Almagest

The library · The aspects

The Sun trine the Sun

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

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show the Sun trine itself, since a single body cannot stand at an angle from its own degree; the tradition reads this key through transit, about four months after the solar return and again about four months before the next one, when the transiting Sun reaches a trine to its own birth place. Cafe Astrology's transit pages describe this period as one where ego-gratifying circumstances are highlighted, some form of recognition, however large or small, giving confidence a boost that arrives without the square's accompanying friction. Between two charts, one person's Sun trine another's is read as mutual support and real alignment of direction and purpose: sources describe partners who energize each other, whose mutual respect forms an excellent foundation, and who find in each other an affirmation that carries them through whatever challenges do turn up elsewhere in the relationship.

The story

A trine is a hundred and twenty degrees, a third of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls it, together with the sextile, harmonious, since the signs it joins are of the same kind, all masculine or all feminine, a judgment about the angle rather than about whose place occupies it. The Sun meeting itself at this easy angle still draws on the same old promise of return that gave Sol Invictus his winter festival, a rebirth carried forward rather than lost, the same light the Greeks had already named in Helios, the Titan who personified it, and in Apollo, credited with the same solar quality under the name of enlightenment. A trine between the Sun and itself, met in transit or in synastry, is that return arriving with no resistance at all, the light simply continuing on the course it was always going to take.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Sun:Sun:trine.