Today's
OracleReading

Today, on her own Friday, Venus stands directly between the Earth and the Sun. For a few days she vanishes from our sky entirely, lost in the Sun’s glare. Then, slowly, she will reappear before dawn as the morning star. This oracle is the voice of that return: the light you carry, renewed by meeting a greater light.

Venus has no light of her own. She shines because she reflects the Sun more brightly than any planet. Her renewal today is a reminder that we, too, are often renewed not by producing light, but by turning toward it and letting it shine through us.

The almost-full Moon crosses from Pisces into Aries today — from the ocean of the last sign to the first spark of the next. Mercury stands still, ready to turn retrograde tomorrow. Everything is pausing, gathering, about to begin again.

In the body, renewal often feels like warmth returning — like stepping from shade into sunlight and feeling the skin soften. The shoulders drop. The face lifts. Something in the chest opens.

It can also feel like a strange emptiness at first, the pause between one thing and the next. That pause is the moment Venus disappears into the Sun. It is not an absence; it is a meeting.

Try sitting in real sunlight today, even for a few minutes. Close your eyes and let the light warm your face, and notice what it awakens.

Today’s renewing brings one luminous question forward: where can I let a greater light shine through me, rather than trying to make all the light myself?

Some days we are the candle, burning with our own effort. Other days we are the mirror, simply turned toward something bright and reflecting it into the world. Both are holy work.

Edith Wharton, who spent her life writing about people trying to find their own light, named these two ways of shining in a single, lasting line.

The morning star makes no light of her own. She turns her face to the Sun, and the whole dawn sees her shining.

Today, softly, I turn my face toward a greater light — and like Venus returning as the morning star, I let that light renew me and shine through me into the world.

1. Where in your life are you exhausted from being the candle, always making your own light?
2. What greater light — love, faith, beauty, a person — could you turn toward and reflect?
3. When have you felt renewed simply by being near someone or something luminous?
4. What will you carry back into the world as your own light returns, like the morning star?

Edith Wharton — born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City in 1862, into a wealthy and old-fashioned family that did not expect a daughter to become a writer; who published more than forty books in forty years; who in 1921 became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Age of Innocence; who spent much of her later life in France, where she organized relief work during the First World War; and who died in 1937 — wrote these words in “Vesalius in Zante,” a poem published in 1902.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. In the poem, the great Renaissance anatomist Vesalius reflects on a rival whose discoveries outshone his own, and comes to see that both the one who makes the light and the one who carries it forward serve the same truth. The line is often quoted as a gentle reminder that we do not all need to be the source; reflecting light faithfully is just as precious.

Today’s oracle lives in Wharton’s words directly. Venus is the mirror in the sky: she shines by reflecting the Sun. On the day she meets him, she reminds us that receiving light, and passing it on, is its own kind of radiance.

“Venus” — Shocking Blue (from At Home, 1969)

Shocking Blue — the Dutch rock band fronted by the singer Mariska Veres, born in The Hague in 1947 — recorded “Venus” for their 1969 album At Home. Written by the band’s guitarist Robbie van Leeuwen, it became an international hit and reached number one in the United States in early 1970. Decades later it was a hit again in a version by Bananarama.

The oracle hears the first-renewing in this song. It sings of a goddess on a mountaintop, burning like a flame — Venus herself, radiant and impossible to ignore. On Venus’s own Friday, as the planet meets the Sun and begins her return as the morning star, it is a playful hymn to the goddess coming back into the light.