Venus

What Venus represents

In modern psychological astrology, Venus is not simply the planet of love. It expresses a broader function: the capacity to appreciate, to give things value, to enter into relationship. It shows what brings pleasure, a piece of music, a landscape, a gesture or a conversation, and what a person considers worthy of love, in someone else as much as in themselves. It therefore touches on self-esteem as much as on the wish to be chosen.

Venus rules two signs, which show its two faces. In Taurus, an earth sign, it is sensual, attached to concrete pleasures and to what endures. In Libra, an air sign, it seeks harmony, balance and exchange. Tradition holds that it is exalted in Pisces, where love leans towards compassion. It is in detriment in Scorpio and Aries, where it loves more intensely or more directly, and in its fall in Virgo, where it becomes more reserved and more demanding.

Its rhythm in the sky

Seen from Earth, Venus never strays far from the Sun. It appears sometimes as the morning star, sometimes as the evening star, and it is the brightest object in the night sky after the Moon. Because it travels alongside the Sun, it goes round the zodiac in about a year on average, and usually spends a little less than a month in each sign.

Roughly every nineteen months, Venus appears to move backwards through the sky for close to six weeks: this is its retrograde phase, an effect of perspective caused by the relative motions of the Earth and the planet. It then lingers much longer in a single sign, sometimes for nearly four months. Psychological readings tend to link these periods to a review of attachments, tastes and values rather than to outward events.

Venus in a relationship

In a birth chart, Venus shows how a person loves and what attracts them. Its sign describes a style: slow or spontaneous, sensual or cerebral, discreet or demonstrative. Its house points to the area of life where pleasure and harmony are sought, and its aspects reveal what supports it or complicates it. It also sketches an inner image of what is desirable, which the person often projects onto someone else before recognising it in themselves.

In synastry, the comparison of two charts, Venus plays a central role. When one person’s Venus touches the other’s Sun, Moon or Mars, attraction and affection often find easy ground. Two Venuses of very different natures, by contrast, may love in ways that are hard to read at first, one through gestures, the other through words. These contacts decide nothing: they show where the bond flows naturally and where it calls for attention.

To go further

• Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas, The Inner Planets (1993)