Almagest

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Venus square Mars

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Venus square Mars is read, together with the opposition, as one of the pairing's harder contacts: Cafe Astrology's natal reading says plainly that "love and hate are very much mixed together" here, Venus's wanting and Mars's pursuing pulling against rather than with each other. The tradition reads the friction chiefly as a matter of timing, since "it's difficult to find a relationship that mirrors their strong desires and expectations," and credits the same tension with real creative use, "a large part of the drive behind their poetry, music, or other art." Between two charts, one person's Venus square another's Mars is read as a stormy pairing: Cafe Astrology's synastry reading calls it "likely to be a stormy and fiery relationship," locating the trouble squarely in mismatched timing between one partner's arousal and the other's affection.

The story

A square sets two bodies at the quadrate distance from each other, three signs or ninety degrees apart; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs names it, together with the opposition, discordant, since the signs it joins are, in his words, of different natures and sexes. A square does not fuse Aphrodite and Ares so much as set them at odds with the chart's own timing: the same Greek myth of an affair "exposed to ridicule" by Hephaestus's snare reads, at this friction making angle, as desire and pursuit catching each other out rather than moving in step, the discovery the myth describes standing in for the mismatched timing the tradition assigns the square.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Venus:Mars:square.