assumed was never yours: the right to stand comfortable in your own skin; to take up space unguarded, disarmed, de-fused. Not armored. Adorned.
THE WORK THAT FOLLOWS
The Return — Reclamation & the Sacred Marriage
Nine months is a gestation. The ascent is the birth. Inanna is delivered not by rescue, nor by force. And no one ascends unmarked: the Underworld requires a substitute, the initiate returns changed, carrying the Eye of Death and the wisdom of the Dark.
In the Fall of 2027, as Venus emerges from the Underworld and rises as the Evening Star, Inanna rises through the same gates, and at each one, reclaims her divine power, no longer armored but adorned.
The Descent of Inanna is this reclamation. Unless and until you do The Work, the inner Masculine and Feminine, the anima and animus, wage war. Spiritual alchemy heals the wounded Masculine — opens the heart — and holds space for the rising Feminine as she re-members and embodies her power. The Dance of Venus integrates, balances, harmonizes the sacred Feminine and Masculine within... an Aquarian Age Hieros Gamos, the unification of Spirit and Matter, Father Sky and Mother Earth, Sacred and Human.
The rose that blooms was first a seed that died in the dark.
WHAT'S INCLUDED
The full container, the Dance of Venus, gate by gate:
Nine monthly live gatherings (two hours, via Zoom) in sync with 9 Venus–Moon conjunctions. Recorded for future reference;
Archetypal Hypnosis — a sonic, Shamanic journey into inner space. Guided through the lenses of astrology, mythology, energy medicine, and the zodiacal Goddess;
Quantum Astrology — connect to the cosmos from the inside out to embody astrological archetypes;
Sound Alchemy — crystal singing bowls harmonize the cellular symphony, resonate energy centers, purify and distill consciousness;
Invocation of the Goddess — meet the Guardian of each Gate, vibrate with the archetypal Venus, Goddess presiding over each astrological sign;
Energetic attunement — align with the Venus Cycle and natural time;
Embodied ceremony — lived astrology that tracks with the actual sky in transit;
The Story & the Sky — correlate the myth of Inanna's Descent, basic astronomy and astrology, the story of the current Venus–Moon conjunction as an embodiment practice.
Dance of Venus book club — read The Heroine's Journey together, one stage a month, alongside the gate it illuminates.
Sisterhood & Community
Held by the Universe, the Goddess, your Peers for the full nine months as we descend. A daily Venus tracker, New and Full Moon astro insights and ceremonies. A monthly virtual practice that demonstrates how to map the sky onto a Dancer's chart. Monthly virtual Dance of Venus book club reading of The Heroine's Journey. Short hypnotic meditations and outer-planet Gene Keys activations. And Sky Inside: musical astrology attuning you to the stars through vibration and frequency medicine.
Investment: $888
A special invitation into the Dance will be extended to those who join within one week of the Info Session, by October 31, 2026. If you are called to register before the October 24 Venus Retrograde Info Session, please reach out directly to secure “Evening Star” pricing.
Enrollment closes January 1, 2027, the day before the Crown Chakra Initiation and the Dance of Venus commences. We descend together, gate by gate. Every session is recorded and yours to keep.
Ask about payment plans at the Info Session.
TRUTH IN THE WEAVE
Grounding & Sources
The Dance of Venus: Inanna’s Descent, A Nine-Month Initiation Into the Underworld
January 2027 – September 2027
Sacred:Human
Conjunctions are ecliptic-longitude conjunctions. The correlation of Inanna's myth with Venus's synodic cycle traces to shamanic astrologer Daniel Giamario and colleagues, and to ceremonial practice with Venus Alchemy. Inanna's gates and vestments follow the Wolkstein & Kramer translation (1983); the reading of Ereshkigal and the "terrible empathy" is from Sylvia Brinton Perera's Descent to the Goddess (1981); the descent as a woman's journey follows Maureen Murdock's The Heroine's Journey. Beneath the visible gates, the alchemical Great Work — solve et coagula, dissolve and coagulate — runs quietly, informing the facilitation rather than crowding the path: what the descent dissolves, the return will coagulate.
Sources: The Descent of Inanna (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983 translation) · Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women (Inner City Books, 1981) · Maureen Murdock, The Heroine's Journey · Daniel Giamario, Turning of the Ages Mystery School — Venus Headed to the Underworld · Cayelin Castell, Venus Alchemy · The Dance of Venus: Inanna's Descent — Becky Shanks · Descend with Venus, Mercury and the Moon — Becky Shanks
The Dance of Venus offers spiritual and ceremonial practice, and is not intended to replace medical or psychological treatment or supervision. Sacred:Human, Presents of Mind does not diagnose, treat, cure, or heal health issues or human beings.