Aspect
Venus sextile Sun
Venus sextile Sun is a contact a single birth chart cannot hold. Venus is tethered to the Sun — seen from Earth it only ever appears near it, as the morning star before sunrise or the evening star after sunset — and it never strays as far as two signs. A sextile is exactly two signs. The two figures do not meet, and no birth moment produces one.
Saying that first is better than writing a page about a configuration nobody has. Where the phrase does get used, it is describing something other than one natal chart: two charts compared against each other, or a moving Venus reaching that angle to a Sun fixed at birth.
Underneath the search there is usually a real question, which is what these two do when they are in contact — and in a birth chart they always are, because they are never far apart to begin with.
The pair a chart does hold
Because of the tether, the only arrangement available in one chart is a close one: Venus in the Sun's own sign, or the sign either side of it, occasionally a little beyond. The question worth asking is therefore not which angle the two hold. It is how near they are, and which side of the Sun Venus stands on.
Venus is read for eros, magnetism, value, and for values, what you find worth paying for. The Sun is read for identity becoming visible. Standing that close together, the two are genuinely hard to separate: what a person is drawn to and who they take themselves to be come out in one gesture, and prising them apart is the work of years rather than of a paragraph.
The tradition places Venus at home in Taurus and Libra, exalted in Pisces, in detriment in Aries and Scorpio, in fall in Virgo.
The tether has a consequence inside that table. A Leo Sun can only carry a Venus somewhere in the neighbourhood of Leo, and that neighbourhood includes Virgo — the sign the classical scheme treats as hardest for it. Certain combinations of Sun sign and Venus sign are simply unavailable to anybody, and which ones remain is settled by an astronomy that has nothing to do with the reading.
Where the phrase does belong
Between two charts. One person's Venus two signs from another person's Sun is a real and common comparison, and it behaves the way sextiles behave: elements that differ and get along, a liking that is available rather than automatic. Neither party is compelled. Somebody still has to make the arrangement, and plenty of pairs never do.
And in transits. Venus comes round to that angle from a natal Sun a handful of times a year, and because the angle is counted over so little room, each pass is measured in days rather than weeks. It is a mild, pleasant, largely unmemorable few days, and it is worth knowing that it is mild — a great deal of astrology writing inflates it.
Comparing two charts is a different job from reading one, and it needs both birth moments. A single chart, however carefully read, has nothing to say about the second person.
What changes the reading
Which end is which. In a comparison between two charts the Sun person and the Venus person are not in the same position — one is being appreciated and the other is doing the appreciating — and the arrangement is rarely as symmetrical as the geometry makes it look.
Older practice read a Venus rising before the Sun differently from one setting after it, and modern practice mostly lets that distinction go. It is worth retrieving here for a plain reason: with the separation fixed, it is nearly the only thing left that varies.
And the signs. Sun and Venus in one sign is one reading; a Sun in the last stretch of a sign with Venus in the next one is another, and two people separated by a single day of birth can land on either side of that line.
Questions
- Can Venus be sextile the Sun in a birth chart?
- It cannot. Venus stays inside a narrow band either side of the Sun, and a sextile sits well outside that band. A chart can hold the two in one sign or in neighbouring ones, and that is the entire range available.
- Then why does the phrase come up?
- Usually because someone met it somewhere it is legitimate — a comparison between two charts, or a calendar of transits — and went looking for it in their own. It is also produced in quantity by software that lists every combination of body and angle without checking which of them the sky permits.
- What is the nearest thing a chart can hold?
- A conjunction, or the two of them a sign apart. Both are read as a close working relationship between what a person values and who they are, which is a different subject from the arranged cooperation a sextile describes.