Venus in Sagittarius and Venus in Aquarius compatibility comes with a hidden guest. The guest is Capricorn, the sign between them. Neither partner has a Venus there. Yet in nearly half of these couples, one partner or both have a Capricorn Sun.
That is no accident. Venus stays close to the Sun, so a Venus sign limits the Sun sign. Capricorn is the one Sun sign that sits close to both of these Venus signs.
This page explains that count, the sextile that links the two signs, and what the old books say. Read it as a lens, not a forecast. Astrology is not a science, and no study has shown that a Venus sign predicts how a couple will do.
The pair at a glance
| Question | What we found. |
|---|---|
| How common is the pair? | About 1 random couple in 75, or 1.34 percent. |
| How does it rank? | 58th of the 78 Venus pairs. |
| What link do the signs form? | A sextile, two signs apart, fire with air. |
| Is the sextile exact? | Within 8 degrees for 46 percent of couples. |
| How many include a Capricorn Sun? | 48.92 percent, nearly one couple in two. |
| Where is Venus strong? | In neither sign by the major ranks. |
Two ways to love with space
Venus in a birth chart shows what you find lovely and how you like to be loved. Its sign is the style. It is not the whole person, and it is not a score.
Venus in Sagittarius loves with room to roam. It wants a partner who is also a friend on the road. Its host is Jupiter, the planet that owns Sagittarius. See our guide to Venus in Sagittarius for the full picture.
Venus in Aquarius loves with room to be yourself. It wants respect for your mind, your friends and your causes. Its old host is Saturn. Modern books add Uranus as a second ruler. Our guide to Venus in Aquarius explains how the two readings fit.
So both partners want space. One wants space to move. The other wants space to think. That shared need is the core of this pair.
The Capricorn Sun in the middle
From Earth, Venus never strays far from the Sun. On our 800-year scan, the widest gap was 47.28 degrees. A sign is 30 degrees wide. So Venus sits in your Sun sign or in one of the two signs on each side.
Here is the Sun sign mix for each Venus. The shares add up to 100 percent in each column.
| Sun sign | Share of Venus in Sagittarius people | Share of Venus in Aquarius people. |
|---|---|---|
| Libra | 9.48 percent | None. |
| Scorpio | 29.18 percent | None. |
| Sagittarius | 23.50 percent | 9.66 percent. |
| Capricorn | 28.58 percent | 28.48 percent. |
| Aquarius | 9.27 percent | 23.09 percent. |
| Pisces | None | 29.46 percent. |
| Aries | None | 9.31 percent. |
Look at the Capricorn row. It is the only Sun sign with a big share in both columns. More than a quarter of each Venus group are Capricorn Suns.
Now pair the two groups. The chance that neither partner is a Capricorn Sun is 71.42 percent times 71.52 percent. That leaves 48.92 percent of couples with at least one Capricorn Sun. In 8.14 percent, both partners are Capricorn Suns.
So a Capricorn and Capricorn couple can hold this Venus pair. So can a Capricorn and Pisces couple, or a Scorpio and Capricorn couple. The sign in the middle ties the pair together.
The likeliest Sun pairs
Which two Sun signs come with this Venus pair most? The answer depends on how you count.
Count by who holds which Venus, and one setup leads. The Sagittarius Venus belongs to a Scorpio Sun, and the Aquarius Venus to a Pisces Sun. That covers 8.59 percent of these couples. Neither Sun then sits in either Venus sign.
Count Sun pairs without caring who holds which Venus, and the order shifts.
| Sun signs of the couple | Share of couples with this Venus pair. |
|---|---|
| Sagittarius and Capricorn | 9.45 percent. |
| Capricorn and Aquarius | 9.24 percent. |
| Scorpio and Pisces | 8.60 percent. |
| Capricorn and Pisces | 8.42 percent. |
| Scorpio and Capricorn | 8.31 percent. |
| Capricorn and Capricorn | 8.14 percent. |
| Sagittarius and Pisces | 6.92 percent. |
| Scorpio and Aquarius | 6.74 percent. |
| Sagittarius and Aquarius | 6.32 percent. |
Five of the top six mixes hold a Capricorn Sun. A couple of Sagittarius and Aquarius Suns comes only ninth. Our page on Sagittarius and Aquarius Sun sign compatibility covers that Sun pair on its own terms.
Match, swap, or neither
There is a neat check on how Sun and Venus line up. Call it a match when each partner has Venus in their own Sun sign. Call it a swap when each has Venus in the other’s Sun sign.
For this pair, the match covers 5.43 percent of couples. The swap covers only 0.90 percent, about 1 couple in 111. The reason is distance. A Sagittarius Sun can hold an Aquarius Venus only near the far edge of Venus’s range. The same holds the other way round.
Compare the next pair along, Venus in Capricorn with Venus in Aquarius. There the signs touch, and the swap beats the match. Here the signs are two apart, and the swap almost disappears.
Most couples are neither. In 58.84 percent of them, no partner has Venus in their own Sun sign. So two Sun signs will not tell you if you share this Venus pair. You need both birth charts.
A sextile of fire and air
Signs two apart form a 60-degree angle called a sextile. Ptolemy counted it as one of his five aspects. In Book I, chapter 13 of the Tetrabiblos, he calls it harmonious. His reason is that it joins signs of the same kind.
Sagittarius and Aquarius share that kind. Both are masculine signs, the ones old texts tie to day. Fire and air feed each other, much as air feeds a flame. Stephen Arroyo, in his reading of the elements, pairs them the same way.
The modes differ. Sagittarius is a mutable sign, one that adapts at the end of a season. Aquarius is a fixed sign, one that holds steady mid-season. On our count, only two of the 78 pairs join fire and air in a sextile between a mutable and a fixed sign. The other is Gemini with Leo.
Ptolemy lists two more ties between signs. Signs can command and obey, or they can see each other. This pair has neither tie. It rests on the sextile alone.
How exact is the sextile?
The sign pair only sets a range. The real gap between two Venus positions runs from 30 to 90 degrees. So we measured the true angle for every couple.
| Orb, the leeway allowed | Share with an exact sextile. |
|---|---|
| Within 3 degrees | 19.01 percent of couples. |
| Within 6 degrees | 36.02 percent of couples. |
| Within 8 degrees | 46.25 percent of couples. |
| Within 10 degrees | 55.60 percent of couples. |
So fewer than half form a tight sextile at 8 degrees. At the far ends, an early Sagittarius Venus and a late Aquarius Venus sit near 90 degrees apart. That is a square in degrees, a link of friction. At an 8-degree orb, 3.58 percent of couples have it.
How rare is this Venus pair?
Venus does not spend the same time in each sign. We timed every Venus sign change from 1600 to 2400 and summed the days.
| Venus sign | Share of all time, 1600 to 2400. |
|---|---|
| Sagittarius | 8.23 percent, ninth of twelve. |
| Aquarius | 8.16 percent, tenth of twelve. |
| Cancer, for scale | 8.62 percent, the highest. |
Take two people born at random moments. The chance that one has Venus in Sagittarius and the other Venus in Aquarius is 1.34 percent. That is about one couple in 75. The pair ranks 58th of 78. The gaps between pairs are small, so rank is a detail, not a verdict.
Where Venus stands in each sign
Traditional astrology ranks a planet in each sign. These ranks are called dignities. Venus is at home in Taurus and Libra, and exalted in Pisces. It is in exile in Aries and Scorpio, and falls in Virgo.
Sagittarius and Aquarius hold none of those ranks. William Lilly, in Christian Astrology, calls such a planet peregrine, a wanderer or guest. A guest is not a damaged Venus. It borrows its tone from its host.
The old tables add smaller ranks. Each sign gives Venus a short run of degrees called its terms, though the exact run differs by table. In Aquarius, Venus rules the first ten degrees, a slice called a face. Sagittarius gives Venus no face.
The hosts matter more here. The Sagittarius Venus answers to Jupiter, the great giver of the old books. The Aquarius Venus answers to Saturn, the planet of limits. Read this way, one partner’s love is generous, and the other’s is principled.
How the two styles meet
Here the numbers stop and the reading starts. What follows is how astrologers read these styles. It is a lens, not a finding.
The Sagittarius Venus says yes with a trip, a joke or a new plan. The Aquarius Venus says yes with trust, candor and room to breathe. Neither one wants to be held too tight.
That makes the easy part easy. Both give space without being asked. The harder part is warmth up close. Each can wait for the other to reach in first.
A couple can use this as a prompt. When do we want space, and when do we want each other near? The sextile, in the old view, is an open door. Someone still has to walk through it.
What the evidence says about sign matches
David Voas, a British researcher, tested sign matches in 2007. He used the 2001 census of England and Wales, with 10.3 million married couples. He found no link between Sun signs and who marries whom. A small excess of same-sign couples came from form errors, not from the stars.
His test was on Sun signs, not Venus signs. No large test of Venus pairs exists. So treat this page as a map of old ideas and real sky counts. It is not a verdict on a couple.
How we measured it
We used two separate routes over the years 1600 to 2400. Every moment counts the same.
Route one used the Astronomy Engine library. It found each Venus and Sun sign change to within a tenth of a second. It then summed the time in each sign, with no random draws.
Route two used the Swiss Ephemeris. It placed Venus once an hour, on a grid shifted by 30 minutes from the first. That gave 7,012,656 moments. The two routes agree to within 0.01 points on every Venus figure.
The Sun pair shares combine the two Venus groups as if the partners were born at unrelated moments. Degree shares use the true spread of Venus inside each sign. The Ptolemy points come from the Loeb edition by Frank Robbins, Book I, chapters 13 to 16.
Related pages
For all twelve Venus signs side by side, see our guide to Venus sign compatibility. For the Sun signs, read about the Sagittarius sign and the Aquarius sign.
For the pair one step closer, see Venus in Sagittarius with Venus in Capricorn. Those two signs are neighbors that still see each other across midwinter.
Questions about Venus in Sagittarius and Aquarius
Are Venus in Sagittarius and Venus in Aquarius compatible?
By the old grid, they form a sextile, a friendly link of fire and air. Both styles value space and honesty. No study has shown that Venus signs predict how a couple does. Read the pair as two free styles of love.
How rare is a Sagittarius and Aquarius Venus couple?
About 1 random couple in 75, or 1.34 percent. It ranks 58th of the 78 Venus pairs, from our count of 1600 to 2400.
Why do so many of these couples include a Capricorn Sun?
Venus stays within about 47 degrees of the Sun. Capricorn is the only Sun sign close to both Venus signs. So 48.92 percent of these couples have at least one Capricorn Sun.
Do a Sagittarius Sun and an Aquarius Sun share this Venus pair?
Only now and then. That Sun pair makes up 6.32 percent of couples with this Venus pair. The full swap, with each Venus in the partner’s Sun sign, covers only 0.90 percent.
Is Venus weak in Sagittarius or Aquarius?
Neither sign gives Venus a major rank, so Lilly would call it peregrine, a guest. In Aquarius, Venus keeps a small rank over the first ten degrees. A guest is not a damaged Venus.
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