Almagest

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The Sun sextile Mars

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart a sextile between the Sun and Mars is read as courage put to cooperative use: Ptolemy names the sextile harmonious, and the tradition describes people with this contact as enterprising, holding powerful stores of energy they can draw on when a real challenge appears, meeting problems with a spirited, enthusiastic confidence that other people find genuinely admirable. They are naturally competitive without losing their belief in fair play, favor competitive sport over anything violent, and because a sextile still asks for a little active effort to bear fruit, the tradition credits these natives with being effective strategists rather than merely lucky ones. Between two charts, one person's Sun sextile another's Mars falls under the one general note sources give the whole Sun-Mars pairing in synastry: it highlights action and physical attraction. The more specific, cautionary reading sources offer is reserved for the harder aspects, where the pairing can turn passionate and filled with conflict; for an easier aspect such as this one, the sources describe only that same underlying charge of action and attraction, without extending to it the conflict warned of elsewhere.

The story

A sextile is sixty degrees, a sixth of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs names it, together with the trine, harmonious, since the two signs it joins are of the same kind, all masculine or all feminine, set against the discordant square and opposition. Mars, in Roman religion, held a dual character the purely destructive Greek Ares lacked: a war god who also protected the harvest, turning his force toward conditions that let crops grow rather than only toward conquest, and a son of Jupiter and Juno whose most famous myth ties him to Rome's own founding, fathering Romulus and Remus and letting his sacred she-wolf raise them after their exposure. A Sun offered only a cooperative angle to a planet this energetic still gets access to its drive, aimed, in this favorable case, at something worth building rather than merely worth winning.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Sun:Mars:sextile.