Pluto sextile Venus transit: meaning, duration and advice

The sextile places Pluto sixty degrees from your natal Venus, in a sign that gets along with hers, fire with air or earth with water. The planet of the depths doesn’t come to turn your way of loving upside down; it offers to show you what lies underneath. Your Venus, which governs your attractions, your pleasures, your sense of beauty and the value you grant yourself, receives an invitation rather than an order: stop skimming the surface of your bonds, dare the kind of intimacy that commits you, prefer what is true to what is merely pleasant. What gets activated is a curiosity about the heart of things and people, and a new lucidity about what you deserve, in love and everywhere else.

The mood is hushed and yet charged. An offhand conversation suddenly drops to the heart of the matter and leaves you closer to someone than ten years of politeness ever did; a friendship turns into one of real confidences; an encounter draws you in by what is true about it rather than what is dazzling. In a couple, the unspoken finds words, and desire gains from it. Your tastes strip down, less ornament, more substance, and you calmly turn down, as a matter of course, an arrangement that used to diminish you. The questions that come back are asked in a low voice: what is it in me that deserves to be loved without my having to prove it? Who can I be my whole self with? What am I still accepting out of fear that I’m not worth more?

Pluto sextile Venus asks for one step toward depth, and it won’t take that step for you. The door is ajar: answer a confidence with a confidence, tell the person concerned what you desire, let a bond become important instead of keeping it at a safe distance. Two pitfalls lie in wait: staying on the surface and finding these years merely pleasant, or flirting with intensity, tasting the magnetism without ever committing. The gift, for whoever crosses the threshold, is yours to keep: bonds with real substance, a quiet charm that comes from your assurance rather than your efforts, and a self-esteem that no longer asks anyone’s permission.

Pluto’s sextile to Venus lasts two to three years within a one-degree orb, since Pluto advances only one to three degrees a year and moves backward for about five months out of twelve. Count on three passes, sometimes five: the first opens the door; the retrograde gives you time to check that this depth suits you; the last pass writes it into your habits of the heart. The two sextile points to your Venus are 120 degrees apart on the zodiac, and Pluto takes decades, often more than half a century, to travel from one to the other: most people go through this transit only once, at an age determined solely by the distance between their Venus and their natal Pluto.

Count two signs from your Venus, in either direction, to know where to look for Pluto: a Venus in Aries receives its sextile when Pluto crosses Gemini or Aquarius, at the same degree give or take a degree or two. The site’s free birth chart gives the degree of your Venus; the sky-of-the-day page gives Pluto’s.