Almagest

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Mars trine Saturn

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mars trine Saturn is read, like the sextile, as belonging to builders and workhorses. The tradition names the trine the more dynamic of the two harmonious Mars-Saturn contacts, discipline and drive expressed naturally and consistently rather than called upon only when useful. Between two charts, this trine is read among the pairing's easier contacts, the same constancy the Mars person finds attractive in the Saturn person present here as well, focus and resources combining well for couples who share responsibility or work together.

The story

A trine is a hundred and twenty degrees, a third of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls it, together with the sextile, harmonious, since the signs it joins are of the same kind, all masculine or all feminine, and Wikipedia's own summary of the aspect calls the trine extremely beneficial, indicating harmony, ease and what is natural, one of the two aspects the tradition sets against the square and opposition's discord. 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 most flowing angle, the old king's structure and the young god's charge need no effort to agree, force built to last rather than merely to strike once.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mars:Saturn:trine.