The Wrath of Venus
Harmony and Ferocity
Most people, when they think of Venus, don’t think of wrath. Yet Venus is among the planets that display wrath most visibly. Wrath and Venus are almost synonyms. What strikes me is how consistently the modern picture runs the other way: soft, sensual, relational. All of that is true. I’m not saying it isn’t part of Venus’ significations. But it isn’t the part of her that makes her exceptional, or the part that makes those other qualities stand out.
It’s easy to be soft and sensual. Though I shouldn’t say easy. Nothing planetary is easy. But Venus rules Libra, the sign of balance and harmony, and balance and harmony take extreme wrath to acheive.
When I was a kid there was a Star Trek movie called “The Wrath of Khan.” It dealt with war and battle, which is where most people’s association with wrath sits. War, battle, anger. Those significations are present in Venus, and they are most visible in her masculine morning star phase, known as Lucifer. Lucifer and Hesperus were once thought to be different stars, different planets, because the two appearances are so unlike each other. Even so, thousands of years ago it was already understood that she was the same planet.
The morning star phase is where she demonstrates the external qualities of wrathfulness: ferocity, bravery, anger when it is needed, fighting, standing up for yourself and your cause. The evening star phase expresses that same wrathfulness inwardly. Either way the effect is strongest at maximum elongation, when she stands furthest from the sun on one side or the other. And in the evening phase, that internal wrath is precisely what makes her outward expression feel soft and sensual and beautiful. Directing wrath inward is what produces softness and suppleness and beauty and sensuality.
So what do I mean by wrath? An energetic quality, not a state, because it’s active. Not the description of an action. Not anger. Any parent who has had to show wrath to a child knows the difference: sometimes we have to display it, especially with young ones, to bring them in line, and it doesn’t mean we have become angry with them. Sometimes we have, sometimes we do internalize the wrath and become angry. But often it’s closer to scolding. We project the wrath while our internal state is nothing of the kind.
We’re in the middle of something, a puzzle, the gardening. The child acts out, or is about to do something dangerous. We erupt, and the wrathful component goes out of us, external to us. The child stops. The wrath subsides immediately and we return to what we were doing. If we’re with friends we might roll our eyes and chuckle. But a quality of wrath came out there, and that is the quality I mean. Anger can wrap around it and control it. Love can wrap around it and control it. It’s a force. It has no goodness or badness in it, no moral or ethical implication. Its like electricity. Electricity isn’t good or bad and doesn’t carry a morality.
That is the quality required to keep things in balance, and it is why Venus rules Libra as its masculine, air ruler. The balance maintained through Libran exceptionalism is a Venusian wrath. Saturn is exalted in the same sign. Why? Saturn basks in recieving the adoration that comes through this harmonic exceptionalism of balance and order. The home Venus builds through her wrathful expression is the home best suited to raising Saturn to his highest pedestal.
Venus is also one of only two planets with a mutable exaltation. Mercury holds the other. Mercury is exalted in Virgo, Venus opposite him in Pisces; the remaining mutable signs, Sagittarius and Gemini, carry no exaltation at all. Consider what mutability underneath it all actually is. It is the change process of life itself. Zodiacally we track the individuation of the modalities through the signs and say that Pisces is mutable, but every sign contains every modality. It’s a fractilinear expression of the multimodal universe we live in.
Mutability is the quality of transition, the change that arrives in the shift from one season to the next. Things change and die and are reborn, and at the same time the weather turns. The weather turns in our bodies too. Mutability is not growth; it is what comes after growth. Take hair. It grows, we hold it at a length for a while, and then we have to cut it so it doesn’t get to long. Or we cut continuously. Some people cut once a week. Someone who keeps a shaved face shaves every day.
There is the growth, there is the sustained period, then there is the cut. Growth, sustained, cut. The cut is the mutability. To be mutable requires cutting. When the caterpillar becomes the butterfly, it requires the severing of caterpillarness in order to arrive at butterflyness. And this cutting quality (I don’t mean directionality, not to cut or to be cut, but the archetypal quality of cutting itself) is mutable. The two planets exalted in mutable signs are precisely the two with bi-phasal solar expression, morning star and evening star. The others rise and set in the east and the west. But Venus and Mercury are the internal planets, inside our orbit, and so never travel far from the sun. They oscillate permanently between the extreme morning and evening states, and their retrogrades carry a weight no other planet’s do.
What had me thinking about all this today was looking up and finding Venus in Virgo. Alone there. Virgo being such a solitary sign. It isn’t the mutability that makes Virgo her fall, since Pisces is mutable too. It isn’t the earth element; she thrives in earth in Taurus. So what specific quality of Virgo is she fallen in? If exaltation is the condition of being placed on a pedestal, the other planets offering praise and regarding that planet as the highest, then fall is the condition of being regarded badly. Why would the other planets regard Venus badly in Virgo? It has nothing to do with any internal quality of hers. It has to do with how she is being witnessed.
And I think it’s the solitariness of Virgo. Venus is not intended to be solitary. Libra is a relational sign, one that requires relationship in order to reach balance and harmony. Pisces is relational. Virgo is the most solitary of them, and as the name gives, the self governed woman.
And it is in this fallen state that the quality of wrath I’ve been describing becomes the most essential. How do we survive the denegration of others? How do we survive being ridiculed? How do we survive being ostracized and shamed and held in low regard? We survive through this quality of wrath. We survive by the spark of fire in us that stays fierce even when nothing of it is externalized. That spark keeps our spirits alive and prevents the spark of life from going out. Wrath, then, is a critical energetic quality to be developing.
If we admire her softness, and we admire her sensuality, and we admire the harmony and balance that come from Venus, then we are obliged to look at Venus in her fall and learn how to take that deep wrath and bend it to our internal states, our internal thoughts, the way we feel about ourselves and about others. Bend that wrath inside us, at the hour we are most alone, where no one else can be with us because no one can reach us. Sitting across from someone, touching another person, there is still a part of us that is alone. That part is the solitary one. That part is where Venus is fallen.
And it is in that fallen part that her mastery of wrath allows her not only to survive but to carry what she developed there, by surviving it and being reborn out of it, back into the relational signs, into the rest of the zodiac, as she comes out of Virgo. As she comes out of being the self-sufficient woman. Wrath serves as a teaching component, as a component of self-mastery, as the component that draws the boundary preserving her and brings her fully into her own power, despite the other planets looking down on her there. Her most humilating place. From it she rises, not angrily. Coming up out of Virgo her next destination is Libra, where she immediately restores balance to herself, her energetic state, and her quality, through the force of wrath she concentrated and developed while in Virgo.