We all know them, the martyrs of everyday life. The ones who suffer from love, the ones who are sacrificing. The ones who are tormented. Have you ever wondered how is it possible that some people keep loving someone who is an absolute mess, who ruins their life and then with the slightest hint of hope, they give yet another chance? Well, they usually have some sort of Venus-Neptune connection, be it a Neptune aspect or a 12th house Venus or 7th house Neptune or Pisces on the 7th house cusp.
Do you remember the series Homeland and beloved characters, assassin Peter Quinn and German Intelligence Office – Astrid? And a little less beloved but equally brilliant, main character Carrie? He was a smart guy, a black ops, paramilitary CIA officer who ran secret missions in the Middle East. You would think he had his shit together, after all people like him apparently take care of peace in the world. Well, it turns out he was just a human being and as the rest of us, all he wanted was to love and be loved.
We meet Quinn at the beginning of season 2 and you can see there is an immediate spark on his side. Maybe not quite obvious yet, not for everyone, definitely not for Carrie. There is a dance between them two for two seasons with the culmination in Islamabad, when he decides to not blow up ISIS leader, even though he successfully manages to make a bomb and prepare a riot in front of the embassy for successful assassination. The thing is, last minute, when he is just about to blow up the bad guy, he sees her from afar right next to the spot he placed the bomb. So at the very last minute they talk over the phone and he decides to abort the mission. If it wasn’t clear that he is in love with her for all this time, at that very moment it was quite obvious. In the very next episode he shows up at her father’s funeral and at the end he confesses his feelings and asks her to leave the CIA for good with him. They share a beautiful kiss and you’d think this is it, there will be a happily ever after for them. Bad moment Quinn, one would want to say but there we see him smiling and leaving her house full of hope. It seems though, Carrie is no good fit for anyone, she knows it but he is the classic case of a Venus-Neptune martyr. He hopes he will save her by unconditional love and by this act he will save himself. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.
People with Venus and Neptune influences in their natal charts have a tendency to think that their love can heal and save the tormented souls. The truth is, it can but the person who is at the receiving end of their affections, needs to be able to receive this love and that is usually not the case. That is the saddest part because the love from people who have this aspect in their natal chart can be very healing, magical and life-saving.
In case of Quinn, he was very aware of everything: he was aware that he is killing people for money, he was aware of his past mistakes, he was aware that nothing justifies the things they do with the agency. You could literally see he is a very down to earth person who stands firmly with two feet on the ground. But he also had the need to be a martyr in love. Why am I saying that? Well, it’s kind of obvious from the beginning that Carrie is a mess, not through her own fault mess because she has a BPS, but without meds she is a mess. Right from the start when she nearly ruined months of work of the whole task force and he had to shoot her to prevent that from happening, through the affair with a traitor, up until the end when he sacrifices himself to save her life. Everyone tells him she is a mess, she tells that herself literally a minute after he confesses his feelings for her and yet he doesn’t give up. That is the reality of Venus-Neptune martyrs.
If you haven’t seen the series, here is a small spoiler: after he took off from the funeral, she decided to go after her mother, who showed up briefly at the funeral. This required a long drive to another state. The guy literally poured his heart open and she decided to drop everything and leave. Was she scared of her own feelings? Who knows. The very next day he calls her, surprised she is somehow so far away, finding out about family secrets. He asks again if it’s a yes or a no. And she can’t even answer him clearly so he takes it as a no and decides to leave on another black ops mission in the Middle East. Sitting there on the couch, all alone and defeated, like any ordinary person, he throws his phone in despair and thinks what to do next. We did feel sorry for him and we cursed Carrie.
Carrie wasn’t able to receive his feelings. She was in love with her job, maybe still with Brody, she had a baby with? We will never know. She had a bipolar personality disorder and in the moments of clarity, she knew very well that she is not a girlfriend/wife material. She liked complicated situations herself. But Quinn loved her no matter what. Here’s a short list of things she’s done to him and in the end, out of love, he decided to sacrifice himself just to save her. Because have no doubt, it was not a president-elect he was saving, it was the love of his life.
- She shows up to prevent him from executing his mission in Islamabad
- She runs away after he confesses his feelings
- She literally tells him to not push her to make decisions over the phone which eventually leads to him accepting the mission in Syria and vanishing for 2 years.
- Later on they meet in Germany, she has a boyfriend and lives a happy life but Quinn, who sank into the darkness, had her on his kill list. So after all this he is still unable to just kill her, he helps her to buy some time and tells her to leave but even then she insists to accompany him to the locker, where he gets his kill tasks. When things go south and he is wounded badly, he literally refuses to go to the hospital because it would be a death sentence to her.
- Suffering from extreme pain, blood loss and sepsis, he decides to take away his own life, just to protect her. It’s not enough for the poor guy, he ends up with a Berlin terrorist cell, who prepares a civilian attack and eventually gets gassed with sarin. You would think that this is it but no.
- When he is unconscious in the hospital, Carrie decides to wake him up even after the doctor tells her that this could lead to him being in vegetative state or even dying. As expected, he ends up with a stroke and gets into an even deeper coma. Later she receives a love letter he wrote before he left for Syria and one could expect this puts her heart in the right place. Did it?
- Next season they end up living together as friends, he is half paralyzed, too traumatized to even shower himself and just a shadow of his former self. She takes care of him and later they have a talk about why she is doing all this, about how she found him. There is no conclusive answer from her side but one would think that she finally realizes that here he is, completely at her mercy, he needs her more than ever. So there is that one painful to watch scene, when he wakes up from a nightmare and she is there to comfort him. He was there, in her arms, getting probably a glimpse of hope that this is love so he is making a move. Nope, not even then.
I think he was in a friend-zone for a very, very long time and Carrie was completely aware of his feelings for her. I mean you can’t track down terrorists, manage foreign affairs, be a CIA chief in the Middle East and be blind at the same time. But aware of this effect on him, she knew how to exploit it to max out his involvement in whatever that she was doing at the moment. She was a narcissist and she knew very well how to use people for her own needs.
This briefly sums up how from an outsider point of view people with Venus-Neptune, can be in love with other people who don’t even care if they exist. They do so no matter what, no matter the facts, no matter what others are doing to them. They just keep loving and hoping one day they will get rewarded for their unconditional love and faith.
Peter wrote a heart-breaking love letter to Carrie, which she read sitting next to his bed in hospital, when he was in the coma with a little hope to ever wake up.
“I always felt there was something pulling me back to darkness. That I wasn’t allowed a real life or a real love. That was for normal people”
Since the actor who played Quinn wrote the letter himself, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at his natal chart because to be able to write something like this, well, you need to be able to tap into your own feelings of past heartbreaks. So do I see an incredibly challenged Venus or Moon? Well, his Venus is at 0 deg Sagittarius in close conjunction with Black Moon Lilith. Could that be it? This is perhaps a material for another article. But another thing that strikes in his chart is the nodal axis, with North Node in Cancer, which is a lesson for this lifetime to find a balance between career and family. Wasn’t that exactly what Quinn wanted deep down in his heart? A normal life, home, someone to love and kids. And every time he was near that, yet something was pulling him back into darkness, his South Node. We know he was a foster kid, picked from the streets when he was just 16 for his first black ops mission. The episode where Dar Adal tells Carrie about how Quinn ended up in the CIA gave me shivers down my spine. Through the seasons we learn he had a son he has abandoned. He had a fair share of friends and people who wanted to get closer but to quote him “something was pulling him into darkness”. My feeling though is that it was Carrie. At one point she was the one who summoned him to an operation in Pakistan, she didn’t say “yes” when they could both escape their darkness and she didn’t “let him go” when he asked.
Ultimately I believe this is the dynamic present in their relationship was Venus on the South Node. When challenged, it can lead to self-destruction of epic scale and proportion. For those who don’t have any 12th house placements, the house of self-undoing or Neptune is not very prominent, this looks almost unbelievable. And even though Carrie and Quinn were fictional characters from a tv show their story gets very real. You don’t need to be an intelligence agency operative to have something pulling you or pushing into darkness. Plenty of other ways to destroy your own life.
But on the side of Carrie and Quinn’s story, we also have Astrid. Astrid lost her life when she came over to the US to help damaged Quinn to recover. Placed in the cabin lodge in the woods, by the lake, they have time to reconnect. But before they even get the chance, Astrid is killed by an assassin and Peter is one more time thrown into darkness with full force.
Have you seen her tacit love confession? When he is yelling at her, asking what would she come, why would anyone do something like that, in utter disbelief that there is one person who actually care enough about him to take two weeks off, parachute into US, risk her life to extract him from a mental institution and stay by his side to actually help. Well, if that’s not a love, I don’t know what is. But then again we learn about her feelings only right before she gets shot, how has she been holding it inside for all these years? She knew he wanted out every few years because but yet he always went back to doing this. Was it the conversation with Carrie that made her realize that ultimately it was her who was the evil incarnated?
Astrid was way more realistic than Carrie or even Quinn ever were. She could have been his ticket to the light if he only allowed it but he doesn’t know any better. For one, as a foster child he has experienced an early abandonment so his attachment schemes are not exactly the healthy ones. Carrie, who was also abandoned by her mother, is something that he knows, she completes him. Astrid on the other hand is a grown up and expects him to behave like one as well. It’s really too bad she had to die. Her own natal chart would probably not be as extremely challenged if it comes to love and relationships. This has allowed her to stay out of trouble for years and be a successful German intelligence agent. Yet, if you think about it, she probably had probably some other challenges in her chart, that have prevented her from forming a lasting relationship and made her choose work over personal life. She has a weakness, a soft spot for Quinn and for him she is willing to risk her career and ultimately also her life. Kudos for not running away and crying when he said “We fucked each other when we were lonely – that doesn’t make us friends”. I am not entirely sure what he understands as friendship but she did drop everything and came to rescue him from the psychic ward. That does look like friendship to me. It looks even like love and very unconditional love because she did not even expect any reciprocation.
I wouldn’t say she might have had any of the Venus-Neptune aspects in the natal chart but when she came over to babysit Quinn, but what she did was definitely at least a Venus – Neptune transit. It could be even a short one, mere 2 weeks but enough to make a decision and risk your life. That is the nature of Neptune, you don’t really know what you’re doing. Fog is all around. People who have Venus challenged by Neptune in their natal charts, tend o to not see certain aspect of the situation. Often it’s very clear and obvious for everyone around them but it seems like they have a foggy glasses on their noses and if they could only take them off. It’s extremely easy to be deceived then and lake irreparable mistakes. These transits give us a glimpse of how it is to live with a natal chart with certain aspects. Because that is exactly what a transit is, a celestial body movement that bring us various experiences. While natal chart is a print of certain situation on sky at the moment of birth, it forces us to live with certain transits through all our life, the transits are usually the shorter or longer lessons. But this a subject for another story.
So one might wonder: is there a cure for Venus-Neptune connection in the natal chart? Well, some may say a strong Saturn. Indeed it’s true. When you are younger and you fall in love with a drug addict, a strong father figure can pull you out, put you over his knee and apply a literal or figurative spanking as a lesson of what should you not be doing. As unpleasant as it may seem at the moment, it’s often life saving. Unfortunately as you get older, it’s hard to expect your parents to get you out and then you need to start doing your homework on your own.
On the contrary to a popular belief, one should really start to believe their eyes and ears. You see an addict – you run. Someone tells you “I am no good news” – please believe them. The popular myth of Neptune is that it produces the fog, uncertainty and lack of clarity. It’s actually different – everything is as it is but during Neptune transits, we refuse to believe our eyes. It’s often right there and we seem to act as if we don’t see.
It happens as well, that during those transits we may act as if we don’t see someone being completely head over heels for us. Maybe we don’t want to, maybe we pretend that we don’t. But this is for the part two of Venus-Martyr article.