Almagest

The library · The aspects

The Sun conjunct the Sun

the transiting Sun's yearly return to conjunct its own natal place, a solar return, or one person's Sun conjunct another's in synastry

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show the Sun conjunct itself, since a single body cannot stand at an angle from its own degree; this key is read instead through transit, where, as the wider tradition of returns holds for both lights, the Sun returns yearly to the exact degree of its own birth place, the moment astrologers call the solar return. Cafe Astrology's own transit pages read the day this way: time to celebrate, a new solar cycle beginning, with mood and any insight that surfaces around the date worth paying close attention to, a personal new year riding on top of the calendar one. Between two charts, one person's Sun conjunct another's is read as an unusually close likeness: sources describe overall characteristics and energy levels running very similar between the two people, a strong mutual identification that rarely needs much explaining. The same closeness cuts both ways, since flaws are shared as readily as strengths, and the relationship is said to hold up best once both partners have made some peace with themselves individually.

The story

A conjunction sets two bodies, or one body and its own former place, at 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 degrees of separation, 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. The Sun meeting itself has its clearest mythic image in Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun honoured in the late Roman empire, whose festival fell at the winter solstice and marked the sun's own symbolic rebirth after the year's longest night, a late instance of what the record calls a form of solar monotheism. Helios, the Titan the Greeks named as the sun's own personification, and Apollo, credited among the Greeks with the same solar quality under the name of enlightenment, both stand behind that same later Roman figure, one light carried under three names. A conjunction between the Sun and itself, whether marked yearly at the solar return or found between two people in synastry, borrows the promise common to all three: the light does not end, it returns.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Sun:Sun:conjunction.