Crossings
Sun–Venus crossing
Charm with your name on it. Where a Sun line crosses a Venus line on your map, both planets were on angles at the moment you were born, and the latitude through that point is a Sun–Venus paran.
On this page
What the Sun–Venus crossing means
Sun–Venus is the gentlest of the Sun's pairings, and astrocartography reads it as approval that sticks to you personally. Rooms warm up when you walk in, your taste is trusted, and the partner you meet is pleased to be seen with you. With the Sun on the MC and Venus on the horizon, public life comes with charm in it; with Venus on the MC and the Sun rising or setting, the work is what gets admired and you get the credit for it.
Venus never gets more than about 47° from the Sun, so the two sets of lines cross the globe as neighbours and their crossings sit high. A meridian line of one meets a horizon line of the other no nearer the equator than about 52°, and that only when Venus was close to its greatest distance from the Sun, as a bright morning or evening star. The rest of the time those meetings lie further out, through Scandinavia, Iceland and Alaska in the north and open water in the south. Lower down the two meet only by rising or setting together, mostly in charts with Venus close to the Sun, and only about one chart in ten has a Sun–Venus paran nearer the equator than 55°.
Close to the Sun, Venus is combust, which the tradition reads as weakened; on the map that's often taken to mean affection gets hard to tell apart from the wish to be admired. The pair's wider catch holds even with Venus well clear of the Sun. A place that likes you on sight makes it easy to stop improving, and the people who gather round may prefer the version of you that's good company to the one having a bad month.
Where they meet on your map
Your Sun MC and IC lines run from pole to pole, and so do your Venus ones, so those four never meet. Each of them crosses the other planet's rising and setting curve once, which makes up to four crossings of a meridian line with a horizon line, and the rising and setting curves of the two can cross each other as well. Where they fall depends on the moment you were born: every chart has them, though some land in the middle of an ocean or too near a pole to be drawn.
At a crossing both planets were on angles in the same place at the same moment. Move east or west along that latitude and the same two still reach their angles together, only at another time of day, so astrocartography reads the whole latitude as a Sun–Venus paran. Zenith Map draws it as a band 1° (about 110 km) either side, and its weight in a place's score fades with distance from the latitude.
Birth time
A wrong birth time moves every line, and the crossings with them: an hour's error puts each crossing 15° of longitude east or west, more than 1,600 km at the equator. The paran latitude hardly moves, because it depends on where the two planets were in the sky rather than on the time of day; in the engine's test charts an hour shifts it by about a tenth of a degree or less nine times out of ten. With an uncertain birth time, trust the paran before the crossing. What a doubtful birth time does to a map.
Questions
Is the Sun–Venus paran good for finding love?
The tradition reads it as a good place to be liked and to meet someone who's proud of you, especially where Venus is on the Descendant or the Sun is setting at the meeting. It says less about lasting partnership than the Moon or Saturn would. Because the paran usually lies at high latitudes, most people meet it on a visit, not in daily life.
Why is my Sun–Venus crossing so close to the Arctic?
Venus is never more than about 47° from the Sun, so for one to be on the meridian while the other is on the horizon you have to go far from the equator, usually beyond 60° and never much closer than 52°. Charts with Venus near the Sun get a second kind of paran, where the two rise or set together, and that one can fall much lower.
The free map draws both sets of lines; the paran bands come with Pro.