Almagest

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The Sun opposite Mars

the Sun opposite Mars, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart the Sun opposite Mars is read as more confrontational and argumentative than plainly active: Ptolemy names both the opposition and Mars discordant, and the tradition describes people with this aspect as experiencing Mars's aggression, when young, as something coming at them from outside rather than as their own trait. Recognizing that aggression as part of their own personality, rather than only other people's, is treated as the turning point after which the same energy can be channeled into genuine competitive drive instead of into constant confrontation for its own sake. Between two charts, one person's Sun opposite another's Mars is read as belonging to Mars's more difficult synastry register: sources describe such contacts, in general terms, as producing a passionate relationship thick with conflict, the pull across the whole axis of the wheel giving the friction less a single flashpoint than a running, low grade contest that flares given any opening.

The story

An opposition sets two bodies a hundred and eighty degrees apart, the full diameter of the circle, the greatest distance either can stand from the other; Ptolemy counts it, together with the square, discordant, set against the trine and sextile's harmony. Mars, in Roman religion, was not only the destroyer Greek Ares often was; he doubled as an agricultural guardian, protecting the conditions crops need to grow, and was Jupiter and Juno's son, one account crediting his birth to Juno alone through Flora's intervention. Faced directly across the wheel by a planet this forceful, the Sun is asked to hold its own identity against a pressure that will not simply pass; the tradition's remedy, in every register, is the same one Mars himself eventually serves when turned toward the harvest rather than the battlefield: a will given somewhere useful to push.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Sun:Mars:opposition.