Venus is the planet of love, style, self-worth, aesthetics and values. Scorpio is he sign of Shaman and the Spy, the Sorceress and the Super-Villainess, the Special Agent and the Super Sleuth, the Vampire and the Vampire Slayer, the Samurai and the Assassin. Astrologer Raven Kaldera associates Venus in Scorpio with the myth of Inanna, a Sumerian goddess who must “go down to the bottom of the pit and back up again, over and over, until it is a familiar place and has no power over her”. (Source) When Inanna finally emerges from her trip to the underworld she is accompanied by “an entourage of chittering underworld she-demons”. Repeated trips to the underworld affords Inanna the chance for “rebirth at a higher level of honesty . . . all who venture near had best hang on for the ride” Kaldera tells us. (Source) To illustrate: using the character’s first appearance on the show as his date of birth, Robert Vaughn’s portrayal of “Hunt Stockwell” in the 1980s television series “The A-Team” is a Libra with his Venus in Scorpio. (Chart) Stockwell, the audience is told, is the head of something called “Enhanced Intelligence Assets” (EIA), a highly classified outfit the show’s writers seem to have modeled after the “Intelligence Support Activity” (ISA), a real life organization whose astrology has been discussed on this site here. Like the goddess Inanna, Stockwell hails from the underworld (of U.S. covert operations) and is accompanied by an entourage of black suited he-demons armed with chittering sub-machine guns:

Venus in Scorpio really does believe in “till death to us part”. Stockwell, for instance, makes contact with members of the “A-Team” on the eve of their scheduled execution for a crime they did not commit. He provides intelligence that enables them to fake their own executions, escape prison, and then disappear to one of his safe-houses amid the haunts of Langley, Virginia (home of the CIA). Once the A-Team is ensconced in his web, he blackmails them into going on a series of high-risk (ie “suicide”) missions, reminding them that as convicted murderers and escaped fugitives they are now totally, thoroughly, 100% expendable. “If you fail, we won’t even ask for your bodies back” he cooly informs them.

Should, however, they “hang on for the ride” through a Plutonic underworld of plausibly deniable foreign policy interventions, Stockwell’s promised to acquire for them full presidential pardons. In other words, Vaughn’s Venus in Scorpio alter-ego is going to take the A-Team to “the bottom of the pit and back up again” in exchange for the possibility of “rebirth” as free men and the opportunity to come out from the shadows in which they’ve been hiding since the end of the Vietnam War. “All I need”, he tells their leader, “is your commitment” — the importance of which can’t be underestimated for this Venus placement.

As far as television shows go, “The A-Team” was simplistic, highly-sanitized Reagan era pablum but Vaughn’s portrayal of the Scorpionic Stockwell did briefly bring an intensely serpentine authenticity to the series. Whenever he appeared on the screen it was as though a totally different, far spookier, far more honest show had momentarily come on in its place. From his fashion sense (dark sunglasses, black suit) to his modus operandi (in the shadows), the Stockwell character was a textbook Venus in Scorpio.

Washington D.C. based attorney Jesselyn Radack is a Sagittarius with her Venus in Scorpio. (Chart) She represents NSA whistle-blowers Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, and William Binney — three men truly committed to opposing the surveillance state that is cataloging the fact you’re currently reading an article about the surveillance state. You could say that she is to the band of dissidents like Snowden and company what the Hunt Stockwell character was to the A-Team except that, unlike Stockwell, there are no doubts as to the nobility of her intentions.

The Stockwell character was, of course, fictional but the shadowy “network” he ran was actually anything but unrealistic. Consider, for instance, the insurance company American International Group (AIG), which has Venus in Scorpio in its incorporation chart. (Chart) The public thinks of AIG as simply the large insurance company that was somehow involved in the 2008 financial crisis. The reality is that there is much more to what goes on behind the closed doors of that company than most people realize. For starters, it’s been heavily involved in covert operations since World War II, many of which are not all together different than those run by the fictional Mr. Stockwell. A year 2000 Los Angeles Times article entitled “The Secret Agent (Insurance) Man” explains:

Newly declassified U.S. intelligence files tell the remarkable story of the ultra-secret Insurance Intelligence Unit, a component of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, and its elite counterintelligence branch X-2. . . . the unit mined standard insurance records for blueprints of bomb plants, timetables of tide changes and thousands of other details about targets . . . “They used insurance information as a weapon of war,” said Greg Bradsher, a historian and National Archives expert on the declassified records. The men behind the insurance unit were OSS head William “Wild Bill” Donovan and California-born insurance magnate Cornelius V. Starr. Starr had started out selling insurance to Chinese in Shanghai in 1919 and, over the next 50 years, would build what is now American International Group . . . (Source)

Venus in Scorpio can be the placement of “the femme fatale who uses her appeal to gain power over people” according to astrologers Frances Sakoian and Louis Acker. (Source) AIG is a multinational corporation, not a “femme fatale”, but the information contained in their insurance files could certainly be leveraged to gain power over people since people only insure that which is important to them.