A Taste of Return
An End of Venus Retrograde Ritual

Open to the meaning of your Venus Retrograde Journey

Venus is in the final day of her retrograde (October 3 – November 13, 2026) having moved back from Scorpio into Libra. On direct motion, she’ll move back into Scorpio again, tracing for the final time the same contours she’s crossed twice over the past several weeks. We have until December 15 to fulfil the promise of this year’s internal journey. This is a season for introspection and return: for finding out what you still want — how you want it differently, and who you are in the presence of it.

In the old myth, Persephone is taken away from bright innocence into the underworld, and what awakens her there is a taste. Sweetness reaches her in the dark, and something in her answers… despite everything. That taste becomes both her aliveness and her tether — she will ascend, and she will also return, changed by what she has tasted.

Sometimes what returns is you.

This ritual takes five minutes. And the beauty of your attention…

You’ll need:

• Something gorgeous and sweet that you genuinely want to taste, held in a small, beautiful bowl. Pomegranate seeds, a few blackberries, a couple squares of dark chocolate, a date, a cookie, or a glass of wine to sip — or both — whatever calls to you. Choose what you desire. Desire is your guide.
• A piece of dark cloth large enough to cover your head and shoulders. A scarf, a shirt, a towel, some magnificent, embroidered thing you brought back from your travels. Any cloth you use in daily life or keep on your altar can become your Venus Retrograde threshold.
• A candle and matches or a lighter
• A journal, pad, or slip of paper and pen
• and five unhurried minutes.

The ritual:

Stand or sit comfortably, with your items placed beautifully around you.

Choose. Hold the delight you want to taste. Let it be wanted.

Taste. Take half of what you’ve chosen and TASTE IT — slowly enough to notice the instant pleasure bursting in your mouth. Chew slowly. Sip fully. Let it fill your whole mouth. Savor. Let the sweetness open you.

Save a bit. Save a few sips, and set a few seeds, one square, a berry or two aside, in the bowl beside the unlit candle. It waits for you on the other side.

Light the candle. With that taste of sweetness laughing on your tongue, light the candle, and watch the flame for a moment.

As you gaze at the flame, ask:
What in me still tastes alive?
Hold the question deeply, gently.

As you gaze at the flame, ask:
What in me has been hidden and wants to feel the fire of life again?
Hold the question deeply, gently.

Cover. Place the cloth over your head. Let the visible world soften and fall away… Light shifts… Sound shifts… You are gently enclosed inside your own presence. You have crossed the threshold from light to dark, right where you are. Magic.

Descend. Go down into Self — into whatever has gone quiet, waiting, ripening in the dark… the buried, the unfinished, the long-unfelt, the long-untasted. Let whatever comes, come…  a sensation, a memory, an urge to move, a longing, tears, sweet stillness.

Hold this:

What in my life is asking to be tasted — again, or for the first time?

(Some descents bring a different question with them: What have I desired so deeply that letting it into my life changed the landscape? If that one rises in you, follow it — it knows the way.)

Encounter. Stay a breath longer in the dark, with whatever you have found. Meet it. See it — Feel it, in the quiet, at last.

Lift. When you’re ready, lift the covering slowly. Return gently to the visible world.

Taste again. Eat the bite you saved. Drink the wine. The same sweetness now stands on both sides of the threshold — and you may taste it as someone new. Returned — but different.

Write down your revelations. Take your journal, your pad, your slip of paper, and commit in writing what you’ve discovered. Uncovered. Perhaps recovered.

Return to life. Within the next day, give what came to you one small embodied expression in the living world. Buy the flowers. Begin the page. Put on the music. Take the walk. Say yes to the thing. Reach for the person you love.

We descend for more life. We return – but different.
And sometimes what returns is you.

— with love, Michelle