Venus Square the Lunar Nodes: Values at the Turning Point

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With Venus square the Lunar Nodes, Venus sat between 82° and 98° from the North Node when you were born, and so equally far from the South Node. The chart therefore shows two square lines from Venus, one to each Node. Instead of sitting on the familiar end or the growth end of the axis, Venus stands across it, at one of the two points older astrologers called the bendings.

Either bending counts, which roughly doubles the frequency compared with a conjunction. Across the 73,049 daily noon charts we cast for Greenwich between 1900 and 2099 it showed up on 6,441 dates (8.8%, about one sampled date in 11), in 440 windows, roughly 2.2 a year. Most windows lasted 12 to 14 days; a retrograde Venus stretched the longest to 98. Venus was at the northern bending, 90° ahead of the North Node in zodiac order, on 49.3% of square dates, and at the southern bending on the rest.

How it may show up

Torn between two sets of values. What you were taught to want and what you are starting to want can both feel legitimate. Some people describe this as standing at a crossroads in matters of love, money or taste.

Relationships at the turning point. Close ties are often where the square gets worked out. A partner or friend may seem to pull toward the old habits while another pulls toward the new direction.

Restless taste. A sense of beauty that never quite settles can be tiring. It can also keep someone creative, because nothing is taken as finished.

The bridge. A hopeful reading casts Venus as the go-between that carries old and new values toward each other, through diplomacy, art or simple warmth. Where and how that happens is better shown by the sign and house Venus occupies.

None of this is fixed. The square points to friction that can be put to work, and most readers weigh the Nodes more lightly than the planets.

Never an eclipse on these dates

NASA's eclipse tables for the two centuries never show the Sun more than about 18.6° from a Node at an eclipse. Venus can stand up to about 47° from the Sun, so on every Venus square date in our sample the Sun was at least 35.1° from both Nodes, and none of the 440 windows contained an eclipse date.

The Sun can still be at the bendings with Venus. On 6 June 2016, at Venus's superior conjunction, the calculator has Venus at 16°02' Gemini and the Sun at 16°10' Gemini at London noon, with the North Node at 17°16' Virgo. Venus was 1.2° and the Sun 1.1° from an exact square, both at the southern bending. Sun square the Lunar Nodes covers the Sun's version of the contact.

Autumn 2018: three passes

In 2018 Venus met the northern bending three times. The first window ran from 4 to 30 September: on 13 September Venus at 2°46' Scorpio was 0.60° from an exact square to the North Node at 3°22' Leo. Venus turned retrograde between 5 and 6 October at 10°50' Scorpio, 8.6° from exact and just outside the orb, and came back into it on 13 October. On 29 October, retrograde at 1°20' Scorpio, it was 0.41° from exact with the Node at 0°55' Leo.

While Venus was retrograde the Node moved from Leo into Cancer, on 16 November, the same day Venus turned direct at 25°14' Libra. On 30 November, moving forward at 28°51' Libra, Venus squared the North Node at 29°14' Cancer by 0.38°. The square had moved from a Scorpio-Leo pair to a Libra-Cancer pair without ever leaving the orb, and that second window lasted 61 days, to 12 December.

Retrograde at the bendings

Venus was retrograde on 6.8% of square dates, close to its 7.2% share of all dates. Those dates fall in 19 of the 125 Venus retrograde periods that began in the 200 years, about one in seven, more than for either conjunction because there are two bendings to hit. After 2018 the next is calculated for the summer of 2031. Venus squares the Nodes from 28 June to 15 August 2031, crossing the exact square on 12 July and again, retrograde, on 30 July. On 21 July 2031 it turns retrograde at 26°25' Leo, 1.6° from exact with the North Node at 24°48' Scorpio, and on that day Mercury, at 24°00' Leo, squares the Nodes by 0.81°. Mercury square the Lunar Nodes explains why Mercury's retrogrades are returning to the bendings in those years.

Venus at 60° and 120°

The gentler contacts also arrive two at a time: when Venus is 60° from one Node it is 120° from the other, so a dashed blue line and a solid blue line leave ♀ together. Venus stood 60° from the North Node on 6.6% of sampled dates and 120° from it on 8.9%. They are usually read as an easy channel between familiar and new values, worth noting but lighter than the conjunctions and the square.

Seeing it on your chart

Two solid red lines run from ♀, one to N.Node and one to S.Node. In the planet table, the distance between ♀ and ☊ falls between 82° and 98°. Sign pairs usually share a modality, yet 13.7% of the sampled square dates crossed into a neighbouring sign, so read the degrees. If Venus lies about a quarter circle after the North Node in zodiac order, it is at the northern bending; a quarter circle after the South Node, the southern.

With no birth time, the calculator uses local noon as an internal reference for Venus and the Nodes. On about 7% of square dates the lines could depend on the hour (an estimate from interpolating between noon charts), and the houses Venus and the Nodes occupy need a known birth time. Find your own lines on the free birth chart.

Further reading

• Venus conjunct North Node and Venus conjunct South Node
• The North Node and South Node explained
• Aspect patterns, when a square is part of a larger figure
• The aspects library

To talk through what this square means next to your Venus sign and house, use Ask the Astrologist.