Venus Conjoins Neptune in Aries — The Goddess is on Fire this Week!

Hey, everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/]. Today we're going to take a look at Venus entering the sign of Aries immediately making a conjunction to Neptune in the sign of Aries. I believe that these first transits to Neptune in the sign of Aries are giving us a feel for what Neptune in Aries is all about. So we're going to talk a little bit about that, and I'm also going to be sharing with you one of my favorite passages written by the famous astrologer Liz Greene on Venus Neptune contacts, and extrapolating from some of the points that she makes, to offer you some insights today.

I hope that you will enjoy this and that it will give you some good things to watch for as the Venus Neptune contact comes through this week. So before we get into it, remember to like and subscribe, share your comments and reflections. All of this stuff really helps the channel to grow. We do a look. We take a look at all of the analytics of the channel. We find that a lot of people watch regularly but are not yet subscribed. That simple little click of the subscribe button helps us immensely. So we really appreciate it.

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On that note, let's turn our attention to the real-time clock and take a look at Venus and Neptune coming together today. So you are going to see the two planets. This is Tuesday, April 29 and if we take this forward just a touch, I'm going to move this forward into April 30th. That's Wednesday, you'll see Venus enters Aries and is at that zero degree Aries mark - a very powerful degree marker in the Zodiac for the initiation of new things.

It is the degree that marks the spring equinox in the tropical zodiacal form of measurement. So a very powerful starting point for Venus tomorrow. If we take this forward just a little bit more, we're going to see that the two planets come together by Friday May 2. So this transit is not technically coming through until Friday. Now for this week, we are looking at your astrological overview for the month of May, where we do spend a little time talking about Venus and Neptune.

And then we're looking at horoscopes for the month of May, where we focus mostly on Saturn's entrance into Aries later in the month of May. And then Friday, I'm doing Pluto retrograde horoscopes. So today, we're spending some time with Venus Neptune, although it doesn't come through until the end of the week. So just note that this transit will really be building Wednesday through Friday. We're prepping for it today.

So May 2 is your date of interest here, and you'll be experiencing the separation of these two planets within three degrees all the way until about May 7, next Wednesday. So give it a full week, Wednesday to Wednesday, and you will maybe be feeling the effects throughout that entire period. Now, what I want to do today is share with you about a page and a half of a portion of Liz Greene's book on the astrological Neptune.

If you don't know Liz Greene, she is one of our great modern masters of psychological astrology. She was a student of Carl Jung, contemporary with James Hillman, and really is a treasure in our astrological tradition. I have learned so much from reading basically everything she's written. This was one, especially when I first got started. The past five, six years, I've spent a lot more time with ancient, traditional astrology, Indian astrology, but I always come back to Liz Greene.

So this book, if you've never seen it, is called The Astrological Neptune and the Quest for Redemption. If you want a really deep dive into the planet Neptune from an astral or a psychological perspective, I highly, highly recommend this book. It is a go-to as a reference in lectures I've planned and talks I've given for years. There's a brief passage that she has on Neptune and Venus combinations, and I'd like to read it to you today.

Since it's about, I guess, three pages, and I want to, as we go along, I'm going to pause and offer some reflections of my own that sort of just dovetail right off from what she's saying. So here it is, and I hope that you will enjoy this. If you're newer to my channel, once in a while, I like to just bring in excerpts from really masterful texts, because I like people to know about the great astrologers out there.

Many of you have probably read Liz Greene, maybe even read this book. For those who haven't, I think that this is very powerful to expose people to Neptune Venus. "I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed. Gods and men, we are all deluded. Thus it breaks in our bosom and then we bleed." The contacts of Neptune and Venus are the most romantic in the colloquial as well as the historical sense of the word.

Venus does not describe love on the emotional level. Rather, it portrays an ideal of love which embodies what the individual perceives as beautiful and worthwhile. This is really important to mention right away, because one of the things that comes through when Venus and Neptune get together is romantic idealism. Now, romantic idealism under a Venus Neptune contact for me - you guys have heard me say this before on my channel - makes for really great date nights.

Like my wife and I always seem to land in really fun, memorable date night experiences and memories that we make when Venus Neptune are together. I think that's because both of us, my wife and I, are both sort of romantic in our sensibilities, and so we end up feeling like our date nights approximate something close to a romantic ideal when Venus and Neptune are together.

You know, there's always the chance, at the same time that a Venus Neptune contact will hold out what you have in life against the standard of an ideal, and make you feel like something is sorely lacking. That can be really disillusioning and difficult. We may struggle to live with the reality of mundane life relative to the romantic idealism that's present with the Venus Neptune contact. But this is what Liz goes on to - Liz Greene goes on to talk about.

"Venusian relationships allow us to discover our values. What one loves one secretly is, and it is these qualities which form the bedrock of a sense of personal worth. Aspecting other inner planets, Venus will find its vision of beauty embodied in the people, objects and experiences of everyday life. The expression of individual values through personal taste creates feelings of contentment, and each day can provide happiness through the pleasure of the senses and the delights of human companionship."

This is interesting because in ancient astrology, the fifth house - it was called The Joy of Venus - is associated with that pleasure which is innate to the soul. We associate this with creativity. But that's not exactly what the fifth house's original meaning was all about. It was called the fifth house was called The Joy of Venus, the house of good fortune. In Indian astrology, it is a Dharma house that is said to be the joy derived from one's dharma.

What that means is what makes you happy that you can't change because it's just fundamental to who you are. Discovering that, we might say, is a process of creative individuation by reaching into our what makes us essentially us, we tap into what makes us happy, what makes us feel fulfilled, creatively, romantically, sensually. But this is different from just saying it's a house of creativity in some generic sense, the fifth house.

So what I love about what Liz Greene is saying in this little passage is that Venus really helps us understand what is innately pleasurable and valuable to us, therefore bringing us some level of satisfaction while we're living a life on Earth. "The feeling the expression of individual values through personal taste creates feelings of contentment, and each day can provide happiness through the pleasure of the senses and the delights of human companionship."

"Neptune, unlike Venus, tends toward chronic unhappiness for nothing in this world, however beautiful, can compensate for the lost waters of paradise. Two characteristic manifestations of Venus Neptune are divine discontent in matters of love and interference with the capacity for personal happiness. If the lover is not perfect, one feels betrayed. If the environment is not perfect, one becomes depressed. If society is not perfect, one despairs. If the body is not perfect, one longs to shrink it, enlarge it, face-lift it, disguise it, or, if all else fails, destroy it. For anything less than the seamless beauty of Eden cannot be born."

So she's gone a little heavy, right? But Venus Neptune again, because Venus Neptune will hold out the earthly and relatively embodied world of pleasure, happiness, beauty and value up against the ideal of paradise, something so transcendentally perfect in Neptune that sometimes the feeling of chronic dissatisfaction or disappointment is common for Venus Neptune contacts.

It is one of the most predictable transits that I've seen when people struggle with their marriage, or they struggle with infidelity, or betrayals or a feeling of boredom in love. At the same time, just to be fair and push it in the opposite direction, people will often find that the romantic sentiments are heightened and are sort of peaking and holding out new possibilities for things that are maybe even more enjoyable.

So there can be Venus Neptune enhancements. I think Liz kind of underestimates those in this section, but she's not wrong either. They can be very problematic. "Venus Neptune is often associated with sexual magnetism and seductiveness. Examples such as Bridget Bardot and Marilyn Monroe abound in the world of film, but having the kind of charisma which allows one to be all things to all people may not be a promising augury for future stability and contentment."

"The individual may unconsciously - excuse me - identify with the victim Redeemer through his or her sexuality, seeking to discover a solid sense of self-worth by offering himself or herself to those who've been wounded by life." So the love that can redeem, the love that can save, the love that can heal, or the sex or the pleasure or the beauty that can redeem or heal or save.

There's a powerful healing capacity with Venus and Neptune when it comes to everything sensual, relational, physical, romantic. And yet, insofar as we - you know, it's a kind of a double-edged sword, because the thing that we're trying to redeem may not be, in some sense, redeemable any more than death is avoidable in the material world. Like there are blemishes, there are edges, there's a kind of harshness and a tentativeness and - what do I want to say - like a vulnerability or fragility to life itself.

And Venus Neptune contacts will often try to save or redeem or heal or make perfect something that we're having a hard time accepting for its flaws. And so another example of Neptune Venus contacts will be those - you know, sometimes people will go through with cosmetic procedures, and they'll be obsessed during Neptune Venus contacts with trying to improve their looks to the point where they end up looking unnatural and maybe even worse than they did prior to having cosmetic procedures done.

I have no judgments against whatever people do. I'm not like, I'm a very live-and-let-live kind of person in that respect. They don't judge people for having cosmetic procedures, but it is something to watch for with Venus Neptune. It's like, I can save you in a romantic relationship, or if I have this procedure, it will save me. And the underlying issue is never addressed, and then the chronic thing becomes distorted, and we start trying to live with a kind of delusion, and we live in a state of denial that can be very common for Venus Neptune, unfortunately.

So these are all again, just things to remember. So let's go on here. "Venus Neptune may also be drawn toward those who seem to offer redemption. It's the aspect par excellence of the pursuit of the unobtainable. Ideals of love may be conjoined with themes of suffering and sacrifice, and only a relationship involving pain and expiation has felt to be authentic."

I remember when I was in my 20s, I have a Venus Neptune trine in my natal chart, so thankfully, they get along relatively well. But when I was in my early 20s, I really used to think that relationships that didn't involve a lot of hard, deep processing and work all the time were not real. And if I dated someone and everything was stable, you know, that was suspicious to me.

This is a reflection of my own healing process that I was going through, you know, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, and coming out of my early 20s, when I dealt with the phase of addiction, so that kind of co-dependent dynamic is quite common for people to have to work through with Venus Neptune. Where you go, it doesn't need to be heartbreaking and Shakespearean for it to be real - not that heartbreaking, Shakespearean, deep inner work isn't part of life or part of a part or an aspect of a meaningful relationship.

But Venus Neptune may kind of hold out the illusion that it's only real if it involves a lot of suffering, and as a Taurus rising, I have learned to resist that narrative. Anyhow, "The poetry of courtly love is never far from Venus Neptune's dreams, nor is the Oedipal triangle of courtly love ever far from Venus Neptune's psychology. Venus concerns rivalry as much as harmony, because one cannot define one's own worth without contrasting oneself with others."

"The triangle-forming propensities of Venus are as evident in life as in the goddess myths, but the common or garden variety Oedipal triangle, which, if we are to believe Freud, is an everyday part of childhood experience, looks rather more dramatic in the waters of Neptune's world. The parent whom one seeks to claim is the divine source. And the Oedipal sin is not mere illicit erotic desire, but a longing through fusion, for the omnipotence of the Godhead."

"As Plotinus once wrote, 'Our concern is not to be sinless, but to be God.' Venus Neptune does not desire a mortal partner in whose mirror its own values can be reflected. It seeks union with the deity. Only here can absolute beauty and perfection be found." I have found that Venus Neptune contacts are not only common when idealization is happening or co-dependent dynamics within a relationship, or an inability to live with the faults and flaws of worldly existence.

But also that there is a projection of something of a divine, transcendent, perfect nature onto things that we value, religiously, spiritually, artistically. It's not uncommon for someone to find a band they love under a strong Neptune Venus contact, and say to themselves, this band is God - not like consciously, like that, but or for a lover, or also for, you know, maybe a religious or spiritual tradition.

I've seen many clients over the years who absolutely fell in love with yoga and started seeing it as their salvation, along with their yoga studio and yoga community during a Neptune Venus contact. It's not that there's something wrong with that, necessarily, but it's almost a guarantee that that will come back down to Earth after the transit is over. Meaning they'll find faults and flaws and limits to how far yoga can take them, compared to the intoxication that we feel when we first encounter a new spiritual path.

And it really gets us high and it's really promising. There's nothing really wrong with falling in love and getting swept up into a Venus Neptune space. It's just sometimes when it comes to taking the projections back, we go through turbulence. For example, in order to take my projection back at the yoga studio, I have to make one of the teachers the devil, and then the studio is the devil, right? So it becomes like a hard binary. This was God, now it's the devil, or now I demonize it.

We do have to be careful of that seduction to go in a complete opposite direction when coming back down to earth, because we still, in a sense, can't just accept the earth. So anyhow, "Because the perfection of Eden shimmers behind Venus Neptune's aspirations and love, physical perfection or lack thereof, may become a major theme in the individual's relationship pattern. Venus Neptune may experience an unwilling but inexorable turn off as soon as the partner is discovered to be physically flawed."

"Sometimes disillusionment can follow only one sexual encounter. Sometimes it develops over time, as the partner shows those small but unmistakable signs of aging, which challenge the immortality of paradise. The fantasy of perfect sexual union is often so far removed from the mechanics of the physical act that the latter may prove a deep disappointment. Thus disillusionment is never far away, nor is the hurt and anger of a partner who cannot understand why he or she is being rejected simply because of existing in a physical body."

I remember early in my practice - this was a long time ago now, so more than 10 years ago - that I worked with a man who was the nicest guy. He had a really hard Venus Neptune opposition in his birth chart, and I've used this with permission and lectures I've given before and everything like that, but he struggled with sex addiction, and the way he described it was really heartbreaking.

He said, "In my head, when I meet a woman, I've fallen in love with her, and I'm picturing my whole life with her, and as soon as - and the power of that fantasy has this great seductive power, like I've been able to sleep with a lot of women because I have a lot of charisma and romantic, I guess, attractiveness that comes through how strongly I start desiring this woman, and even if she's sort of uncertain if it's real or not, because of how strong an instant it is."

"You know, oftentimes the power of that attraction would just overwhelm women. I'd sleep with them, and then the next day, I'm completely uninterested. And then the pattern repeats." And this was like hundreds of partners, okay, so like a big pattern. And the person ended up going into a 12-step program. That's a Venus Neptune opposition that was being activated around the time that this person went into rehab for sex addiction.

And, you know, our conversation was not so much about that, because they were already on the rehab part of their journey, but I found it really interesting, and took note of the Venus Neptune contact that was activated at the time that the addiction was being addressed. And this person was having to recognize that "I have this powerful ability to project and then some on some level, once sex has been - you know, you've consummated the relationship in an active sexual intercourse, then all of a sudden, I see them as mortal."

That's a tough pattern. And I think it's - I don't know, because I'm not any expert on sex addiction, but I imagine that there are probably similar dynamics at work in other, you know, other people who have experienced sex addiction anyway. Venus Neptune - oh, here we go. "The fantasy of perfect sexual union is often so far removed from the mechanics of the physical act that the latter may prove a deep disappointment."

So anyway, she goes on to talk about the perfection that Venus Neptune seeks. "However it may be glimpsed in art, and it is here that the aspect expresses one of its greatest resources. Even if the individual is not musically talented, there's usually a deep feeling for music which touches one's longing for absolute harmony and fulfills many of Venus Neptune's most insistent yearnings. Poetry, painting, fiction, drama may conjure the Lost Eden."

"A perusal of the charts of well-known artists reveals an abundance of Venus Neptune contacts." Now, I went to art school for creative writing. I did two graduate degrees in creative writing. I've got a Venus Neptune trine. I've seen in so many charts with Venus Neptune contacts that seem to naturally incline people toward the arts - dance, whatever it may be. So I'll say that that is one of the great things, and something Liz goes on in this chapter to say a lot about with respect to how to use or work with the energy constructively.

Can you channel it into art and creativity? Because in the realm of art and beauty and dance, it's as though there is an arena set aside for the temporary attempt to embody something divine. We're channeling something as we dance. We're channeling something as we paint or write or perform or sing or even just listen to music or take art in. We are in the theater, and in that theater, you know, catharsis is allowed because we come very close to touching something ideal in art and in beauty.

So one great antidote to the restlessness or the delusions of grandeur with Venus Neptune is art or even creative, romantic, you know, escapades. Like this is why, like, I'm very deliberate about date nights with my wife when Venus Neptune come around, you know, and we just make sure really not to get into argumentative spaces about what each person is lacking against some ideal standard.

Like, as soon as that starts coming up around Venus Neptune, I like, let's just hold off. Let's just wait a second. And no, we're both. My wife's a double Taurus. I'm a Taurus rising - both very earthy Venusian people for the most part. So we're able to keep it pretty grounded, but it is fun to get swept up in it, too. We don't have to be so afraid. I think Liz is a psychological astrologer who's working often with people who are dealing with problematic patterns with planets.

And so this is the point of view she's coming from. But anyway, "With all these potential pitfalls, Venus Neptune possesses and can create extraordinary magic. Its delicacy, poetry, romantic sensibilities generate exalted visions of love and harmony, which may find their way into creative products graced with great beauty. The deep unhappiness which the aspect so often reflects in personal life is not contrary to Venus Neptune's own view, a karmic inevitability or the signature of a higher spirituality."

"More often than not, it is a product of an edible conflict, strongly colored by Neptune's mythic dreams, and remains a psychological inevitability as long as its dynamics are unconscious." You see, that's the whole idea of reading this is to try to bring attention to a dynamic that it's easy to get grabbed by - because we use that name for our grab series, right? It's easy to get grabbed by a transit like this.

So we draw we bring awareness to it, we ritualize our connection to it, and then it can be a dance, and the dance can be in the way we creatively live a life and the story that's unfolding, even if some of these themes come up. The consciousness is what turns it into art. The consciousness is what helps us to avoid some of the darkest pitfalls, which I appreciate her for pointing out.

"If the individual can build a sufficient sense of self-worth as an ordinary human, mortal and does not demand the impossible, Venus Neptune can find contentment in occasional glimpses of Eden." That's the date night, that's the music, that's the theater. So I couldn't more highly recommend checking out the rest of that essay if you find it interesting. I hope that this was a useful meditation for a strong Venus Neptune contact coming through this week.

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They sent it to me. Said, check it out. I get nothing for promoting this, other than to say, if you're into divination, I think you'll really appreciate this really beautiful resource book on world divination traditions. Again, Divination, Oracles and Omens. You can get it on Amazon, I believe. Anyway, that's it for today. Stick around for an informational video about year one coming up next. I hope you're having a great day. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye, bye.