The Lovers Square Off: Venus in Virgo And Mars in Gemini

Hey, everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Today, we are going to take a look at the approaching Venus, Mars square, that is coming through this week on the heels of a very busy and dynamic full moon, which we explored yesterday. The lovers are getting together in a square based on the Mars-based tension. So this does favor a kind of Venus-Mars interaction if that makes sense.

But we're going to unpack that today and tell you what to watch for and really get to know some of the more tense interactions between Venus and Mars in general because there is an opportunity to do that right now, and that's a good thing to spend time talking about because we don't get the really tense interactions between these two planets all that often. So it's nice to dive into it a little bit more intentionally.

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So on that note, Let us now turn our attention to the real-time clock where we are looking at Venus's square to Mars this week; Mars is in the superior position, meaning that Mars has a little bit of the upper hand in the dynamic. And that is also an ancient concept with right and left-handed aspects. So we'll I've broken that down before. I'm not going to get into that today. But the bottom line is the two planets are coming through the square. This is Thursday, August 22, into Friday, August 23, where the exact square takes place. But you could spread this out to about Monday, August 26, when the two planets start to move within about, you know, about three degrees apart by next Monday, Tuesday.

So we're in the orb or the range of the effects or manifestations of the. You've heard me talk about this as like a bush full of berries that are blossoming, and here is the bush full of berries that are blossoming between Venus and Mars in Virgo and Gemini. Now Venus is debilitated in Virgo, which means that there's a little bit of tension between Mercury and Venus that is natural to those two planets. That Venus carries that tension when she. Levels through Virgo, and we've talked about that. If you took a look at my deep dive into Venus in Virgo last week, you learned more about Venus coming through the square to Mars in Gemini. One thing that's interesting is they're both in Mercury-ruled signs.

And, of course, Mercury is retrograde and coming out of the combustion with the sun and about to turn direct as the sun also enters Virgo and then becomes then moves into a mutual reception with Mercury. So it isn't it's an interesting time for the rulers of these two planets, Venus and Mars, in the square with each other; Mercury is undergoing a process of transformation that is about to conclude if we take this forward just a little bit, by the end of next week, Mercury will be stationing direct.

So, anyhow, the square between Venus and Mars is one of the oldest archetypal combinations; you know, in many different religious and spiritual traditions, these two archetypes are the quintessential archetypes of the masculine and feminine, the yin and the yang, and when the Lovers meet in trines and sextiles, even conjunctions to a certain extent, usually, the significations are very you know, they can be very harmonious.

When they're in squares and oppositions, they tend to be a little bit more conflicted. Squares are of the nature of Mars. Mars is in the superior position, so we might see a little bit more of a tense interaction between the two planets this week. So, I want to talk about what you can watch for with these two planets anytime they get together. I'll say a few things about the fact that they are in Gemini and in Virgo, but what is really important is that we understand how Mars and Venus's squares manifest because that is the most palpable thing that you will feel and notice. This week, I titled this: the lovers are always together. And I'm alluding to a book that was written by the archetypal psychologist James Hillman, who is one of my, one of the great, really great, like intellectual and spiritual influences of my career.

I've read everything he's written, and he has a book that he wrote, and I actually read from it before on the channel called A Terrible Love of War. The words Love and War are purposely put together because the book is a real excavation of the age-old archetypal relationship between Venus and Mars, love and war, conflict and harmony. These are archetypal principles, personified, obviously, in these gods. And what's most important is not that we take the side of one planet over the other, which we're prone to do because we want one of them to be better than the other. It's just very easy for us, most of us, to say, I'd like peace over war.

You know, it's like very common sense. But it's more complicated than that because for ancient mystics, the entirety of manifest reality, the living cosmos, exists because of the tension of so many opposites, all different kinds of opposites, oppositional tension and duality between opposites, opposites that hold and work against one another, and also Those that move fluidly across spectrums, different kinds of opposites, different ways in which opposites move, was at the heart of what ancient philosophers were thinking about. This is across the East and the West.

And despite the kind of new age, I don't know. There's a new age mantra that you'll hear about oneness and nonduality and overcoming duality and all that kind of stuff that also existed in the ancient world. This thought about what is non-dual, or the one, however, what is much more common in ancient philosophy than I think people understand, is that we wouldn't have life without duality, that we wouldn't have life without the tension in interaction and creativity that comes from opposites and their tensions. And so ancient philosophers, many of them, were not really interested in getting rid of opposites or insisting that they are all illusions, but rather learning how to live with them, live in and through them, without getting torn apart by them, without getting taken on a horrifying ride by them, right?

So ancient philosophers, by and large, are interested in a kind of oneness that exists in and through duality. So you have both oneness and duality as co-present divine, eternal realities that are a part of life. That's really important philosophically speaking because it gets right to the core of one of the difficulties that we have about Mars and Venus, which is that we would typically like Venus to be better than, more important than, more virtuous than Mars. We think, yeah, love, peace, harmony, happiness.

Shouldn't these things be more important than strife? A Mars-ruled word or division or conflict or cutting or severing or hostility. Well, yeah, I mean, on the surface level, most of us are privileged and prefer Venusian types of experience. This is one of the reasons that Mars, within our relative world of karma, was considered a malefic. A malefic not meaning that Mars is evil in and of itself, but meaning that Mars tends to signify the things that we don't like as much as the other things we like. From Venus, who is called the benefit we like, good fortune, a nice day, sunny sky, temperate weather, a day at the beach, making love, eating good food. You know, doing nice things with friends. We love that not many of us really love.

Like, oh, today was beautiful. I got in this wonderful fight with John, whoever John is. So you get the idea, but it's really important that we do a little more work to recognize the presence of opposite archetypes in bed with each other. And Venus and Mars are the quintessential lovers in the bed of almost every image, and that's something that James Hillman said.

So let me give you a taste for this. And I'm not suggesting, please don't hear me wrong, and suggesting that I'm like, oh, let's go glorify war and violence. And no, it's not about it's not about that. As much as it is about, there's a kind of cosmic humility that is required for us to really recognize how complicated things are, that there are archetypes like Venus and Mars, and we all say, Oh, I love Venus. I have, and I'm not into Mars, but if we do a little digging, we'll find that Mars is everywhere. Venus is because they're intertangled with each other, just like lovers; you can't really separate them. And once we recognize that we just it's not that we glorify warts, that we become less hypocritical, we become less self-righteous, we become more humble in the face of what's really going on in the universe and how complex it is. Once we can hold onto the tension of those opposites we really are, we become so much more mindful.

One of the biggest blocks to any kind of spiritual growth is self-righteousness and hypocrisy. We think that in order to not be self-righteous or to not be hypocritical, we have to be in possession of tons of virtue and truth. And no, we don't have to know all the truth. We don't have to be anywhere than where we are, to be in a really good place for spiritual growth. Spiritual growth happens so much more quickly for people who just realize, like, I don't know. I'm kind of a mess. I do my best. There are some good things about me.

There are a lot of things I don't know. And I'm not going to stand on any platform of righteousness because I will be the world's quickest hypocrite if I do that. One of the quickest ways to get to that kind of humble attitude in the face of the complexities of the cosmos is to understand opposites and understand how intertwined they are with one another because it makes it so much harder for us to judge or to marginalize or to cast out or to, you know, stand in some kind of righteous opposition to part of reality, which is part of us, right?

So, anyhow, my long-winded sermon over here. Let's get into it. Here are the ways in which you can see the lovers together, in their conflicts, in their tensions. How about makeup sex? Let's start with a juicy one. I mean, let me put it this way. I think that I and like I'm just observing human experience from the standpoint of doing so many readings over the years and listening to people from where they're coming from in their life, and looking at my own life, there is something about conflict within relationships, tension within relationships, which we broadly can describe as Venus-Mars, relationship, and conflict, and the two are very important for the sake of passion and the sake of chemistry and the sake of connection and attraction.

Now, obviously, there are going to be examples where, you know, there's no place for violence in a relationship, or suppression, or, you know, oppression or what have you. And there are examples where, you know, obviously, like relationships need to end and people need to advocate for themselves, but you see, even in advocating for yourself, in a relationship where maybe someone is being abusive, that the development and cultivation of the right kind of relationship in your life will have grown out of fighting for yourself for your own dignity.

The point is not that that glorifies and justifies violence; it's that it gives a place for Mars in the reality of life, that there's a dark Mars that comes at you in a relationship, and you have to advocate for yourself, stand up for yourself, protect yourself. Uh, leave sever, cut the cord, okay? And then, hopefully, your next relationship will be more harmonious, but you will not be if you're honest with yourself; you will not be able to separate the beautiful, harmonious relationship you reached and the fighting for your own dignity that you had to do, right? And so life works like this. Life teaches us; life grows us through these tensions of opposites.

The other thing is that let's just say, and I'm, like, I mentioned makeup sex, and I haven't come back to it, but like, How many times is there tension in a relationship that two people really love each other? In a good relationship, no abuse going on; it's just, you know, it's just your run-of-the-mill conflict, and that conflict will often be intimately involved with the dynamism and attraction of two people that there will come a point where the tension will break into a smile and two people will come toward each other and then have very passionate lovemaking that is rooted in conflict.

Everybody knows what that's like, and I'm not saying that it's always healthy. There's; clearly, there's clearly going to be examples where it's not, but my point is to just draw those two opposites, Mars and Venus together, because the more we do that, the more we're capable of seeing that in creation at large, the harder it is to stand in judgment of anyone or anything because we realize that conflict and flow, tension and harmony, that they work in and out of each other, and they are part of how life flows along. And if we have more understanding and less judgment of that process, we are going to be in a much better space for growth. We're going to have an appreciating capacity for life rather than constant polarization.

We think sometimes that we get rid of duality by going to some space of oneness. That's not it. We get to a space of oneness by appreciating and understanding the contours of duality and how they move within the scope of oneness, like the black and white within the larger circle. Anyhow. So, makeup sex is a good example.

Two, victory is attractive. Okay? Like, let's just be real. We want our teams to win, and we, like, we are so, like, I think of it in sports, right, when a team wins a championship, they have a parade, and there's, and there's, like, you know, the floats moving down the street, and streamers and confetti and it's beautiful, and they're dressed up, and, like, victory is something like, I think about, I'm thinking about, I think it was the six of wands, and the tarot shows a guy, like, riding on a horse, and he's got, like, a whatever, a wreath around his head, and he's riding high.

The thing is that, whether it's something we care about, politically or socially or in sports or in our personal lives, or, you know, whatever it is, we find victory and achievement and overcoming of difficulties very attractive. We find it beautiful. Even though I know that sounds weird, one of the reasons that, like, for example, one of the things that I love about bodybuilding as a hobby right now in my life and weight training and so forth, is that the results are beautiful. Like, I love how I feel. I love how my body feels. I love that my body looks better because I'm doing difficult things, like the training, the cardio, the sleeping, and the diet. It's a lot; it's those challenges, right? And they kind of, it's like, whoo, this is challenging, but then the results are so attractive, you know? And the same thing goes for why we love the Olympics.

We love seeing the people at the end holding beautiful beings adorned like Venus with jewelry, with metal gold, and they're standing up on a platform, and that the flag is waving and the music is playing, is very Venusian, and we were attracted to victory. And it's just, it's not it. I don't think that that is like, a damning I don't think that, like, like anyone should feel, um, you know, condemned by that. We should feel liberated by that. Because, if we can admit to ourselves, yeah, I like to see my team win, you know, because I'm attracted to the beauty of victory.

Well, it's a little harder to be a hypocrite, and it's a little easier to be humble, the more aware of that we are, right, and because then we can say, okay, when is that tension appropriate, and when is it feeding into an unhealthy form of domination, or an unhealthy form of, you know, like, like, egoic. The victory and the support and development of hierarchies that crush people. Do you know what I mean? So, you can't get there by pretending that you're not, that you don't have a very basic archetypal level of attraction to victory.

So Venus and Mars, when they come together, they often bring up the tension between what we desire and the difficulty of getting there, of the tensions and hardships required to win, or they bring up tensions in relationships between who's more attractive or valuable and who should be who's ahead of the other person. And we always think to ourselves that when Venus and Mars come together in a conflict, we think, Well, I'm on the right side of this, you know, because it's easy to justify our stake in any matter.

And it's easier to imagine that someone else is being selfishly attracted to some vain glory, or, you know, some, so the other person is the one who's attracted to something selfish. I think it's really healthy to have Venus Mars moments like these. They come up, and you just admit to yourself what outcome you find to be both powerful and attractive and just be honest about it.

Honesty is one of the main qualities necessary for growth in honesty with ourselves, especially when we can be honest with ourselves. It is harder to be a hypocrite and is harder to be self-righteous, and that's our mantra for this talk today. It is like if you are the more aware we are of archetypal tensions, the harder it is to be self-righteous, the harder it is to be a hypocrite. And that's a good place to be in because it's so much easier to appreciate, stay curious, and grow when we're in that space.

Number three, relationships are often formed and deepened based on what we fight for, right? So think, for example, about the groups you belong to, politically, socially, culturally, that care for the same fights and battles that you do ideologically or philosophically or religiously or whatever the case might be. This is a basic Mars Venus tension that many relationships in our lives are based on what we take a stand for, what we fight for, what we advocate for, what victories or battles we're in the midst of, and who we see as you know that person that's on my team. Now, is it bad? No, not at all. It's normal. It's natural.

However, I think again, it can keep us humble if we stay aware of it. Because if we point the finger at other human beings and say, oh, you know you're, it's these people over here who are who all have some kind of mob mentality trying to fight and dominate other people based on what they desire, what outcome they wish for humanity, or whatever it's like, yeah, well, most of us do that, you know. And that doesn't mean that that doesn't mean that anything that everything is the right cause or the best or the best or right outcome. But it does mean that the human impulse to join other people based on what you want to fight for is pretty normal.

And so if we can understand that, we can also understand that it's just, it's easy to be led by archetypal impulses, and that can give us a lot of compassion and patience for other people, rather than, again, self-righteousness, different vices, same desires. I want to give you a classic example of a Neptune to Venus transit versus a Neptune to Mars transit. These come from my client practicing different vices and having the same desire. We saw a client in my practice who had a Neptune, Neptune transiting natal Mars, and this person went through a period of time where they became addicted to sports gambling.

Okay, so what they wanted behind this was money and success, and they liked the thrill of getting a sweat on a game with something on the line. So it's adrenaline and a thrill and the joy of victory and then like wealth and success and addiction on the other hand, I'm thinking of another client that I had, Neptune transiting natal Venus, and she got herself into an enormous amount of credit card debt, overspending and going and getting clothing and jewelry and purses and things that were way outside of her means Neptune transiting Venus. What did she want?

She wanted beauty and luxury and wealth and the enjoyment of these kinds of Venusian things. But behind Venus and Mars, in either case, and a Neptune transit to both right was get. Lost in the desire. And the desire might look a little different from a purse to gaining money through a sports bet, but both of them went into great debt.

Both of them had an addiction, and one addiction looked like Venus, the other looked like Mars; okay, but fundamentally, Venus and Mars can entangle us in very similar vices, in very similar desires, even though it's easy for us to sit back and judge the two as very different and typically, to exalt Venus over Mars. And not that I don't agree most of the time, I prefer Venus to Mars as well, but you get the idea of Venus and Mars when they come together. It can also point to the fact that Venus's Venus can be hypocritical, and Mars can be hypocritical, and they can look more like each other than they think they do. So, just keep that in mind.

Number five, and I just want to close with this understanding of opposites. There is no more fundamental opposite in ancient astrology than Venus and Mars, maybe the sun and the moon, but harmony and strife are at the core of life in this cosmos, so there should be great tension and releases of destructive power in the actual forging of stars and planets is as important as the fact that when you look at you know the Earth from space, and you see this beautiful, glowing ball of life, there's a way in which that looks like Venus. It looks like life is flowing along in some holistic sense of things, with a comet striking the Earth devastating.

That Marzi piece is just as real as Venus, and it's so important that we move beyond what is good and bad because that's one part of our experience of what is real. Because the more we're able to just accept what is real, what is a part of life and how it moves along, and how these tensions of opposites work, the harder it is for us to stand in judgment of ourselves, of each other, of life itself. There is tremendous freedom in that, and for most of us, growth starts in that space and in learning how to stay in that space because that space is fundamentally appreciative and curious, rather than conclusive and certain and judgmental.

So, anyhow, we'll leave it there for today. I hope that this was a useful meditation for everybody and that it gives you something good to meditate on as the lovers get together this week. As Hillman said, they are always together in the bed of images. And I love that, if you dig a little bit, you will always find this Venus-Mars tension at play in most things in life. So yeah, by the way, I've got my tie dye on for you today. This is especially true for all of you, and I also do not identify as a tie-dye-wearing human. All right. I hope you guys are having a good one. Bye.