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The Sun sextile Saturn

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart the Sun sextile Saturn gives natural access to handling responsibility, ordered living and financial caution without the conjunction's earlier struggle attached to it. The tradition describes people with enough patience and self-discipline to reach goals methodically, taking a real, step-by-step approach rather than rushing; they are naturally trustworthy, loyal to the people they love, and somewhat reserved in how they show feeling, the difference from the harder aspects being that these traits show up easily when actually needed rather than only after being forced into shape by hardship. Between two charts, one person's Sun sextile another's Saturn is read as producing a deep sense of mutual commitment and dedication: Saturn stays loyal and responsible, and both partners handle practical concerns effectively together, the tradition naming reliability and trustworthiness as the pairing's defining, dependable qualities.

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, a judgment about the angle itself that applies here as to any pairing. Two different stories carry the name. Greek myth has Cronus overthrow his own father Uranus and then devour his own children by Rhea to escape a prophecy that one of them would depose him in turn, until his son Jupiter, called Zeus in that telling, did just that. Rome's Saturn kept the name but not the violence: he arrived in Italy dethroned and a fugitive, was received by Janus, brought agriculture and order, and was rewarded with a share of the kingdom rather than winning it back by force. Offered only a cooperative angle to a god this bound up with structure and time, the Sun gets access to Saturn's discipline without having to be humbled by it first, order lent rather than imposed.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Sun:Saturn:sextile.