Almagest

The library · The aspects

Mars square Pluto

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mars square Pluto is read, together with the opposition, as a powerful aspect: sources say 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 rather than working together, so that the same intensity the sextile and trine put to steady use here arrives instead as a repeating pattern of crisis. Between two charts, Mars-Pluto interaspects are read as stimulating, sources say, more intensely so than most contacts, and this square falls within the sources' own warning that difficult aspects can create battles of wills that threaten the relationship's harmony.

The story

A square is ninety degrees, a quarter of the circle, one of the four configurations Ptolemy names; Ptolemy's own chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls the opposition and quartile discordant, formed between signs of different natures and sexes, while Wikipedia's own summary of the aspect describes the square, in its own words, as creating a strong and usable tension, a turning point where an important decision needs to be made that involves an opportunity at a cost. 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. Set at this harder angle, the will to act and the pull toward what lies beneath it work against each other: force keeps meeting a resistance that will not simply clear the field before it.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mars:Pluto:square.