Almagest

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The Sun sextile Venus

the Sun sextile Venus between two charts in synastry (the two cannot stand at this angle within a single nativity)

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart the Sun and Venus cannot stand sixty degrees apart: Ptolemy notes that Venus never reaches a greater distance from the Sun than two signs, and Cafe Astrology confirms that because the two are never more than about forty eight degrees apart, the only aspects they can form in one nativity are the conjunction and the minor semi-sextile and semi-square. One source attributed to Max Heindel states the point plainly: Venus's orbit is so small that she never forms the sextile, trine, square or opposition to the Sun. The tradition reads this key, accordingly, only where it can actually occur, between two separate charts. Between two charts, one person's Sun sextile another's Venus is read as a feeling of mutual respect: sources describe this contact as less powerful than the trine but still a source of genuine appreciation, each person recognizing the other's value and finding them worth the time and effort a relationship asks for.

The story

A sextile is sixty degrees, a sixth of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs names it, together with the trine, harmonious, since the two signs it joins are of the same kind, all masculine or all feminine, a judgment about the angle itself. Venus was born, in one telling, from sea foam gathered around the severed genitals of Caelus-Uranus after his own son overthrew him, rising from the water fully formed. Virgil pictures her guiding Aeneas as the morning star, bright even in the daylight sky, a companion light rather than a rival to the Sun's own. A sextile between the two, real only in synastry, keeps that same companionable distance: beauty offered as a courtesy the self can accept without being outshone by it.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Sun:Venus:sextile.