Almagest

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The Sun square the Sun

the transiting Sun's yearly passage in square to its own natal place, or one person's Sun square another's in synastry

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show the Sun square itself, since a single body cannot stand at an angle from its own degree; the tradition reads this key through transit, about three months after the solar return and again about three months before the next one, when the transiting Sun squares its own birth place. Cafe Astrology's transit pages describe this as a period asking for more effort: obstacles tend to arrive in the ordinary run of things, though the same pages add that a person is generally capable of turning them into useful, positive energy, the difficulty read as a learning stretch rather than as a plain setback. Between two charts, one person's Sun square another's is read as a genuinely dynamic and energizing contact that is, in the tradition's own words, also abrasive and frustrating: sources describe two people who push each other to grow precisely through friction rather than through ease, whose life goals can conflict outright, and who risk real, draining competitiveness if neither side ever gives ground.

The story

A square sets two points ninety degrees apart, a quarter of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs names it, together with the opposition, discordant, since the signs it joins are, in his words, of different natures and sexes, a judgment about the angle regardless of whose place stands at either end of it. The Sun's own year gives this angle a literal home at the two equinoxes, points falling a quarter turn from each solstice, days the old calendars marked as thresholds rather than as either the sun's height or its low point. Where Sol Invictus was reborn at the winter solstice, the equinox belongs to neither extreme, a threshold the Sun has to cross rather than simply arrive at or depart from, which is exactly the effort this square, met in transit or in synastry, keeps asking for.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Sun:Sun:square.