Venus: Where Astrology, Artistry, and Mysticism Collide
A Collaboration by The Paganista and Astarte’s Temple
Birth of Venus by Botticelli
Venus has been with us for thousands of years—not just in myth, but in art, in longing, in the way we see and seek beauty. She shows up in sculpture, poetry, music, fashion, film. She’s the figure we return to over and over, even when we don’t realize we’re invoking her. She’s not just a goddess, she’s the eternal muse. The ideal. The one we long for, create for, perform for. But the question is: do we ever really see her?
Throughout history, Venus has been more projection than person. Artists, poets, philosophers, and lovers have used her as a canvas to reflect what they value most—beauty, sensuality, power, desire. And in that projection, she gains a strange kind of power. The muse has always held mystery: not for what she reveals, but for what she allows others to see in her.
Today, we still do this—just not with marble statues or oil paintings. Now we project our longing onto celebrities, influencers, models, and even the people we silently admire. We edit our photos, curate our lives, and chase the magnetic pull of being desired. But this isn’t new. It’s Venus, dressed up for the algorithm.
And yet beneath the surface, Venus is not just an icon or ideal. She’s a goddess with roots deeper than Rome—older than Aphrodite. In Sumer, she was Inanna: a goddess of both love and war, who descended into the underworld to face her shadow and rose transformed. In Babylon, she became Ishtar, fierce and untamed. To the Phoenician and Canaanite peoples, she was Astarte, the Queen of Heaven and the Mother of the Gods. And to the Egyptians, she was Isis, the goddess of magick and motherhood. These older versions of Venus were not passive muses—they were initiators, wild forces of nature who ruled both beauty and destruction. They embodied the full range of feminine power: pleasure, grief, seduction, rage, creation, loss.
Somewhere along the way, we softened her edges. We made her more palatable. She became Aphrodite rising from the sea, or Venus reclining on a chaise. Still powerful, but safer. Still beautiful, but easier to adore. She is the muse, yes—but she is also the mirror.
But if we stop chasing the idea of Venus, of projecting our fantasies and desires and actually look—beyond the surface, beyond the symbols—Venus asks harder questions: What do you find beautiful, and why? What does your longing say about you? What are you seeking when you pursue love, or attention, or admiration? Do you truly want to be seen—or just reflected? To meet Venus is to confront the complexity of desire. And to realize that real beauty, like real love, has depth. It’s not just what’s shown—it’s what’s revealed when we stop performing and start paying attention.
Venus doesn’t just live in myth—she governs the rhythm of attraction in astrology, too. She rules two signs: earthy, sensual Taurus, and airy, harmonious Libra. In Taurus, Venus lives in the body—she wants to taste, touch, and feel secure. She loves what is real, grounded, and rooted in the senses. In Libra, she moves into the aesthetic and relational, where beauty becomes balance, and elegance becomes diplomacy. She curates, harmonizes, and creates connection.
But Venus also has a shadow side—one that is especially felt when she moves through Scorpio. Here, she becomes deeper, more intense, more investigative. Venus in Scorpio doesn’t want surface beauty; she wants soul-bonded truth. This is the Venus who strips away illusion, who loves like a plunge into dark water. Passionate, possessive, and psychic in her knowing, she reminds us that love is never risk-free. In Scorpio, Venus confronts what lies beneath the pleasure—jealousy, obsession, betrayal, transformation. She teaches us that desire can destroy, but also resurrect.
In a birth chart, Venus reveals how we relate—what we’re drawn to, how we express affection, and how we experience pleasure. But she also tells the story of what we think we’re worth. Self-worth and attraction are always entangled. What you believe you deserve often shapes what (and who) you attract. The tension between being loved and being valued is one of Venus’s oldest lessons. Across all her forms, Venus is a teacher of discernment. She invites us to ask not only what we desire, but why. And whether the love we seek is rooted in truth—or performance.
The Venus de Milo
Art history is full of Venus. She is perhaps the most painted goddess in Western tradition. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus gave her a mythic innocence, born from the sea and carried on a scallop shell like an offering to the world. Titian’s reclining Venus met the viewer’s gaze with agency and sensuality—no longer symbolic, but fully embodied. Later depictions ranged from erotic to decorative, from idealized to commercialized. Through centuries of artistic reinterpretation, Venus became less of a deity and more of a mirror: reflecting society’s evolving—and often conflicting—ideas about femininity, beauty, and power.
But even when she’s reduced to an aesthetic, her presence remains magnetic. Why? Because Venus is not static. She changes shape depending on who is looking at her—and what they need to see. She is never just one woman, one story, or one ideal. She is the pull behind poetry, the reason music aches, the silent force in every love story and heartbreak. She’s what draws artists to the page, the stage, the lens. She is the hunger and the halo.
In the film Shakespeare in Love, when the playwright is asked who she is—his muse, his mystery, his inspiration—he replies simply: “She’s always Aphrodite.” That line speaks to something ancient. For centuries, so much hope, ache, and longing has been laid at the goddess’s feet. We’ve asked her to carry our fantasies. To grant us beauty, love, recognition. But rarely do we ask who she is underneath all that projection. Rarely do we stop to see her—not just as a vessel for desire, but as a force of her own.
Even in modern times, we haven’t stopped making offerings to Venus. We just do it differently. Filters. Fragrance. Silk. Lipstick. Screenshots of texts we read too many times. We still chase the high of being wanted—and the fear of not being enough. And we still place people on pedestals, projecting onto them our deepest longings. But Venus doesn’t exist to be worshipped from afar. She exists to be known. To be felt. To remind us that real beauty has texture. Real connection requires presence. And real love doesn’t demand we become someone else—it asks us to come home to ourselves.
For the modern spiritual practitioner who longs for connection to the self and to the goddess, as in ancient times—the magick of the personified Venus can feel distant or lost to time. Often, we wonder where the breathtaking goddess who walks on the sea dwells today. Is she still with us? To mystics and pagans of varying spiritual paths, she is still venerated, invoked, and evoked. She is just as real today as she was to people of historical times—if you know where to look and how to establish a connection to her.
Just as ancient temples were built in her honor, modern practitioners act as mini temples or living vessels of her sacred energy or build altars to her in sacred spaces they’ve created within and around their home. Altars and shrines can both symbolically and literally connect with a deity’s energy—and you, too, can connect with the personified form of Venus if you choose to.
Triumph of the Marine Venus by Sebastiano Ricci
Symbolism is like a universal language that allows the incomprehensible to take form in a way humans can grasp. The symbols of Venus include, the planet Venus, doves, roses, seashells, mirrors, pearls, the ocean, water, the Morning Star, and myrtle wreaths. Through the lens of Inanna, Ishtar, and Astarte, she is also associated with the cosmos, the number seven, intuition, darkness, balance, death and rebirth, fertility, lions, thrones, snakes, dragons, owls, lilies (specifically lily of the valley), lotus blossoms, lapis lazuli, frankincense, and myrrh. Her Greek counterpart, Aphrodite, was remembered through symbols of mirrors, swans, pomegranates, apples, and marine life.
All of these symbols can be used to create a sacred space where Venus, in her many forms, can be called upon—but more so than physical items to represent the goddess, she is often remembered as a goddess of wisdom and one who appreciates those who give everything up to pursue that which is hidden.
Just as the sacred pearls of Aphrodite can only be discovered through a deep-sea dive to find a worthy oyster to unlock, the heart of Venus is softened toward those who devote their time and energy toward wisdom, mysteries, and magick.
In the Canaanite wisdom traditions, she is remembered through the fable of a person seeking fine pearls, and once they found one they deemed priceless, they gave up everything they had in exchange for that single precious pearl.
Venus by Abraham de Bruyn
Similarly, in the Hermetic wisdom traditions rooted in Egypt, the principle of Cause and Effect, as well as the Principle of Correspondence highlight the power of exchanges and mirrors within our universe. All of which connect back to Venus.
The Principle of Cause and Effect states that every cause has its effect, every effect has its cause, just as we learn in physics, but in the spiritual application. In the same vein, the Principle of Correspondence highlights the sentiment of “as above, so below,” which is about how things are reflected. Every choice we make has an outcome. Every action we take in the physical is mirrored in the spiritual. When we pursue Venus. She pursues us back. When we devote our lives to wisdom. Wisdom becomes the nature of our life.
Venus longs to answer the call of those who crave wisdom in its pure, unadulterated form. Something rarely found in the era of quick digital access to information. Not all knowledge is equal, though, and more often than not, the information that is provided is mere crumbs despite the seeker hungering for loaves of bread. Where is the food capable of nourishing the spirit? Where is the wisdom that transforms the mind?
Those who know Venus—and Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite, Isis, and all of the many names and personas she wears—both in the hushed circles of oral traditions of ancient times and the modern practitioners longing to return to the old ways—claim that she is the provider of this food, this wisdom. Simultaneously, they maintain the tradition that she also is this food, this wisdom.
To venerate, invoke, and evoke Venus is to venerate, invoke, and evoke wisdom.
And, of course, being transformed by sacred wisdom is the beginning of everything. It is the pathway to the infinite—the divine, the great consciousness of all that is.
Are you ready to begin the journey of knowing the multi-faceted, paradoxical Venus? You’ll find her where astrology, artistry, and mysticism collide.
This essay was written in collaboration with Kate Jade of Astarte’s Temple.
