In the early hours of Sunday December 19, Venus retrograde officially began. While Venus moves backwards through purposeful Capricorn, you’ll be called on to reflect on what you really need in the New Year, to reevaluate what kind of relationship will sustain you in the long run. Then on Tuesday, the sun enters Capricorn as well, ushering in a time for moral seriousness. Are you satisfied? Are you living according to your personal code? Are you doing what you were put on earth to do? During Capricorn season, you have the power to make real, tangible changes, to put in the work toward the life — and the world — that you want.
Aries Weekly Horoscope
It can be frustrating, even painful, for you to wait so very long for change to take hold. Your thoughts move quickly, you can develop incredible plans in the blink of an eye, and it’s reasonable to want the world around you to keep up. But putting ideas into motion always goes more slowly than you’d like. Right now, everyone is exhausted, even you. This week, try to accept that some of your dreams will take years to come to fruition. But know, too, that there are other plans that have already been underway for years and will yield results sooner than you think.
Taurus Weekly Horoscope
There are times when refusing to take on any extra responsibilities is a matter of self preservation. It’s important to know, as you already do, how to decline the extra work that others would heap on you, how to avoid feeling a sense of duty to those who hold vastly more power than you. What might look to others like laziness is often really a stubborn insistence on honoring your own values and priorities above all else. This week, don’t let anyone try to persuade you that you aren’t working hard enough or that you’re being selfish. Trust the inner voice that tells you when to say no.
Gemini Weekly Horoscope
It can be wise not to get too attached to any one particular vision of the future: The world is too unpredictable for that, all the possibilities too strange and varied. Still, you don’t have to leave everything up to fate. Even though you can’t control what happens next, that doesn’t mean you’re powerless, doomed to experience life as no more than a curious bystander. You don’t have to know exactly what your choices will bring, but it still matters that you make them. When you dream and strive and make courageous decisions, the effort is never wasted.
Cancer Weekly Horoscope
These days, you’re more aware than ever of all the ways that your existence has been determined by forces you have no control over: the community around you, your family’s history, the stories you were told when you were young. Understanding your place in a vast web of connections can be a source of wisdom. It can also just make you feel trapped. While it’s never possible to separate yourself completely from the people and places that shaped you, this week you do have a say in which pieces of this inheritance you’ll nurture and develop, and which cycles you’ll finally break.
Leo Weekly Horoscope
Sometimes, being hungry for other people’s respect and admiration makes you incredibly productive. It instills in you a drive to create and communicate, to translate your ideas into terms that others can understand. Occasionally, though, your desire for approval causes you to lose perspective. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to be appreciated by others — it’s only that, chances are, the people around you already love and believe in you, already see your brilliance more clearly even than you do. This week, try to remember that ultimately you have nothing to prove.
Virgo Weekly Horoscope
So much of your energy, lately, is taken up by work — both the paid and the unpaid kind — that you do not because you want to, but because someone else requested (or demanded) it of you. This isn’t your fault, but that doesn’t mean that it’s right. This week, even if you can’t overthrow the entire system that prevents you from living the life you want, you can still be on the lookout for small chances to break the rules. Whenever you get the opportunity to turn your energy away from the efforts that are demanded of you by others and toward what you really care about, it’s worth it.
Libra Weekly Horoscope
Lately, it can seem as though some longstanding source of tension — a thorny relationship, a fruitless creative project — is finally coming to a head. You’ve been trying so hard to make things work out the way you want, but resolution eludes you. And after all this time invested, it’s hard to know when to keep persevering and when to stop. Right now, you have a chance to assess realistically — without bitterness or false optimism — whether you’re on the right path. If you are, then keep going, but if you’re not, then there is no shame in deciding to stop, and try something new instead.
Scorpio Weekly Horoscope
It shouldn’t be so difficult to make yourself useful in this world. You have so much to offer, and there’s so much need for energy and bravery and care like yours — and yet it’s hard to figure out what kind of action to take, and how to use your time in ways that actually have meaning. This week, you might criticize yourself for not being more active, more connected, more generous — but it’s very likely that you’re already doing much more than you realize. Being helpful and feeling helpful don’t always coincide. As long as you’re doing something for someone else, you can trust that for now it’s enough.
Sagittarius Weekly Horoscope
No matter how unsatisfactory life is, there’s always the promise that things will change. Regardless of how discouraged you are in the moment, it’s forever possible to believe in a future version of yourself who has become happier, more creative, more interesting. This week, though, you don’t have to keep waiting for some idealized future version of yourself to arrive. Right now, in this brave and imperfect form, you have the power to make decisions and make things happen. You’re already as smart and courageous as you want to be, you just have to remember it.
Capricorn Weekly Horoscope
You have a deep understanding of the ways in which the universe is unfair. You’re unwilling to lie to yourself, to pretend that conditions are better than they really are. Knowing what you know about the world’s great capacity for cruelty, knowing how much worse things could be, makes it strangely easy to accept less than you merit, to stay in friendships and relationships that don’t really give you what you need. So this week, ask for more. You deserve more than “good enough” — you deserve a life that is special, sparkling, wonderful.
Aquarius Weekly Horoscope
More puritanical minds sometimes try to convince you that the only path to an ethical life is to be, well, dull — to quash every playful impulse, to rein in your bright curiosity, to set aside magic and fun and love, so that you might dedicate yourself wholly to work. Occasionally, you might even begin to wonder whether they’re right. This week, though, it’s vital that you remember that you can be honorable without being boring, that you can be principled without giving up your wild, strange spark. It’s possible that your wildness is just what the world needs most from you.
Pisces Weekly Horoscope
When the outside world becomes unbearable, there’s comfort in dreaming, in losing yourself to the rich colors and textures of your ideas. It’s good to give yourself space to escape the universe’s heaviness. This week, just make sure that you don’t check out completely, to the point that you forget what is solid. Your life isn’t the nebulous, inconsequential thing you sometimes imagine it to be. Your actions can create change — not just within your private emotional landscape, but in ways that touch other people too. Your time here on earth is precious and powerful; don’t treat it like it doesn’t matter.
Read the weekly horoscopes for the week of December 13. The weekly horoscopes for the week of December 27 will be online next Sunday.
Get Claire Comstock-Gay’s book, Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars, out now.