Almagest

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Venus sextile Mars

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Venus sextile Mars is read, together with the trine, as one of the pairing's easy contacts: Cafe Astrology's natal reading says it is "easy for these people to attract attention of the positive kind," since they "radiate charm, vitality, and enthusiasm" once affection and drive are working with rather than against each other. The tradition credits the sextile with this warmth in a milder form than the trine, which sources describe as the more dynamic of the two harmonious contacts. Between two charts, one person's Venus sextile another's Mars is read as a comfortable, mutually pleasing pull: Cafe Astrology's synastry reading finds "a strong romantic attraction between you" in which the couple "instinctively know how to please and make one another happy intimately."

The story

A sextile sets two bodies at the hexagonal distance from each other, two signs or sixty degrees apart; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs names it, together with the trine, harmonious, since the two signs it joins share the same gender. Set at this cooperative distance rather than caught together by Hephaestus's snare, Aphrodite and Ares answer instead to the gentler, Roman version of their pairing, the depictions that, as Wikipedia's account of Mars notes, "often ignore the adulterous implications" and show an idealized couple instead: wanting and pursuit meeting by invitation rather than by exposure.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Venus:Mars:sextile.