Venus sextile Venus
the transiting Venus standing in sextile to its own natal place, or one person's Venus sextile another's in synastry
What the tradition reads
A natal chart cannot show Venus sextile itself, since a single body cannot stand at an angle from its own degree; the tradition reads this key through transit instead, the practice of returns and their intervening angles applied to Venus as it is to the Sun or Jupiter. Cafe Astrology's reading for transiting Venus sextile its own natal place describes harmonious interactions and smoother negotiations in relationships during the transit, along with a possible small financial benefit. Between two charts, when this is the aspect between the two people's own Venus placements, the pairing is read, together with the conjunction and trine, as one that "helps boost your overall compatibility," since the two share a similar style of expressing love and affection, appreciating how the other dresses, decorates, handles money, and socializes, and feeling, in the source's words, generally "at ease in one another's company."
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's own myth already holds two aspects within one figure: Wikipedia's page for her describes Venus Verticordia, "Venus the Changer of Hearts," honored at the Veneralia for her ability to transform untethered desire into pudicitia, desire expressed within bounds society permitted, and notes that in one context she was a goddess of prostitutes while in another she turned hearts from sexual vice to virtue. A sextile between Venus and itself, whether met in transit or found between two people in synastry, sets that same doubled nature at a cooperative angle to itself, desire and its more presentable face working with each other rather than against.
Written from
- Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Book I, Chapter XVI (Ashmand translation, Project Gutenberg ebook 70850, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70850/70850-h/70850-h.htm)
- Wikipedia, Aspect (astrology)
- Wikipedia, Transit (astrology)
- Wikipedia, Venus (mythology)
- Cafe Astrology, Venus Transits
- Cafe Astrology, Synastry: Venus-Venus Aspects
Corpus key aspect:Venus:Venus:sextile.