Almagest

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Venus opposite Neptune

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Venus opposition Neptune is read, together with the square, as "a suggestible romantic nature," a person, in Cafe Astrology's phrase, "in love with love." The tradition warns that "deception in love is possible, but self-deception is even more likely," since "they see what they want to see, rather than what is," and names a real risk of clinging to romantic delusions, idealized images of a partner, and an attraction to relationships built on rescue rather than on equal footing. Between two charts, one person's Venus opposition another's Neptune carries the same warning across the chart's widest distance: sources say that "if Venus falls in love with a romantic ideal instead of the real partner, Neptune will most likely retreat," the Venus person swinging between excessive trust and outright fear while the Neptune person struggles to communicate plainly through 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. Venus and Neptune keep separate myths that the sources do not connect. Wikipedia's page for Neptune describes him as Roman religion's god of both fresh water and the sea, attended by the consorts Salacia and Venilia, the latter's name sharing only a linguistic root with the idea of love or desire rather than any shared story with Venus. Wikipedia's page for Venus instead traces her own birth to the sea foam produced by the severed body of Caelus-Uranus, an origin belonging to her alone. Set at the chart's widest distance rather than fused, the tradition reads that same lack of a shared story as fitting: two natures facing each other across a gap that was never bridged by myth in the first place.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Venus:Neptune:opposition.