Venus

What Venus stands for

Venus stands for what a person wants and how they love: attraction, taste, what they find beautiful, and what they will put up with for it.

Venus takes its name from the Roman goddess of love, and astrology gives it more than romance: friendship, art, adornment, pleasure, and what a person values and spends on. Older texts read Venus in a man’s chart as the kind of partner he sought; modern astrologers read it in every chart as what the person is attracted to and how they go about being liked.

How Venus moves

It circles the Sun in two hundred and twenty-five days and from here is never more than about forty-seven degrees from it. It goes backwards every nineteen months or so, for about six weeks, and its whole pattern repeats almost exactly every eight years.

Those eight years trace a five-petalled figure round the zodiac.

Because it orbits inside the Earth’s path, Venus is always within two signs of the Sun. It shows as the evening star for months after sunset, disappears into the Sun’s glare, and comes back as the morning star before dawn. After the Sun and the Moon it is the brightest thing in the sky, bright enough to pick out in daylight for anyone who knows where to look.

Each retrograde lasts forty to forty-four days. Outside those stretches Venus usually crosses a sign in three to five weeks, but in a retrograde year it can stay in one sign for about four months. Five of its meetings with the Sun take almost exactly eight years and fall at five points round the zodiac, the rose the Venus cycle page draws.

Rulership, dignity and sect

Venus rules Taurus and Libra.

It is exalted in Pisces, at twenty-seven degrees by the old reckoning, and has its fall in Virgo; its detriment is in Scorpio and Aries, the signs opposite its own. Venus belongs to the night sect with the Moon and Mars, and is read as more fully itself in a chart born at night.

It is called the lesser benefic, Jupiter being the greater. In the tradition benefic means that the things a planet signifies tend to come together easily; it is a description of the planet’s character, not a promise about anybody’s love life. Its joy is the fifth house, of pleasure and children.

Reading Venus by sign and by house

By sign, Venus is read as taste and the manner of affection: in Aries drawn to directness and pursuit, in Cancer to care and familiarity, in Libra to fairness and grace. By house, it is read as where a person finds pleasure and puts effort into being agreeable, whether that is friendship, work or home. The Taurus page and the Libra page describe its own two signs, and its aspects, especially to Mars, are what a compatibility reading looks at first.

A worked example: Venus in Taurus in the seventh house is in its own sign in the house of partnership, and is read as someone who values steadiness, loyalty and physical ease in a partner and is prepared to be patient about it. Venus in Virgo in the same house, its fall, is read as affection shown through practical help, with a habit of noticing what is wrong before what is right.

What gets confused about Venus

Venus retrograde is often described as a bad time for love or spending. The tradition’s reading is narrower: a stretch for reconsidering what, and whom, a person values. About one chart in fourteen has Venus retrograde at birth, which is read as values arrived at slowly or in an unusual way rather than as a flaw; the retrograde page shows when the next stretch falls.

Nor is Venus the planet of women and Mars the planet of men. That division belongs to older texts written for male clients; a modern reading looks at both in anybody’s chart.