Venus in Medical Astrology

Venus was the lesser of the two fortunes in the texts, Jupiter being the greater, and the astrologers of Lilly’s time read a well-placed Venus as a planet that helped whatever house it stood in. Ptolemy gave her a warm and moist nature in moderation; Lilly held her temperately cold and moist, and the two readings sit side by side in the tradition without ever being reconciled. In the body Ptolemy listed the liver and the flesh under her and the sense of smell, while Lilly and Culpeper both listed the reins, the womb and the throat. Her sickness readings followed those parts and her moist quality. She stands within a sign and a half of the Sun at all times, runs retrograde for a small share of her days, and in one sign of the sample stayed four solar months. All of this is history, and none of it describes a reader.

Venus keeps near the Sun, so the hours in which she occupies the Placidus 6th house fall on either side of sunset, a little before it when she is the evening star following the Sun down and a little after it when she is the morning star ahead of it. At forty degrees north the sample finds her in the 6th for 2.03 hours a day. The share of charts is 8.44% there, 8.3% at the equator and 8.28% at sixty degrees north, and under Whole Sign houses at forty degrees north it is 8.27%.

None of those figures is far from a twelfth, and the differences among them are of the size the sampling step produces. The table is here to settle one thing: Venus in the 6th was and is an ordinary placement, found in roughly one chart in twelve under either house system, and the texts read it as such, with no special rule for Venus in that house beyond the general reading of a fortune there. The methodology page gives the house system and the sampling.

The three columns in the table beneath this section agree less with one another than the Sun’s or the Moon’s do. Ptolemy listed smell, the liver and the flesh. Lilly listed the reins, the womb, the throat and the seed, and Culpeper the reins, the womb, the throat and the liver. The two English authors therefore match on three entries, and Culpeper’s fourth, the liver, is the one point where he and Ptolemy meet. No single organ appears in all three columns; the liver comes closest, present in two.

The English lists read like the sign list folded into the planet list. Lilly and Culpeper both listed the throat under Taurus on the Zodiac Man and the reins and loins under Libra, and those are Venus’s two signs. Reins is the old English word for the kidneys, and the word in the table is the word the texts used. The womb and the seed belong to Venus’s role in the tradition as the planet of generation, and Ptolemy’s flesh belongs to his humoral reasoning, since a moist planet was given the soft, moist parts.

The nature column reads hot and moist (warm), following Ptolemy, and the signs column Taurus and Libra. Lilly’s cooler reading of Venus is set out in the dignity section below, and the planets and the body guide sets this row against the other six classical planets, where the pattern is the same: later writers added organs to earlier regions and seldom contradicted them.

Lilly’s table of essential dignities gave Venus her houses in Taurus and Libra, her exaltation in Pisces, her triplicity in the earthy signs by day, and terms and faces in every sign. Her detriment fell in Aries and Scorpio, Mars’s two signs, and her fall in Virgo, Mercury’s. Lilly also gave Venus her joy in the 5th house, an accidental fortitude. Each dignity carried points, each debility took them away, and a Venus with none of them in her place was peregrine. Those points are what the table measured; they were never a statement about a person.

On her nature Lilly wrote that Venus was temperately cold and moist, and his list of the diseases under her followed from that: the moist complaints of the parts he listed. Ptolemy had called her warm and moist, and the site’s temperament calculator follows Ptolemy, so a Venus in the 1st house casts a hot vote and a moist vote there. A reader who follows Lilly instead would count the hot vote the other way, and the temperament guide notes the choice.

Combustion reached Venus at her two conjunctions with the Sun, one with the planet retrograde between the Earth and the Sun and one with it direct beyond. Lilly counted her combust within the same measure as the other planets and cazimi at the Sun’s center, and he remarked that Venus and Mercury, standing so near the Sun, were combust often. Her retrograde share in the sample is 7.26% of days, the smallest of the five planets that loop at all, and the tradition scored her retrograde as a debility in the same way as the others, as a signification that turned back or went otherwise than expected.

Lilly’s chapter on Venus, as each of his planet chapters did, began with the person she signified when she ruled the Ascendant or stood in the 1st house, by stature, coloring and manner, and he meant it as portraiture rather than as medicine. A Venus in the 1st also cast its vote in the temperament tally, and in a question Lilly read a fortune in the 1st as a help to the person asking. The 1st house was the house of the native’s body in his scheme, and the Ascendant and its lord were the first significators of the sick in a question about sickness.

In the 6th, Venus was one of the significators of the disease, since Lilly drew those from the house, its lord and any planet in it. He read her there by her nature and by the parts in the table above, and because she was a fortune he read her presence as easing the matter of the house rather than aggravating it; a Venus in detriment, combust or retrograde lost that character in his scoring. Culpeper’s decumbiture used the same significators and listed Venus’s diseases under the reins, the womb and the throat. The 6th house guide describes the house entire.

Steve Jobs’s chart appears here as a specimen of the method only; nothing about him enters the page. His Venus stands in Capricorn in the 4th house, an angular house, with the Sun in Pisces two signs away, so Venus is well clear of the Sun’s beams by any measure in the texts. Capricorn is neither of Venus’s houses nor her exaltation, and neither her detriment nor her fall, so by Lilly’s table she holds no major dignity and no major debility there; whether a term or a face applies depends on the degree, which the chart page gives.

Venus in this chart rules neither the Ascendant, whose lord is Mercury, nor the 6th cusp in Aquarius, whose lord is Saturn in Scorpio. An astrologer following Lilly would therefore have read her for the 4th house and for the native’s temperament, not for sickness, unless she cast an aspect to the lord of the 6th. The specimen shows the method’s first question about any planet: which houses does it rule, and which does it occupy.

Over 1900 to 2050 the sample counts 1,913 sign entries for Venus, a little more than the Sun’s twelve a year, and the surplus is the re-crossings her loops produce. Her mean stay is 28.8 days, a day or two under a solar month, because the count includes the short visits that end when she turns. Her longest stay is 126 days, in Cancer: a loop made inside one sign, which kept her there for about four solar months.

Venus’s loops are fewer than Mercury’s and longer, coming about every nineteen months, and when one falls inside a single sign that sign gathers the longest stay in the table. The spread by sign is wider than the Sun’s: Aries holds 9.21% of her days and Sagittarius 7.42%. Her loops repeat in a pattern of five that returns to nearly the same signs every eight years, which is why some signs collect more of her long stays than others across a century and a half. The sign pages for the 6th house include both of her signs, Taurus and Libra, among the twelve.

Lilly’s next steps after Venus’s sign and house were her dispositor, the lord of the sign she stood in, and her aspects: whether Saturn or Mars cast a square or an opposition to her, whether Jupiter or the lights cast a trine or a sextile, and whether she applied to or separated from the lord of the 6th. A Venus received by her dispositor was read as stronger in her signification than one left peregrine, and a Venus in aspect to the Moon was read with the Moon’s own matter in mind.

Mercury is the nearest companion page, as the other planet bound to the Sun with loops of its own; the Sun page explains combustion from the Sun’s side. The planets and the body guide reads Venus’s row against the other six, and the Zodiac Man guide explains why the throat and the reins appear under both her signs and her name.