Getting off the Camel
Venus retrograde sextiles Jupiter this week (Nov. 4, 2026, 2:31 am PST, at 24°43′ Libra and Leo), the second in a series of three sextiles between the two benefics.
Back on August 17th, when these two first came together in a sextile, it was just five days after an eclipse at 20° Leo. This aspect has such a cheerful and promising ring to it. But what I actually saw on the heels of that eclipse in Leo and the first Venus-Jupiter sextile was a lot of stuff falling apart in spectacular fashion.
Relationships were tearing at the seams. A respected astrology elder was involved in a scandal and uninvited from the UAC conference. I lost a vital source of income. Two of my family members had a dramatic falling out. And it all seemed to happen pretty suddenly.
This time around, Venus and Mercury are both retrograde, which I imagine will send our minds back to that sextile in August. Rather than hell breaking out all around you, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something that you experience on a more internal level.
The Sabian symbol for Venus is 25 Libra, Information in the symbol of an autumn leaf. It certainly could be information of some esoteric type, but maybe the information is just as simple as this: Things are finishing up. The leaf is old and crispy. The cycle is complete.
And Jupiter is at 25 Leo, A large camel crossing the desert. That’s a hard journey, but the camel is built for it. And it’s a symbol that makes me think of the maxim, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
What has ended in your life since August? What desert are you marching across, steadfast and determined? Did you think of getting off the camel at some point? Did people close to you count you out?
The final sextile in this series comes on November 28, at 27º Libra and Leo, with Jupiter in a conjunction with the South Node of the Moon and Mars – growth through letting go, cutting off. If you’re still planning to get off the camel, that could be the time to do it.
Something Clicks
At the moment Mercury comes into a conjunction with the Sun (Nov. 4, 6:24 am PST, at 12º10’ Scorpio) it’s in a condition we call cazimi, or “in the heart of the Sun” – a bright, brilliant moment of potential breakthroughs and insight.
Look for an aha moment during this cazimi period, which is when Mercury is within 17 minutes of orb of its exact conjunction with the Sun; that’s between about 3:27 a.m. and 9:24 a.m. Pacific time. It’s not that you’ll necessarily solve a problem altogether, but that may be when some of the pieces begin to fall into place.
This cazimi happens at Sabian symbol 13 Scorpio, An inventor experimenting. It doesn’t show us an inventor who’s all ready to file for a patent. It shows us somebody who is still in the process of figuring things out. Experimentation means you’re willing to try something without knowing exactly how it’s going to turn out. You take one thing, and you put it together with another thing, and you see what happens.
Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it does something you weren’t expecting. And that can turn out to be more interesting than whatever you were trying to accomplish in the first place.
That is so often how the best ideas come to us. We spend weeks, months, sometimes years gathering information, trying different approaches, and turning a problem over in our minds. And then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, something clicks. We see a connection we hadn’t seen before. We realize that two things that we thought were unrelated might actually belong together.
This Mercury cazimi happens during Mercury’s retrograde, a period when we often feel like we’re going backward, revisiting old ground, trying to fix things that aren’t working. But sometimes going backward is exactly what we need to do to ultimately move forward. We return to an old idea with new information or we tilt our head and look at it from a different angle, and suddenly there’s this possibility that we didn’t see before.
The seed of this idea might have been planted at the last Mercury cazimi, on August 27th. Maybe you just needed a moment to stand still and let the gears finally mesh. Mercury’s retrograde periods are perfect for a moment like this one, when something comes together in a sort of synchronicity, almost as though you weren’t planning it at all. But on an unconscious level, maybe you’ve been working for weeks to arrive at this moment.
With this conjunction in Scorpio, it’s likely some of those breakthroughs come from being willing to look beneath the surface. Scorpio is not satisfied with the obvious explanation. It wants to know what’s really going on. What is motivating something? What’s hidden underneath the first answer that we come up with?
So maybe the breakthrough isn’t necessarily a brilliant new idea. It could be that you realize you’ve been asking the wrong question all along.
When you experiment, you have to leave room for surprise. If you already know exactly what the answer is supposed to look like, you might miss the answer that actually shows up. So around this conjunction, give yourself a little room to play with an idea. Revisit something that you have been puzzling over. Let yourself make an unexpected connection.
You don’t have to force a breakthrough. And you certainly don’t have to have the whole thing figured out by the end of the day. Just remember what questions were you asking back in late August. What ideas were you exploring? Or what conversations were you having? You might find that something happening now is connected to a thread from back then, even if you couldn’t have seen the connection at the time. And if nothing particularly dramatic happens on the day of the cazimi, don’t worry about it. Sometimes the breakthrough is just that you finally know which experiment to try next.
© 2026 Words and Illustrations by April Elliott Kent
