Almagest

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Venus sextile Neptune

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Venus sextile Neptune is read, together with the trine, as a naturally graceful expression of "mysterious and dreamy Neptune" in love: Cafe Astrology's natal reading credits a rich imagination and a strong attraction to beauty, saying that "when you love, you love deeply and completely" and are capable of "surrendering totally to the essence of Love," while keeping more realistic expectations of a partner than the harder aspects allow. Between two charts, one person's Venus sextile another's Neptune is read, together with the trine, as a tolerant and "dreamy and romantic" bond: Venus "is willing to overlook Neptune's faults, and Neptune is generally very pleased to be loved in such a tolerant manner," each partner left feeling spiritually enhanced rather than disillusioned by the connection.

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. 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. At this easy angle, the tradition reads that same lack of a shared story as no obstacle at all, Venus's want for what is beautiful moving freely through a domain, Neptune's waters, that never needed a myth to welcome it.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Venus:Neptune:sextile.