Almagest

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Venus square Venus

the transiting Venus standing in square to its own natal place, or one person's Venus square another's in synastry

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show Venus square 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 square its own natal place names potential imbalances in a relationship, differences in personal style between two partners coming briefly to the surface, and a possible feeling of being underappreciated for the transit's short duration. Between two charts, when this is the aspect between the two people's own Venus placements, the pairing is read, together with the opposition, as one where "tastes and values differ between the two of you, and this can become more and more obvious as time passes": the source notes that "arguments over basic tastes and the ways you handle money could easily surface," and that decision making as a couple can become lengthy and complicated as a result.

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'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 square between Venus and itself, whether met in transit or found between two people in synastry, sets that same doubled nature at a friction making angle to itself, desire and its more presentable face catching against one another rather than agreeing.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Venus:Venus:square.