Aspects are the angles your planets form with one another in your natal chart: the geometry of your inner sky. They describe how your different psychological functions talk to each other. The conjunction (☌) comes first. It’s the easiest to understand and the most powerful to live with: two planets sit at practically the same spot (0°, with an orb of about 8°).

Each main section starts with the mechanics, what a conjunction does in any chart, in everyday gestures. Then it shows the conjunction at work in an actual chart, with its exact gap.

The five charts in this article

Instead of “the Venus-Mars person” and “the Moon-Saturn person,” you’ll follow five people and their actual degrees.

✦ These five people are invented, and their skies are calculated for real, with the Swiss Ephemeris and Placidus houses, as in the readings I sell. Their five charts hold 17 conjunctions between chart points and 16 conjunctions to an angle. Every gap quoted below was measured on them before being written here.

What actually happens

Two conjunct planets stop working separately: they fuse. You can’t switch one on without waking the other. Someone with Venus conjunct Mars never loves without desiring, nor desires without loving. A Moon conjunct Saturn never feels anything without an inner voice that weighs it and holds it back.

In practice, it shows in the way your day glues together two gestures other people keep neatly apart. Venus says what you like, Mars says how you go after it. Fused, they make a single gesture. You say yes to a dinner and your body has already decided. You tidy a shelf and tidy your life in the same movement. Nobody around you makes the connection. For you there’s nothing to connect: the two functions have always arrived together.

Alfred, at 0.40°. His Venus is at 19°25′ Aries and his Mars at 19°49′ Aries: twenty-four minutes of arc between them, in the 1st house, the house of what you show of yourself when you walk into a room. At this gap, there is no separation. He gets moving and finds out on the way that he’s in love. His Black Moon Lilith sits in the same spot, four minutes of arc from his Mars: the tightest of the thirty-three contacts these five charts hold.

That’s why the conjunction is called neutral in itself: everything depends on the guests. Some fusions come naturally (Venus-Jupiter: the joy of loving big). Others make a more demanding alloy (Mars-Saturn: drive and brake welded together, which matures into exceptional endurance). None of the five charts here holds either pair, and I’d rather say so than widen an orb to get a pretty illustration.

✦ Name the alloys that make your signature — the adult birth chart · $29.99

Its strength: the intensity of a spotlight

A conjunction concentrates energy the way a magnifying glass concentrates light. The area of life where it falls (its house) becomes a major stage in your life, and the functions involved gain a relief the others don’t have. A Sun pressed against Saturn in the 10th house builds a career; the same two points in the 4th house build a family. People marked by a tight conjunction often have a “something” others pick up on right away: a signature.

Concentration has a flip side, and it plays out elsewhere in the chart. Light gathered in one place is missing from another. Three planets in the 10th house often leave a very quiet 4th house. You work on your strong point, it grows even stronger, and the neighboring area waits its turn for ten years without anyone noticing.

Louise, across almost ten degrees. Uranus at 5°47′, her Sun at 10°44′, Neptune at 12°02′, Saturn at 15°39′: four points in Capricorn, all four in the 10th house, the house of work and public standing. Nine degrees fifty-two separate the first from the last. What she does with her working life carries four functions at once: who she is, what she dreams, what she breaks, what she holds. People notice her at work without being able to say why. No other area of her chart gathers more than two points.

The trap: not seeing what you are

The flip side of fusion is a lack of distance. When two functions have never been lived apart, you assume “everyone works like this.” A Moon-Pluto person thinks everyone feels with that underground intensity; a Sun-Neptune person believes everyone dreams their life as much as they live it. The work of awareness is to name the alloy, which is exactly what a chart reading brings.

Seen from outside, it runs the other way. Other people see the alloy right away. They even name it in one sentence (“you’re so dramatic,” “you’re always leaving”), and that sentence feels unfair to you: it describes as a trait what you live as normal. With a conjunction, the people around you are one step ahead of you. A square pulls and an opposition stretches you apart, and you feel both from the inside; a Moon fused to Pluto is felt mostly from the outside.

Louise, at 1.31°. Her Sun and Neptune are a degree and eighteen minutes apart. Neptune, porousness and dreaming, falls on the Sun, that is, on who she is when she isn’t watching herself. She describes a project and it’s already half lived. When someone asks where she really stands with it, the question surprises her: for her, imagining and doing are the same gesture.

Mateo, at 5.57°. His Mercury is at 3°04′ Scorpio, his Pluto at 8°38′ Scorpio, both in the 1st house. Mercury says how you speak, Pluto what goes to the bottom of things. One evening at dinner, he says one short sentence about what nobody had said, and the table goes quiet. To him, he simply answered the question. It took him years to understand that a remark that’s ordinary for him lands elsewhere like an X-ray.

The orb: at what distance the fusion speaks

Two planets half a degree apart are felt every day, without exception. At six or seven degrees, the fusion wakes up now and then, on a tired evening or before a big decision, and then goes back to sleep. In between, each function gets its own voice back. So the orb weighs as much as the pair. A Venus pressed against Mars at 1° and the same Venus 7° from the same Mars give two different lives. If you have a conjunction in your chart, its gap tells you almost more than the names of the two planets.

Both extremes live here. Alfred’s Venus-Mars, at 0.40°, never takes a day off. Jonas’s Sun, at 8°27′ Sagittarius, is conjunct his Mars at 1°28′ Sagittarius at 6.98°. Almost the limit of the orb. With him, wanting to move forward and moving forward walk separately for months. Then they snap back together all at once, over a week.

How to read it in your chart

Three questions are enough: who fuses (the two planets), where (the house, so the area of life), and how (the sign, which colors the alloy). A Moon conjunct Saturn in Capricorn and the same pair in Pisces don’t look much alike.

The where holds a case many quick readings flatten: a conjunction can straddle two houses, the 2nd and the 3rd for example. The two planets touch in the zodiac and still work in two separate areas. The alloy exists, and it has two addresses.

Mateo, at 7.10°. Saturn is at 16°00′ Sagittarius, in the 2nd house, the house of money and material security; Uranus is at 23°05′ Sagittarius, in the 3rd house, the house of ideas and exchanges. Same sign, same conjunction, and it’s the widest in these five charts. His caution and his need to break away work on two separate fields: he secures his income and blows up his convictions in the same year, without ever seeing the contradiction.

Then check whether the conjunction receives other aspects. A square from elsewhere, from a Saturn or from Black Moon Lilith, puts the fusion under tension; a trine opens outlets for it. Both cases can be read here, on the two conjunctions you’ve just met.

When the fusion falls on an angle

A conjunction on the Ascendant, the Midheaven, the Descendant or the IC (the bottom of the chart) changes status: it stops being an inner matter. The four angles are the doors of the chart, the places where it meets the world. What sits there is visible from outside before you’ve even put it into words.

Louise, at 0.11°. Her Jupiter, at 5°10′ Cancer, is conjunct her IC by just over six minutes of arc, the tightest of the sixteen contacts these five charts make with an angle. Jupiter enlarges; the IC is the root, the home, where you come from. Her house is always too full and her table always bigger than planned. Nobody has ever pointed it out to her. A root is lived in before it’s described.

Carla, at 2.99°. Her Venus at 15°13′ Cancer touches her Ascendant at 18°12′ Cancer. At eight, people find her “sweet,” and it’s the first word adults use, before they even know who she is.

In a child

A tight conjunction in a child is often their most visible trait, the one adults sum up in a word (“he’s intense,” “she’s a dreamer”). A Sun pressed against Mars makes the child who runs before thinking. A Moon pressed against Saturn makes the child who packs their school bag without being asked. Understanding it early lets you guide the child’s nature without fighting it. It’s one of the first things I look at in the child birth chart.

Carla, at 3.55°. Her Moon is at 11°14′ Capricorn, her Saturn at 7°41′ Capricorn and retrograde, both in the 6th house, the house of routines and the body. The Moon asks to be comforted, Saturn asks that it be earned, and both speak at once in the area of daily life. One Tuesday evening, she’s eight, tired from a day at school, and she asks for nothing: she packs her school bag and waits for someone to notice. An adult who reads “she’s independent” is off by a notch. If you live with a child like her, the gesture that changes everything is to offer before she asks, because she doesn’t ask.

Keep reading

The conjunction is the first letter of the aspect alphabet. The next ones: the opposition, the trine, the square and the sextile.

Between two charts, the same mechanics play out differently: a Sun that lands on someone else’s Moon, for example. That’s the ground of synastry.

✦ Have your conjunctions read across your whole chart — the adult birth chart · $29.99