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The Moon conjunct Mars

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart the Moon conjunct Mars fuses instinct with the tradition's most forceful planet: Ptolemy names Mars malefic for its excess of dryness, so the fusion here runs hot rather than gentle. Natives are described as hot-blooded, passionate and full of raw energy and initiative, brave and spontaneous, if blunt, protective of the people they love without necessarily offering them much deep sympathy underneath the protection. They find routine boring and seek excitement instead, and their temper is said to ignite quickly and burn out just as fast, leaving little residue once it has passed. Between two charts, one person's Moon conjunct another's Mars is read as a strong attraction that is both physical and emotional: sources describe an emotionally intense relationship with real, significant involvement between the two people, touchiness and hurt feelings turning up alongside equally frequent and equally genuine joyful reconciliations.

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. No surviving myth ties Selene directly to Ares; her own story is dominated instead by her chariot crossing the night sky and by her long affair with the sleeping mortal Endymion, whom she loved for his beauty and visited nightly. Mars, meanwhile, kept in Roman religion a dual character Greek Ares mostly lacked, a war god who also guarded the conditions crops need to grow. Fused together despite having no myth of their own, the Moon's steady nightly return and Mars's forceful, protective energy meet here as two very different kinds of devotion pressed into a single light.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Moon:Mars:conjunction.