Almagest

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Venus opposite Mars

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Venus opposition Mars is read, together with the square, as one of the harder contacts between the two: Cafe Astrology's natal reading says "love and hate are very much mixed together" for a chart holding this pairing, since Venus's wanting and Mars's pursuing now stand across the whole circle from each other rather than meeting easily. The tradition notes that "timing can be off" and that it can be "difficult to find a relationship that mirrors their strong desires and expectations," though the same friction is credited with fueling real work, since "challenges in relationships may be a large part of the drive behind their poetry, music, or other art." Between two charts, one person's Venus opposition another's Mars is read as a pull sparked, in Cafe Astrology's own phrase, by "an irresistible physical attraction and romantic desire," the couple's difference of position round the chart giving the same magnetism a longer distance to travel rather than dampening it.

The story

An opposition sets two bodies at the diametrical distance from each other, six signs or one hundred eighty degrees apart; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs names it, together with the square, discordant, since it joins signs of a differing nature and gender. Caught at the chart's widest possible distance rather than fused close together, Aphrodite and Ares still answer to the same myth: the affair that, in the Greek telling, was "exposed to ridicule" once Hephaestus's snare closed over the pair. An opposition holds two natures at arm's length rather than merging them, and the tradition reads the same exposure the myth describes, wanting and pursuing now visible to everyone else in the room rather than folded into one private impulse.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Venus:Mars:opposition.