Almagest

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Mars conjunct Neptune

Mars conjunct Neptune, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mars conjunct Neptune is read as a native who very often acts on instinct or impulse, Cafe Astrology says, preferring to connect with intuition to inform a course of action rather than working it out by plain calculation. The two functions are fused rather than merely related, so the native trusts a feeling well ahead of a fully reasoned plan, a driving impulse Neptune colors before it ever reaches the point of being explained to anyone else, including, at times, the native's own self. Between two charts, Mars-Neptune contacts are generally read as indicative of sexual attraction, sources say, an attraction that can turn disruptive and variable specifically where the aspects between the two charts are difficult ones.

The story

A conjunction sets two bodies at, or close to, the same degree, with no real angular distance between them; Ptolemy's own chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs measures the opposition, trine, square and sextile by the number of degrees separating two positions, yet Wikipedia's summary counts the conjunction among the five traditional major aspects sometimes called Ptolemaic, and reports that conjunctions are said to be the most powerful aspects, because they mutually intensify the effects of the involved planets. Mars and Neptune are bound to the horse very differently. Roman tradition consecrated the Campus Martius to Mars as horse pasturage and an equestrian training ground, held the October Horse chariot race and Rome's only known horse sacrifice in his honor, and sent Roman cavalry parading from his temple every July; Neptune's own tie to the horse came later and secondhand, Wikipedia's page on his mythology says, through the Roman god Consus, whose festival featured horse races and who was reinterpreted as Neptunus equestris under the influence of the Greek Poseidon Hippios, Neptune himself having no such direct connection with horses of his own. Fused together, the war god's own horse cult and the sea god's borrowed one ride as if they were a single tradition: drive given Neptune's current to run in, force finding a mount already broken to exactly this kind of speed.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mars:Neptune:conjunction.