Aspects in the natal chart

The six aspects: what each one means

1. ☌
   Conjunction · 0°

   The plainest of the six names, and the least misleading: two planets simply share a spot. What throws people is that a conjunction has no flavour of its own - it borrows everything from the pair, so Venus with Mars and Saturn with the Moon are the same aspect and nothing alike.

2. ⚹
   Sextile · 60°

   Sold as “lucky”, which is the wrong word. A sextile is an opening rather than a gift: it needs one deliberate move from you and then it works. Left alone, it stays a possibility for decades.

3. □
   Square · 90°

   The name that scares people most, and it comes from an old tradition of calling angles benefic or malefic. Strip that off and a square is two drives asking for the same hours - friction, yes, but friction is also what builds a skill.

4. △
   Trine · 120°

   The name everyone hopes for, and the one worth reading last. A trine describes something already easy, which is exactly why it tends to go unused: nobody trains what never resisted them.

5. ☍
   Opposition · 180°

   Sounds like conflict, means an axis. The two planets are not fighting; they mark the ends of one spectrum - home and work, company and solitude - and the skill is alternating between them rather than picking a side.

6. ⚻
   Quincunx · 150°

   The one with no folk reputation at all, because it never made it into popular astrology. Two planets that share no element, no mode, no polarity: not hostile, just permanently out of step, which is its own kind of training.

Figures: when aspects form a pattern

1. △
   Grand trine

   Three planets form an equilateral triangle: a closed circuit of ease within one element. Present in 9.4% of charts - roughly one in eleven. It gives a steady talent that can also lull, because inside that triangle it is a little too comfortable to bother.

2. ⊤
   T-square

   Two planets in opposition and a third squaring both - the apex. Present in 29.3% of charts, which makes it the least exotic thing on this list. The apex is where the tension resolves, and it is usually the most productive point in the whole chart.

3. ✚
   Grand cross

   Four planets in a cross: two oppositions locked by four squares. Present in 1.18% of charts - about one in eighty-five. Energy pulling in four directions at once, which reads as stamina rather than drama, and tends to come good with age.

How many aspects is normal? We counted 40,000 charts

Forty thousand birth moments, spread evenly across 1950–2010, were cast with the orbs listed below and the ten planets only. Here is what came out.

• 15 aspects in an average chart out of 45 possible pairs; eight charts in ten fall between 11 and 19, the whole range ran 5–38.
• A T-square turned up in 29.3% of charts - three people in ten, which is a poor basis for calling it a curse.
• A grand trine in 9.4%, a grand cross in 1.18%. Rare, yes; magic, no.
• The commonest pair on the list is Neptune–Pluto, aspected in 73% of charts. It is shared with everyone born in the same decades, so it says something about a generation and almost nothing about you.
• Two pairs can only ever meet one way: Mercury never gets further than 27.8° from the Sun and Venus never further than 47.1°, so Sun–Mercury and Sun–Venus are conjunctions or nothing. In 60 years of daily positions no other angle appears. If a report offers you a Sun square Venus, the report is wrong.

Orbs: which ones we use and why

An aspect is rarely exact to the degree, so an orb is used - the tolerance within which the connection counts as active. Our values (the same as in the app):

• major aspects - 8° when the Sun or the Moon is involved, 6° otherwise;
• sextile - 5°, quincunx - 6°;
• auxiliary points (node, Lilith) - 3°, Chiron - 5°; two auxiliary points are not aspected to each other.

The smaller the orb, the stronger the aspect: a pairing with a 0.5° orb sounds far louder than the same pair at 5°. That is why the results are sorted by precision.

Squares and oppositions: the “bad aspect” story, checked against the count

Squares and oppositions still get called malefic, and the census above is the short answer to that: tense angles are the second and sixth commonest things in a chart, and a T-square sits in nearly a third of all of them. Whatever is that widespread is ordinary equipment, not a sentence.

What a tense aspect actually does is supply pressure and refuse to let a question stay open. Careers and character tend to grow out of exactly those spots. Easy trines are the ones people sleep through: something that arrived free is rarely used to the full. So the useful question is never “good or bad” but which two themes are tied together, and what you would like to do about it.

Frequently asked questions

Calculating the angles is astronomy; interpreting them is a symbolic system for self-reflection, not science.