Venus Sextile Chiron: Kindness That Grows When You Practise It

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Venus sextile Chiron means Venus and Chiron were 54° to 66° apart when you were born. On the free chart the sextile is the one major aspect with a 6° orb; the conjunction, square, trine and opposition each get 8°. Astrologers tend to call it an opportunity aspect: helpful, low-key, and most noticeable when someone makes use of it.

Venus brings warmth, liking, pleasure and the sense of value. Chiron adds a sore spot and the empathy that can grow beside it. A sextile between them usually reads as tact: knowing how to make someone feel welcome, especially someone who expects not to be.

What it can look like day to day

Small kindnesses that land. A note, a chair pulled up, a compliment that is specific rather than general. People with this aspect often know what makes another person feel noticed, and do it without fuss.

Easy company for people who feel out of place. The newcomer, the shy cousin or the colleague who just had bad news may drift toward them at a party or in a meeting.

Pleasant things made out of hard moments. Cooking for a friend who is struggling, choosing music for a bad day, rearranging a room after a loss: Venus's practical comforts applied to Chiron's territory.

Self-worth that improves with practice. Accepting thanks, asking for a fair price or simply saying what you like can feel awkward at first and easier each time it is done.

The catch with a light aspect

Nothing about a sextile insists. It is quite possible to have the instinct and never act on it, or to give comfort freely while leaving your own sore spot unattended because it rarely flares. In the evolutionary reading the step is a choice made again and again: noticing the opening and using it, on yourself as well as on others. The aspect describes a possibility, nothing firmer than that.

Usually direct, but not always

Venus never gets much more than 47° from the Sun, so a Venus-Chiron sextile keeps the Sun somewhere between about 7° and 113° from Chiron. Chiron shows an R only when the Sun is roughly 100° or more away from it, so most of that range is direct territory.

Our sample is 51,501 noon charts for Greenwich, one for each date from 1920 to 2060 (all the dates for which the calculator includes Chiron). The sextile appeared on 3,583 of them, 6.96%, about one day in 14. Chiron was direct on 92.5% of those days and retrograde on 7.5%. Every retrograde case had the Sun 100° to 113° from Chiron, with Venus between them and at least 35° out from the Sun. So an R beside ⚷ is possible with this sextile, just uncommon, and well below the 39.5% retrograde share across all sampled days.

The Sun itself was sextile Chiron on 8.5% of these days and square it on 15.2%. Sun sextile Chiron covers the version in which the Sun makes the contact.

Venus was retrograde on 7.5% of sextile days, and never on a day when Chiron was retrograde too. A Venus retrograde keeps Venus within about 29° of the Sun, which is too close for the Sun to reach 100° from Chiron while Venus holds a sextile.

Two windows a year, about ten days each

The sextile came round roughly twice a year (296 noon windows in 141 years), once with Venus ahead of Chiron in zodiac order and once behind it. Without a Venus retrograde a window most often lasted 10 days, within a range of 3 to 23, shorter than the other Venus-Chiron windows because of the narrower orb. A Venus turn inside the window could stretch it to 49 days. Out-of-sign sextiles made up 8.8% of sextile days.

For people born with Chiron in Aries, from 2018 to 2027, the two windows mostly found Venus in Aquarius (winter) or Gemini (late spring and summer).

June 2024: Venus and the Sun side by side

At London noon on 11 June 2024 the calculator gives Venus at 22°52' Gemini and Chiron at 22°40' Aries: a sextile 0.19° from exact, with Chiron direct. Venus had passed behind the Sun a week earlier (the two were 0.06° apart at noon on 4 June), so on the 11th the Sun at 21°00' Gemini was sextile Chiron as well, 1.67° from exact. The noon window ran from 6 to 15 June.

2020: the longest sextile in the range

The longest sextile window in the sample came in 2020, while Venus was retrograde in Gemini. Counting noons, it opened on 2 June and closed on 20 July, 49 days.

• 11 June: Venus crossed the exact sextile moving backward (London noon: Venus 9°02' Gemini retrograde, Chiron 9°02' Aries, 0.00°).
• 25 June: Venus turned direct at 5°20' Gemini, about 4° short of exact, and stayed in orb.
• 10 July: Venus came back to the exact angle (0.16°), with Mars conjunct Chiron about 2° away.
• About 12 July: Chiron turned retrograde, so births in the last days of the window carry the uncommon pairing of this sextile with an R beside Chiron.

Finding it on your chart

On your free birth chart a sextile is a dashed blue line between ♀ and ⚷; a solid blue line would be a trine. The planet table should show them 54° to 66° apart. Chiron is part of the chart for birth dates from 1920 to 2060 only.

No birth time? The chart still draws Venus aspects from a noon reference position; only Moon lines are dropped. The narrow orb makes edge cases more common here than for the other four contacts: on 16.2% of sampled sextile days the noon orb was within 1° of the 6° limit, and on 7.6% within half a degree. On those dates the birth hour decides whether the dashed line appears.

Read next

• Venus trine Chiron, the other easy Venus-Chiron angle, with Chiron retrograde more often than not
• Venus conjunct Chiron, where Chiron is never retrograde
• What Chiron means in astrology
• Back to every aspect page

To talk through this sextile next to your other placements, try Ask the Astrologist.