Almagest

The library · The aspects

Mars opposite Pluto

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mars opposite Pluto is read the same way as the square: a powerful aspect, sources say, in which the native very often sees extremes of behavior and experience, or goes through crises more than most people do, drive and depth pulling against each other across the full width of the chart rather than settling into a single working relationship. Between two charts, Mars-Pluto interaspects are read as stimulating, sources say, more intensely so than most contacts, and this opposition falls within the sources' own warning that difficult aspects can create battles of wills that threaten the relationship's harmony.

The story

An opposition is a hundred and eighty degrees, half the circle, the two bodies facing each other directly across it; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs groups it with the square as discordant, and Wikipedia's own summary of the aspect describes oppositions as prone to exaggeration, their dichotomous quality keeping whatever they touch in a real and often tense relation rather than letting it settle. 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. Facing each other directly, the act and its own cost stand at two ends of the same field, each fully visible only while the other, for the moment, is held at bay.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mars:Pluto:opposition.