Sun Sextile Venus

Like Mercury, Venus circles inside the Earth's orbit and is held near the Sun, appearing as the morning or evening star and never in the small hours. Her greatest elongation runs to about forty-eight degrees, which falls twelve short of a sextile. The gap cannot be bridged by generous orbs; twelve degrees is a wide allowance even for a conjunction, and nobody grants it to a sixty-degree angle. What a chart can show at the outer limit is a semi-square of forty-five degrees, a minor and mildly abrasive contact.

That semi-square is worth more attention than it usually gets, since it is the only aspect between these two that carries any tension at all. Venus at maximum distance gives a native whose pleasures are genuinely their own rather than an extension of the personality: they can like what does not flatter them, and can be fond of people who do them no credit. The taste is more independent and rather less charming. Popular lists that print a Sun-Venus sextile are usually describing this placement without knowing it.

The reason the false aspect survives is commercial as much as careless. A reference work with a blank where an entry should be looks incomplete, and an automatic generator never leaves blanks. Readers should treat any table containing this row as untested elsewhere too. For the person who came looking, the real question is simple: how many degrees separate the Sun and Venus in the chart, and does Venus rise before the Sun or after. The morning star and the evening star describe different characters, and that distinction is genuine.