Venus, Neptune, and the Quest for Love

Photo by JR Korpa on Unsplash

My exploration of the Higher and Lower Octave planets has reached the second stop in its journey,  crossing  paths with Venus and Neptune.

Simply put, Lower Octave Planets are the personal planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars — who push you towards self-expression; and Higher Octave planets — Uranus, Neptune, Pluto — vibrate to a higher frequency than the personal planets, affecting generations of individuals.

With the Octave pairing of Venus and Neptune, the two planets are associated with deep romantic attachment and appreciation of beauty. But it is the type of love and loveliness, and their pursuit of paradise that is most interesting about the dreamy duo.

Venus, named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, is a personal planet that controls your creative self-expression and what you find attractive. Platonic and erotic relationships also fall under the planet’s rule, so too does harmony (because it is crucial to keep discord away from your relationships to guarantee enjoyment).  Love, as well as your definition of beauty is viewed as an ideal judged on good looks and value. All these things stem from the evening star, but so does your hedonistic appetite.

Venus is a planet hungry for shallow, superficial things that are meant to satisfy cravings for vanity and splendor (i.e.: pleasure).  Yes, pleasure of all forms is really what this decadent dame is all about; Venus loves what satisfies the eyes and feels good to the senses. She appreciates the physical attractiveness of life, with a complete ignorance of the emotions.

The influence of higher octave outer planets like Neptune is invisible, so the expression of Venus’ personal love is more subtle, it expands it out universally and emotionally.  It admires the same things as Venus, only with a little more desperation and devotion.

If Venus is vain, Neptune is a narcissist who judges things based off of how closely they mirror an image of perfection. So beauty, art, and love become a narcotic for Neptune causing it to seek the dissolution of limitations through love and other Venus drugs. But the loosened limitations means blurring of lines, specifically the lines between what is real and what is an ideal.

Quixotic Neptune confuses everything with love, including all of Venus’ carnal delights, and brings these feelings of love and beauty to the senses and emotions, with intent to purify them. Neptune takes the seed of harmony and need for beauty planted by Venus, and views it as a spiritual necessity. When doused with the enchanting waters of Neptune, the basic characteristics of Venus (love and appreciation of beauty) get filtered through unrealistic idealism, and begin to mutate into a consuming desire for perfection, a desire for an immaculate Garden of Eden.

Love means everything to Venus and Neptune.

Love and beauty must supersede the flesh and become sinless, a Neptunian nuance that contradicts Venus’ desires. The overindulgent Venus finds ease and comfort on earth, and is basically sin incarnate, personifying greed, lust, vanity, envy, and sloth. These physical sins are too harsh for Neptune, who prefers surrealism to reality. As such, many a Neptunian seeks the narcotics of drugs in an attempt to escape the coarseness of imperfection. Neptune wants love, but not the seedy Venus-type of love.

The concealed connection between the two aesthetically driven planets is that they both yearn for a slice of heaven through human connection; Venus wants to relate to others and share in the experience of pleasure; and Neptune wants a glamorous, clean union with something larger than itself. But when they encounter their sought after rapture, they react differently.

Neptune thinks love (or any form of beauty & creative, pleasurable act) is pure nectar from the gods, believing love will lead to spiritual exaltation. So Neptune casts a spell on itself, causing supreme disillusion. When the magic spell wears off, and Neptune sees the reality of the ideal, the dirtiness and lewdness of being a human starts eating away Neptune’s romanticism, destroying every belief of perfection associated with the previously exalted Venusian activities. Still, that doesn’t stop Neptunians from swallowing handfuls of hallucinogens in hopes of tripping their way to ecstasy, or having the spiritual orgasm of a lifetime.

Neptune is always in a state of dissatisfaction because it dreams of unrealistic harmony; a clean Eden cannot exist on earth, no matter how hard Neptune tries to charm people into believing otherwise.

Venus, on the other hand, has more realism than its higher octave, and believes cloud nine can be accessed with the right amusements or sexual partner. Lower octave planets are skilled at getting their desires met, because they make you more aware of what it is that you want. As long as Venus gets her kicks via physical beauty and/or sensual pleasure, she’s happy.

All of these amorous pursuits are driven by physical desires and needs; lust, not love. Venus has no problem leaving Neptune’s idealized Eden, because she can go to town on earth, eating, drinking, and indulging in excess.

A retrograde Venus poses a problem for expressing your affections and desires, making you timid when it comes to love, and unsure about what you find beautiful. The most problematic issue that surfaces when Venus and Neptune are in aspect to each other is falling in love with the ideal of love, as opposed to a living, breathing person.

As with all the higher and lower octave planets, Neptune and Venus have a special bond. Not only do the planets create billows of idealistic confusion and perfection that almost never find satisfaction, but they are strangely attracted to each other. Neptunians (Pisces) and Venusians (Taurus and Librans) always gravitate towards one another because of an unconscious understanding they have. Both people are aesthetically driven and moved by fine art and symmetry, and both prefer to be part of a pair.

So in the endless pursuit of paradise, this higher octave pair can wreak some major havoc on your psyche, causing you to continuously fall in and out of love, and gorge on all things gorgeous and glamorous.

Of course, the specific type of love and pleasure, what you romanticize is dependent on the placement of these planets in the houses. When you are Venus dominant or Neptune dominant, you will be familiar with the habit of gift-wrapping the indulgences of the real world so they appear pretty and pristine enough for consumption.

The Neptune/Venus connection could be discussed for eons, but the main message of this octave pair is simple: Love & Pleasure mean everything to Neptune and Venus.