Venus Sextile Jupiter Synastry: When What One of You Enjoys Meets What Widens the Other's World, From Different Places

Every birth chart has a Venus and a Jupiter, and they do different jobs. Venus is what you enjoy: your taste, your pleasures, how you show liking and friendship, and what makes an hour feel good. Jupiter is what widens your world: encouragement, generosity, curiosity, and the sense that there is room to grow. In this contact one person's Venus is about 60° from the other person's Jupiter, a sixth of the way round the zodiac.

A sextile usually joins two signs of different elements that suit each other: fire with air, or earth with water. (Usually, not always: near the edge of a sign the pattern can shift.) The two signs share a polarity, active or receptive. That is the geometry. The reading built on it is a fit between differences: what one of you enjoys and what the other offers as encouragement come from different temperaments, and each can add something the other would not have supplied.

The link can run one way or both. Where it runs both ways, each of your Venus signs meets the other's Jupiter, and each of you has both.

Friends, siblings, colleagues, flatmates, a parent and their child, classmates or partners can all share this contact, and it is one among many in any two charts.

One thing this contact can give is a pleasure with a second author. Either of you may offer a favourite thing and find that either of you may add a detail you would not have thought of, a different spice or a different route or a friend you had not met.

What each may want is to be met where they are before being invited elsewhere. Either of you may want your own taste to be taken seriously, not only the new suggestion. Either may want an offer to be tried, not politely admired. These wants can be easy to meet when said aloud and less obvious when not.

These are sketches, not reports: illustrations of how the contact might show up across different kinds of pairs.

• Colleagues. Two colleagues design a tote bag for the team. One brings a slogan; the other brings a doodle of the printer. Each then adds a line to the other's idea.
• Siblings. Two siblings pick the wording for a bench plaque in a parent's honour. They set a line from a poem beside the little drawing that went with it, and each suggests a change to the other's choice.
• Friends. One friend suggests a tasting afternoon at a marmalade stall. The other, who prefers sweets, comes along, and each leaves with a jar the other chose.
• Parent and child. A parent and their child repaint an old toy chest. The parent picks a first colour and the child a pattern, and later each suggests the other's choice.
• Flatmates. Two flatmates are picking something for the shared shelf. Candles and fairy lights are both put forward, and the shelf holds both in a jar.
• Neighbours. Two neighbours swap seedlings over the gate. Each brings a plant and a name for it, and each goes home with a name that is not the one on the label.

In each sketch both people add to the same idea, and each addition changes the other's.

The older sources used here do not put Venus in one chart together with Jupiter in the other. Two passages name them together. Simmonite (1890, p. 130) speaks of Jupiter or Venus placed on the Sun, Moon, Part of Fortune (a calculated point; editorial gloss) or ascendant of the other person's chart. Wilson (*A Complete Dictionary of Astrology*, 1819, p. 381) speaks of the Lights (the Sun and Moon) in trine or sextile to each other, or in each other's places, or on the places of Jupiter or Venus; it concerns the Lights only. Neither relates Venus to Jupiter, and nothing from either is used here. Wilson's sentence names trine and sextile together, so it does not tell them apart either.

The distinction this page makes, that a sextile reads as a fit between differences (it usually joins fire with air or earth with water), is based on the kinds of sign a sextile usually joins. It is an editorial reading, not something the older books say about Venus and Jupiter. The same goes for the rest of the page: what each of you gives and may want, and the sketches, which are illustrations.

• A favourite of yours has gained a detail from the other.
• An outing between you has more than one author.
• A thing you did not choose has turned out well.
• Some days one of you offers the idea and the other adds the turn, and some days it is the other way round.