Venus sextile Jupiter

Venus sextile Jupiter joins the planet of affection and the planet of expansion across sixty degrees. Modern practice reads that angle as an opening that has to be taken up before it gives anything.

Venus describes attraction and closeness: love, pleasure, beauty, the arts, and affection given and returned. Jupiter describes growth, faith and confidence, and a person's tie to something beyond themselves. Its generosity is complete only once it reaches other people and lifts them along with the person who has it.

The sextile links two planets that generally sit in signs whose elements get on. Its keyword is opportunity, because what it offers has to be worked for. Unlike the trine, which runs without help, the sextile needs someone to meet it halfway. Acted on, it leads to new people, new learning and at times a real skill; ignored, it remains a chance and nothing more.

When two planets meet closely, the pairing counts for as much as the angle, and these two agree with each other. The kabbalistic line places both on the right pillar of the Tree, Venus at Netzah, Victory, and Jupiter at Hesed, which Astrocábala reads as mercy and abundance. Astrocábala holds that Netzah draws on Hesed and is partly born of it, so affection here meets the faculty it comes from. The combination produces warmth, kindness and sociability, a pleasure in company, gatherings and the arts, a liking for beautiful things, and an open hand.

The same agreement runs the other way at full strength. Jupiter enlarges whatever it touches, expectations included, the bad as well as the good. Venus carries a hunger to have and to sample whatever the senses want. Joined, they can swell into self-indulgence, extravagance, promising more than can be delivered, or generous gestures made to be seen. Ease can also settle into comfort, where a gift is taken for granted and never used. One person can show both faces of a pairing at once, and the angle does not change that.

The old tradition counted both planets fortunate and the sextile a favourable angle. The Hellenistic line places the sextile below the trine. Even in the old tradition, one voice grants that Jupiter can also do harm. We follow modern practice here and read the contact by the effort it calls for.

It asks for a step. Jupiter's gifts work when they are passed on. Astrocábala asks a person to start from delight in being alive, and to lift love above the pull of the instincts while still honouring them.