Venus
Venus describes what appeals to you — in people, objects, environments and ways of spending time. Traditional astrology also gives it money, on the logic that what you find beautiful and what you consider valuable are one question asked twice.
- Governs
- Attraction, taste, worth
- Cycle
- About 225 days
In Your Chart
Venus is your own taste, not a description of who you will attract. Reading somebody's Venus as a portrait of their future partner is the most common misuse of the placement.
Connected Sign
The Planets
Attraction in the Broad Sense
Venus describes what appeals to you — in people, but equally in objects, environments, aesthetics and ways of spending time.
Read properly it is at least as much about your taste in furniture as your taste in partners. Traditional astrology also gives it money, on the reasoning that what you find beautiful and what you consider valuable are one question asked twice.
Venus in Capricorn is drawn to competence and things that last, in a partner and in a chair. Venus in Pisces is drawn to atmosphere and things that suggest more than they state.
Your Taste, Not Your Partner
The old convention read a man's Venus as a description of the woman he would want, and it was standard for a long time.
It is a category error. Everybody has Venus and it describes their own attractions, not the person who will arrive. Reading somebody's Venus as a portrait of a future spouse is the most common misuse of the placement.
The functional reading survives the correction entirely intact, since attraction is an operation regardless of who is performing it.
In the Chart
Venus's house shows where you seek pleasure and what area of life you are most inclined to beautify or invest in.
Its aspects describe what complicates or eases relating. Venus with Saturn is traditionally read as caution and durability, Venus with Uranus as attraction to the unconventional and to distance.
Venus and Mars in different signs is common and produces the most informative pattern: being drawn to one thing while pursuing in an entirely different manner.
What It Does Not Predict
No placement determines whether a relationship will work. Venus describes taste, not outcome, and two people with harmonious Venus placements can be entirely unsuited in every other respect.
Compatibility grids built on sun signs compress ten placements into one and then rank the result, which is the least informative version of an exercise that can be interesting done with whole charts.
What chart comparison can honestly do is describe where two temperaments run with the grain and where they cut across it.