Venus in the Tarot

With Venus in Mars’ watery temple, it felt apropos to reconnect with James Hillman’s monograph, A Terrible Love of War. The title itself is suited to the planet of love and lust transiting through the domicile of the war god. Hillman writes: “Venus victrix states a fact: Venus will out. She will be victorious and she cannot be suppressed…When suppression does rule for a while…the goddess goes to compensatory extremes.”

When we consider Venus in the horoscope, it is important to distinguish its appearance by phase. As an evening star, it presents the archetypal energy that we most commonly associate with love: intimacy, sensitivity, sensuality, romanticism, and earthly pleasures. By contrast, as a morning star, Venus assumes the qualities of warrior: strategic, assertive, and highly motivated by emerging victorious in myriad pursuits. This expression reminds us that, as much as we associate Aphrodite with beauty and love, the mythology also points to a competitive side. We need only refer to the Judgment of Paris to see these qualities made manifest.

The distinction between Venus as lover and warrior harks back to the complexity with which the archetype appears in Greco-Roman mythology. In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes:

“Even if we stay only with Aphrodite, or Venus as she has been called since the Romans, we find her love to be a complicated group of myths, now enmeshed with Ares [Mars], now with the heights of Uranus, the waves of Poseidon [Neptune], the concrete artifacts of Hephaestus; now in opposition to…