Venus square Neptune

What does Venus want?

In the old texts Venus governs attraction, taste, harmony and the things a person values enough to keep close. Its method is to choose: this over that, this person over another. That is a function of discrimination, so Venus is at its best when it can see clearly.

What does Neptune do to it?

Neptune, found in 1846, is the planet of the formless, and it rules glamour, imagination, mysticism, devotion and the dissolving of outlines. Where Venus chooses, Neptune blurs the edges that make choosing possible. It adds a halo to what is loved, which is why the older writers on the planet connect it with both idealism and disillusion.

Why a square, and not another aspect?

A square puts the two planets in signs of the same modality and different elements, 90 degrees apart. The planets try to work in the same way but with different tools, so the result is described as friction. With Venus and Neptune the friction is usually described as the gap between an imagined partner or value and a real one, which tends to show up as idealisation first and recalibration after.

Whether that is painful depends on the person. The tradition is also clear that this aspect belongs to artists and idealists as often as to the disappointed, since the same Neptune that blurs a person also supplies the imagery of a song or painting.

The signs that make the square

Neptune takes about 14 years to cross a sign, so a Venus square Neptune is shared across a generation. Sign pairs only give the possible match; the degrees decide it.

Natal, synastry and transit readings

1. 1. Natal

   A lifelong pattern. Astrologers note a taste for romance, art or the spiritual in love, and a need to separate the person from the picture of the person.

2. 2. Synastry

   One person's Venus square the other's Neptune is read as fascination with something unclear. It is often described as a connection easy to idealise and harder to check, which is the reason the tradition suggests plain conversation in such pairings.

3. 3. Transit

   Neptune is so slow that a square to your natal Venus lasts for several months with retrograde loops. Venus passing the square to natal Neptune is over in a day or two.

Questions astrologers ask about this square

• Which element is Neptune in? A water Neptune reads as compassion, an earth one as the wish to make an ideal practical.
• Does Venus have a helpful aspect elsewhere, such as a sextile from Saturn, that supplies the clarity this square lacks?
• Which houses are involved? The pair always links two areas of life that have to be kept in view together.

Seeing the pattern without judging it

A reader meeting this square for the first time often wants to know whether it is a warning. The older and the modern literature both answer no. It is a description of one kind of tension, between a planet that sorts things into the wanted and the unwanted and a planet that lifts the sorting off. A number of creative charts carry it. The practical suggestion in the tradition is modest: let the imagination do its work, and keep a second set of eyes on the facts.

To see where the two planets fall in your own chart, the birth chart calculator lists both, and the planets in signs pages describe how Venus behaves in each sign.