Mars Transits to Natal Venus: Does the Pattern Follow Venus?

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A Mars transit to natal Venus happens when the Mars in today's sky reaches an exact angle to your birth Venus: the same degree, 60°, 90°, 120° or the opposite degree. Every angle except the conjunction and opposition exists on both sides of natal Venus, which gives eight separate target degrees. Your birth Venus does not move. It is a single longitude frozen at the moment you were born, and transiting Mars is the only thing travelling.

The page on Mars transits to natal Sun found that Mars's single passes over the natal Sun clustered around the birthday, while its one three-pass contact came when the moving Sun was far from it. That raises a simple question for a different natal point: does Mars's single and three-pass pattern follow the fixed natal Venus degree, or does it stay tied to the birthday? Seen from Earth, Venus always stays within a limited distance of the Sun, but it can still sit well apart from it. For one invented birth whose natal Venus is 35.17° ahead of its natal Sun, measured over 2000 to 2030:

• Fifteen of the sixteen conjunctions were a single forward pass. Each fell within 80 days of the date the moving Sun reaches natal Venus each year (about 24 September here), but anywhere from 44 days before to 114 days after the birthday.
• One conjunction came in three passes, in 2028 to 2029. Its backward crossing, on 3 April 2029, came with the moving Sun in mid Aries, 167.7° from natal Venus.
• Across all eight contact types the same split held as on the Sun page. Mars was never more than 102.5° from the moving Sun at a single crossing, and between 145.3° and 178.9° from it at the backward crossing of every three-pass contact.

In chart reading, Venus usually stands for what someone values and enjoys, and Mars for the push to go and get things. If you use a Mars contact to natal Venus at all, use it as a moment to reflect; on this site it is never treated as a cause of anything or as a forecast.

Educational guide only. Astrologist.com has no transit tool: no transit calendar, return chart or timing report. The free birth chart shows natal positions only, and every date below was computed offline for an invented person.

How the example birth was chosen

The birth was picked by a rule written down before a single Mars date had been worked out, and the rule looks only at natal Sun and natal Venus:

1. Keep the place and clock time of the birth already used on the Mars return and Mars to natal Sun pages: Antwerp, 10:20 local time.
2. Starting the day after that birth, 16 August 1989, step one calendar day at a time.
3. On each day compute natal Sun and natal Venus with the chart's own routines, and stop at the first day on which Venus is at least 35° from the Sun.

The separations at 10:20 were 34.48° on 16 August, 34.71° on 17 August, 34.94° on 18 August and 35.17° on 19 August, so the fourth day was taken. Nothing else was looked at: not Mars, not how many passes a contact would get, not where Mars turns, not the birthday's place in any later pattern.

• The person: invented, born in Antwerp at 10:20 on 19 August 1989. Belgium was on summer time, two hours ahead, so the birth is 08:20 UT.
• The target, natal Venus: 181.505733° before any rounding, that is 1°30'20.6" Libra, with Venus advancing 1.189° per day. In the chart this is stored as 181.51° and printed as 1°30' Libra. Every crossing below is measured against the unrounded figure and nothing else.
• Natal Sun, for comparison only: 146.334707° (26°20'04.9" Leo), 35.17° behind Venus. Stored as 146.33°; printed as 26°19' Leo, one minute lower than the unrounded value, because the chart rounds to hundredths of a degree first and then drops the leftover fraction of a minute.
• Time span examined: from 00:00 UT on 1 January 2000 to just before 00:00 UT on 1 January 2030, covering ages 10.37 to 40.37. It was set beforehand and matches the span on the Mars to natal Sun page.
• Calculation: Mars and Venus come from the same astronomia VSOP87B planetary theory that the chart calls, the moving Sun from the chart's solar function, and Universal Time is turned into ephemeris time by the chart's own conversion. Mars was stepped hour by hour to catch every crossing, each crossing was then tightened to better than thirty seconds, and every turning point was found separately to better than one minute. Those figures describe arithmetic precision, not how well the model matches the real sky. All dates are UT, and dates later than October 2026 are what the model projects, not predictions.

What counts as one contact. Mars's longitude is tracked as one running total that keeps climbing past 360° instead of starting again at 0° Aries, so each lap meets every target at a new value. All the crossings Mars makes of one such value, without straying more than 30° from it, form a single contact; the contact is closed when Mars is more than 30° away on both sides of those crossings. If Mars ever stopped and turned exactly on a target, that would be listed on its own as a touch, not as a crossing.

All eight contacts in the window

Mars's path is the same one measured on the Sun page: fifteen laps plus 347.13° in the thirty years, from 27°34' Aquarius to 14°42' Aquarius, with 28 turning points. The short stretch it did not cover a sixteenth time, from 14°42' to 27°34' Aquarius, holds none of the eight natal Venus targets, so every target was reached on sixteen laps.

In total: 128 contacts made of 140 crossings. 122 contacts were one forward crossing each; the other 6 had three (forward, then backward, then forward again), spread over 120.5 to 166.9 days from first to last. That spread only records how long Mars needed to make the three crossings, and should not be read as a time of influence or an orb.

127 contacts closed inside the window. The last waxing trine contact, a single forward crossing on 15 December 2029, is complete as a crossing, but Mars only got 30° past it on 22 January 2030, after the window, so it is labelled as closing outside the period rather than counted as closed inside it.

Mars never turned on a target, so there are no touches to list. Its nearest turning point to any target was on 10 March 2010, when it resumed forward motion at 0°17' Leo, 1.21° short of the waning sextile degree. On 1 January 2000 the nearest target was 26.07° away, and at the close of the period 13.20°, so no contact was cut off at either end.

Mars's loops and where natal Venus sits

The loops themselves belong to the sky, not to the birth, so they are the same 14 loops as on the Sun page, each containing a sky Sun-Mars opposition, with Mars 129.1° to 146.3° from the moving Sun at all 28 turning points. What changes with a different natal target is which loops straddle it. A contact gets three crossings only when a loop turns backward somewhere past its target and forward again somewhere before it. Six loops did that for one of the eight natal Venus targets, and the other eight missed every target:

The conjunction's three passes came from the 2029 loop. On the Sun page, whose natal Sun is 39.02° earlier in the zodiac (a different birth, four days earlier), the three-pass conjunction came from the 2027 loop instead. That loop turned backward at 10°25' Virgo, 21.08° short of this natal Venus, so here it produced nothing.

The conjunctions, set against the moving Sun

What to measure was decided in advance, before a single conjunction date existed. At each crossing of 1°30'20.6" Libra, three things were recorded: the moving Sun's distance from the fixed natal Venus; the number of days to the closest date when the Sun itself reaches natal Venus's degree (around 24 September every year in this span); and, only as a side figure, the number of days to the closest birthday, when the Sun is back at 26°20'04.9" Leo, around 19 August.

What the example shows. The fifteen single conjunctions fell between 79.8 days before and 77.4 days after the moving Sun reached natal Venus, with the moving Sun within 77.4° of natal Venus and therefore Mars, sitting on natal Venus, within 77.4° of the moving Sun. Measured from the birthday instead, the same fifteen ran from 43.5 days before to 113.7 days after: lopsided, and shifted later by about the five weeks the Sun takes to cover the 35° between natal Sun and natal Venus. On the Sun page, the single conjunctions ran from 84.1 days before to 73.2 days after the birthday, the date the moving Sun reaches that page's target. In both examples, then, the band of single passes sat around the date the moving Sun reaches the natal target itself, not around the birthday as such.

The three-pass conjunction is again the exception: its first crossing came 92 days after the Sun reached natal Venus in 2028, and its backward crossing came when Mars was 167.7° from the moving Sun, 174 days before the Sun reached natal Venus in 2029.

Why it lines up that way, as geometry. For Mars to move backward over natal Venus's degree it has to be near opposition to the moving Sun, so the moving Sun has to be roughly opposite natal Venus. A fast forward pass needs no such alignment, and here the single passes clustered on the side of the year when the moving Sun was near natal Venus. That fits these thirty years for this one birth. The two examples are different births chosen for different reasons, not a matched experiment, so the comparison shows that the pattern moved with the target in these two cases; it is not a rule for every chart, and with one three-pass conjunction on each page it rests on very few cases.

Near misses. The loop of January to April 2012 turned backward at 23°05' Virgo, 8.41° short of natal Venus, and the loop of March to May 2014 turned forward at 9°01' Libra, 7.52° beyond it, so neither reached the natal degree and the conjunctions of 6 July 2012 and 10 December 2013 stayed single. Those two came only 1.430 years apart, because Mars passed natal Venus just after one loop and again on its way into the next.

Other Venus and Mars events are separate

When Mars opposes the Sun in the sky, or when Venus and Mars meet in the sky, only planets in motion are involved, so everyone on Earth shares the event. Transiting Mars on your natal Venus depends on a degree that belongs to you alone. The two kinds of event may land in the same week, yet one never substitutes for the other, and this page uses no sky Venus-Mars meeting at all.

In the window there were 14 sky Sun-Mars oppositions. The one nearest to this natal Venus fell on 25 March 2029 at 4°57' Libra, 3.45° beyond the natal degree and 9 days before the backward conjunction crossing of 3 April 2029. The other 13 lay 17.44° to 160.43° from natal Venus.

Natal Venus-Mars aspects, where both points belong to the birth chart, are another subject again (here natal Mars, at 9°58' Virgo, is 21.53° behind natal Venus); see Venus conjunct Mars (natal) and Venus square Mars (natal). Comparing one person's Mars with another person's Venus is synastry, covered in Venus-Mars synastry, and is not a transit at all.

When the birth time is not known

The local Antwerp date covers 22:00 UT on 18 August up to, but not including, 22:00 UT on 19 August 1989. Across it natal Venus climbs steadily from 180.993555° to a limit of 182.182907° at 24:00, so 1.189° in total, with no wrap; the last whole minute, 23:59, gives 182.182081°. The selection rule holds across the whole date: Venus stayed 35.07° to 35.30° from the Sun, so any clock time on 19 August would have met the 35° threshold.

To find out whether the clock time could matter, that whole 1.189° range was moved round by each of the eight angles, on every lap, and compared with each place Mars turned and with where Mars stood on the first and last instants of the period. Nothing landed inside the range, so whatever the hour of birth on 19 August, the counts stay the same. The tightest spot is the 10 March 2010 forward turn: it lies 0.70° under the waning sextile range. Only a natal Venus at least that much lower, earlier than this date allows, would have turned the 2009 to 2010 waning sextile into a single crossing. Mars's positions at the start and end of the period miss the range by 25.39° and 12.52°.

A spot check was run as well: the whole set of contacts was worked out again for 145 trial birth times, every ten minutes from 00:00 to 23:50 local, plus 23:59. Each trial produced identical contacts with identical directions. Individual crossing dates moved by between 1.51 and 7.38 days over the trials, most where Mars was crawling near the 2010 and 2018 loops. Those numbers describe these trial times and are not guaranteed limits. If you enter no birth time, the free chart works out Venus for local noon and leaves the houses out.

Rounded values, and a second ephemeris as a check

Would the rounded figures from the chart give different answers? Using the stored 181.51° shifts the crossings by 0.13 to 0.63 hours and changes neither a UT date nor a count. Using the printed 1°30' Libra, read as 181.5000°, shifts them by 0.17 to 0.86 hours; one crossing moves from 14 to 13 June 2021 in UT, and the counts stay put. Any value from 181.495° up to just below 181.512° prints as 1°30' Libra, and no turning point comes within 1.20° of that band.

The Swiss Ephemeris, a separate and widely used ephemeris, served purely as a second opinion. Its natal Venus comes out 0.05 arc-seconds higher than the chart's. At each of the 140 crossing moments, Swiss Mars was no more than 0.49 arc-seconds from the chart's target, and finding the crossings again with Swiss Mars moved none of them by more than 0.003 hours, with either version of natal Venus as the target. On the comparison side, Swiss puts the natal Sun 10.79 arc-seconds lower than the chart does, and it shifts the yearly Sun dates by at most 0.190 hours and the sky oppositions by at most 0.126 hours. The page's figures were not taken from Swiss, and these differences are measurements for this example, not a promise of accuracy.

Possible themes for Mars to natal Venus

Each of these is a question to ask yourself, best weighed together with the sign natal Venus is in, the aspects it makes and, when the birth time can be trusted, its house:

• Conjunction. What would it look like to put real effort behind something you value or enjoy, and where might that effort turn hurried?
• Waxing and waning squares. Where do wanting something and pushing for it seem to pull against each other?
• Opposition. How do your own tastes and values sit beside outside demands or the priorities of people around you?
• Trines and sextiles. Commonly described as smoother openings for acting on what you like or care about, at an even pace.
• A forward, backward and forward contact. A number of astrologers treat the three crossings as a single theme returned to over several months.

These are interpretive patterns, not destiny. The page does not forecast what will happen or explain why anything did, and it makes no claim that Mars reaching natal Venus brings anger, injury, illness, attraction, a change in any relationship, or any result at work or with money.

Two neighbouring pages follow moving Mars back to its own birth degree: the Mars return and, half a lap later, Mars opposition Mars. The same natal Venus question with far slower planets is covered in Jupiter transits to natal Venus and Saturn transits to natal Venus. Mars entering houses, rather than meeting a natal planet, has its own guide: Mars transits through the houses.

Doing this for your own chart

1. Look up natal Venus on the free birth chart and turn it into a single number of degrees from 0° Aries (Libra starts at 180°). Bear in mind that a printed minute hides a small spread of possible values.
2. Decide on your date range before looking at any results. Using a Tropical ephemeris, write down Mars's longitude through that range as a running total that keeps going past 360°, including the backward stretches, and mark where each of the eight targets falls on every lap.
3. Note every crossing and whether Mars was moving forward or backward. Crossings of the same target value with Mars never more than 30° away belong together as one contact. Mark any contact that was already under way when your range began or had not finished when it ended.
4. List each backward loop with the degree where Mars turned back and the degree where it turned forward again. Any target lying between those two degrees will be crossed three times; any target outside them only once, however close the loop comes.
5. To see where your conjunctions sit in your year, count the days from each one to the date the Sun reaches your natal Venus, and to your birthday too if that interests you, rather than taking either link for granted.
6. If you do not know your birth time, work out natal Venus for the start and end of your birth date. Because Venus covers about a degree a day, check whether any turning point, or Mars at either end of your range, falls inside that spread at any of the eight angles.

On the code side, the free chart sets no date limit for Mars, Venus or the Sun. The site's test suite checks Mars and Venus against Swiss at noon on every day from 25 December 1919 to 8 January 2061. For this batch the worst difference was 2.22 arc-seconds for Mars and 2.15 for Venus, and every turning point lined up with a Swiss one (132 for Mars, worst 0.012 hours apart; 176 for Venus, worst 0.011 hours). The tests allow 0.05°, a stricter 8 arc-seconds, and 0.025 hours for turning points. The Sun is tested against 52 stored reference charts to within 0.05°. All of this concerns positions and turning points rather than transit dates, and passing it does not make a projected date a prediction.

Prefer pencil and paper? A manual approach is laid out in reading transits by hand. And Ask the Astrologist is happy to discuss your natal Venus or dates you have already found, though it will not compute transit dates for you.

Related articles

• Mars Transits to Natal Sun (same mover, a natal target at the Sun's own place)
• Mars Opposition Mars
• Mars Return
• Jupiter Transits to Natal Venus (different mover, same fixed natal Venus)
• Saturn Transits to Natal Venus (different mover, same fixed natal Venus)
• Retrograde Planets and the Sun (the sky astronomy behind the loops)
• Mars Transits Through the Houses
• Venus Conjunct Mars (natal)
• Venus-Mars Synastry (two charts compared, not a transit)
• What Venus Signs Mean
• Venus Return (moving Venus coming back to the same natal Venus)