♀ Venus

Venus is the lover of the chart. It governs love, beauty and values.

Venus at a glance

• ArchetypeThe Lover
• Governslove, beauty and values
• RulesTaurus & Libra
• Cycleabout 225 days
• Keywordslove, beauty, harmony, money
• In the bodythe kidneys and throat

What Venus means

Venus is what you find beautiful and what you will do to be near it. Taste, in the widest sense: art, money, food, people.

It rules Taurus and Libra and behaves differently in each. Taurus's Venus wants the thing itself, in the hand. Libra's wants agreement about it.

It is not only romance, and reading it as only romance is what makes it feel inaccurate to people who have plenty of that. Venus is also what you spend on, what you keep, and what you consider worth the trouble.

When Venus is the hard part

It never goes far from the Sun, though further than Mercury does, so it will be in your Sun's sign or within two either side. Which makes it easy to mistake your own Venus for taste in general, when it is quite specifically yours.

And the appetite does not check the bill. Venus describes what you are drawn to and says nothing about whether it is good for you. That is one of the honest limits of the whole practice.

Its cycle, and the ages it lands on

225 days around the Sun, about a year through the zodiac from here, and a retrograde only every 18 months or so, for around six weeks. It is the rarest retrograde of the inner planets.

It also draws the best-known figure in the sky. Eight Earth years is almost exactly thirteen Venus years, so Venus comes back to nearly the same place against the stars every eight years, tracing a five-pointed pattern that repeats for as long as anybody keeps watching.

Can you see it?

The brightest thing in the sky after the Sun and the Moon, and unmistakable. If you have ever seen a very bright star low in the west after sunset and wondered whether it was an aircraft, it was Venus.

It is the morning star and the evening star, and it is the same object. Working that out was one of the earliest real results in astronomy, and it took a while.

What retrograde actually is

Rare and slow: roughly every 18 months, for about six weeks. Few enough that plenty of people have never consciously lived through one.

The mechanism is Mercury's. We pass it on the inside, and for a few weeks it appears to move backwards against the stars. Nothing about the planet changes.

Venus also touches

art, romance, luxury, relationships, what you find beautiful and worth having.

A question to sit with

What do you truly value, and does your life reflect it?