Almagest

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Venus square Neptune

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Venus square Neptune is read, together with the opposition, as "a suggestible romantic nature," someone, 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 clinging to romantic delusions and idealized images of a partner as the square's particular risk, including an attraction to relationships built on rescue rather than on equal footing. Between two charts, one person's Venus square another's Neptune carries the same warning at this friction making angle: "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

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. 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 friction making angle, the tradition reads that same lack of a shared story as active strain, Venus's want for form pulling against a domain, Neptune's waters, that resists holding any shape at all.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Venus:Neptune:square.