Almagest

The library · The aspects

Mars conjunct Pluto

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mars conjunct Pluto is read as a tremendous ability to commit oneself to a task or goal: Cafe Astrology says that, when inspired, the native draws upon great stores of strength and determination that most people simply do not have available to them. Between two charts, Mars-Pluto interaspects are read as similarly stimulating to Mars-Neptune's, sources say, though more intensely so, with difficult aspects specifically able to create battles of wills that threaten the relationship's own harmony.

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 is the god the Romans set over war, and Pluto is the god the Greeks set over what war, among other things, has always produced in quantity: the dead who cross into his kingdom and do not return. The two gods share no single myth between them, but they share a domain each keeps distinct, one causing what the other receives. Fused together, cause and consequence collapse into a single force: the will to act and the willingness to risk everything on the outcome share no distance between them at all.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mars:Pluto:conjunction.