Aspects

In your birth chart no planet works on its own. Each one sits at a precise point on the wheel, and the distance separating it from the others matters as much as the sign it occupies. When two planets fall at certain distances, astrologers say they form an aspect: a channel through which the two functions talk to each other, lend each other strength, or get in each other's way.

There are five main aspects. The conjunction puts two planets in almost the same spot and fuses them into a single block. The sextile and the trine let them work together easily, the first lightly, the second more fully. The square and the opposition set them at odds: the square acts like a brake that jams, the opposition like a tug of war that leaves you swinging between two poles.

One misunderstanding is worth clearing up straight away. A harmonious aspect is not a promise of happiness, and a tense one is not a sentence. A trine hands you a resource that flows by itself, which is exactly why you may never notice it and never use it. A square asks you to work, and it is often where you build your best abilities.

This guide reads aspects in pairs, one planet at a time. Each chapter takes a planet and walks through the links it can form with the others: what they bring into dialogue, what happens when they cooperate, what happens when they block each other. Your chart almost always holds several at once, and none of them should be read alone: a difficult aspect backed up by the rest of the chart weighs far less than it looks on paper.

• Aspects of the Sun
• Aspects of the Moon
• Aspects of Mercury
• Aspects of Venus
• Aspects of Mars
• Aspects of Jupiter
• Aspects of Saturn
• Aspects of Uranus
• Aspects of Neptune