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Venus
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Venus is the planet of attraction and agreement: love and affection, pleasure, beauty, art, comfort and the things a person values. It describes how someone draws others close, what they find lovely, and how they make peace. The tradition gives it lovers and wives, musicians, artists and jewellers, gifts, ornaments and all kinds of pleasant company. Its sign shows the taste of a person's affections; its house, where life tends to feel sweetest.
Nature
Venus is temperately cold and moist, feminine and nocturnal, a member of the night sect with the Moon and Mars. It is the lesser benefic — the gentler of the two fortunes, beside Jupiter, the greater. Its virtues are grace, conciliation and sociability; its faults, indulgence, vanity and taking the easy way.
Signs it rules and where it is strong or weak
Venus rules Taurus, its night house of sensual pleasure, and Libra, its day house of harmony and partnership. It is exalted in Pisces, traditionally at 27°, where love becomes compassion. It is in detriment in Scorpio and Aries, the signs of Mars, and in its fall in Virgo. Modern astrology keeps the same scheme.
Motion
Like Mercury, Venus stays close to the Sun, never more than about 47° away, appearing as the morning or the evening star. It moves up to about a degree and a quarter a day and usually spends four to five weeks in a sign. It goes retrograde about every nineteen months for some forty days, and in those years it can remain in one sign for around four months. Its retrograde periods are often read as a time to revisit old affections and reconsider what one values, rather than to commit to something new.
In a chart
Venus by house points to where pleasure, ease and affection tend to gather: in the 7th, in partnership; in the 2nd, in possessions and earning; in the 5th, in romance, art and play; in the 10th, in a career that charms or adorns. A well-placed Venus, by sign or aspect, inclines toward graciousness and good fortune in its matters; a strained one asks for values to be worked out more consciously.
In transit
Transiting Venus brings short, pleasant spells to the natal planets it meets — a meeting, a gift, a lightening of mood. Its return to its natal sign every year or so, and its slow retrograde loops, can mark periods when relationships and money are reconsidered.
In the tarot
The Golden Dawn's correspondences, which most English-language decks follow.
Major Arcana: The Empress
Decans it rules: Four of Wands (Aries 20°–30°), Two of Cups (Cancer 0°–10°), Nine of Pentacles (Virgo 10°–20°), Seven of Cups (Scorpio 20°–30°), Five of Swords (Aquarius 0°–10°)