Almagest

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Venus conjunct Mars

Venus conjunct Mars, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Venus conjunct Mars is read as affection and drive fused into one impulse. Cafe Astrology's reading of the natal conjunction describes a strong personal magnetism from the blending of Venus's receptive nature with Mars's assertive one, noting that such a person tends to "live and breathe romantic/sexual relationships" and carries "a pleasing blend of self-assertion and cooperation." The tradition names this a temperament "quite direct about what they want in a relationship" and "quite passionate when it comes to going about getting what they want," the wanting and the pursuing scarcely separable acts once the two planets stand this close together. Between two charts, one person's Venus conjunct another's Mars is counted among synastry's most immediately felt contacts: the romantic and physical attraction it brings is described as "almost irresistible," though the same source cautions that the passion it generates "is harder to handle" once a relationship's other, less purely passionate, parts have had time to develop.

The story

A conjunction fuses two natures at one degree, ranked the strongest configuration the tradition keeps even outside the four configurations Ptolemy measures by distance. Aphrodite and Ares were lovers, an affair that, in the Greek telling, was "exposed to ridicule" once her husband Hephaestus caught the pair together by means of a magical snare; Roman depictions of the two, by contrast, "often ignore the adulterous implications" and show an idealized couple instead. Fused together in one chart, the plainer, headlong version of the myth, wanting that does not pause to be discreet, is what the tradition reads the conjunction as carrying forward.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Venus:Mars:conjunction.