Almagest

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Mars sextile Saturn

Mars sextile Saturn, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mars sextile Saturn is read, together with the trine, as belonging to builders and workhorses, sources say, people who put drive to work through discipline rather than through raw force alone. Between two charts, this sextile is read among the pairing's easier contacts: there is a constancy or predictability in the Saturn person that the Mars person finds very attractive, sources say, Mars appreciating Saturn's reliability and Saturn respecting Mars's initiative, a combination of focus and resources that works especially well for couples who share domestic responsibility or work together.

The story

A sextile is sixty degrees, a sixth of the circle, one of the four configurations Ptolemy names, read through the compatible signs it joins and asking for a degree of active engagement before its ease is felt; Wikipedia's own summary of the aspect calls it similar to the trine but less intense, indicating compatibility and harmony. Cronus and Ares meet here as two kinds of hard force set against each other, the old king's calculating self-preservation against the young war god's blunt, immediate action; it was Gaia, not Cronus, who fashioned the sickle and urged her children to move against Uranus, Cronus only the one son among them willing to lie in ambush when the moment came, while Wikipedia's own page on Mars says his Greek counterpart Ares was often treated with contempt and revulsion in Greek literature, viewed primarily as a destructive and destabilizing force next to Mars's own function of securing peace. Set at this easier angle, the young god's charge can draw on the old king's own patience without being slowed by it, action that knows how to pace itself when it is useful to.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mars:Saturn:sextile.