Venus’s eight years

How the drawing is made

The rose is where Venus stands as seen from the Earth, worked out every two days for four years before today and four years after, and drawn in the order it happened, on the same zodiac frame as the charts on this site, with Aries at nine o’clock. Its distance from the centre is real as well: Venus is much closer to us at the small inner loops, when it passes between the Earth and the Sun, than when it is on the far side of the Sun. The slider moves through the eight years, and “Run the eight years” plays them.

For the day shown, one line runs from the Earth to the Sun and another to Venus. The angle between them is the elongation, and the line under the drawing says whether Venus is the morning or the evening star and how many degrees from the Sun it stands, or that it is too close to the Sun to see.

Reading it, with an example

The list of meetings gives every time Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun and the degree where it happened, with how far that falls short of the meeting eight years before. If a meeting falls at 13° Gemini, the one eight years earlier sat a little over two degrees further on, and the next one at that point of the star falls a little over two degrees further back. Meetings next to each other in time sit about 144 degrees apart round the zodiac, the step from one point of a pentagram to the next, which is why joining them in order draws a star. At that pace each point of the star takes well over a thousand years to creep all the way round.

Why eight years and five petals

Venus goes round the Sun thirteen times in almost exactly the time the Earth goes round eight times. In that stretch it overtakes the Earth five times, and each time it does it seems to stop, go backwards for about six weeks and come on again, which is the small loop at the heart of each petal. Five overtakings spaced evenly round the zodiac make a pentagram, and because thirteen to eight is not quite exact the whole figure creeps backwards a couple of degrees every cycle.

Morning star and evening star

Venus never strays more than about forty-seven degrees from the Sun, so it is only ever seen in the west after sunset or in the east before sunrise. For about nine months it is the evening star, then it passes between the Earth and the Sun and reappears as the morning star for about nine months more, before slipping round behind the Sun again. The ancient world took a long time to accept that the two were the same planet.

Transits and the second star

Venus’s orbit is tilted about three and a half degrees to the Earth’s, so at most meetings it passes above or below the Sun. It crosses the Sun’s face only rarely: the last two transits were in 2004 and 2012, and the next is not until 2117. Some astrologers mark the superior conjunctions as well, when Venus is on the far side of the Sun; they fall into their own five-pointed pattern over eight years, a second star. This page draws only the meetings between the Earth and the Sun, and the facts above give the next conjunction of either kind and the next time Venus stands furthest from the Sun.

Venus’s retrograde loops sit with every other planet’s on Backwards, and how easily it can be seen in the mornings and evenings through the year is on Visibility. Mercury, which loops three times a year, has Mercury cycle, and what Venus stands for in a chart is on Venus.

How astrology uses it

Some astrologers mark the degree of each meeting with the Sun and follow the star it draws, reading the sign of the most recent one as a theme for the months until the next. The page gives the dates and degrees; what they are taken to mean is the tradition’s, described here and not predicted.