Almagest

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Uranus sextile Neptune

Uranus sextile Neptune, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

With Uranus sextile Neptune in the birth chart, the tradition reads an openness to raising consciousness through alternative ideas, spiritual beliefs and ways of living, paired with a resistance to being told how to think or what to believe. Cafe Astrology credits the contact with wanting to improve and reform how a culture practices religion, compassion, escapism and transcendence, an inventive confidence that dreams can actually be made to happen, sensitivity to social injustice and the plights of the underprivileged, and a marked, perceptive sense of humor. Because Uranus and Neptune move so slowly, the source notes that this rare contact remains in orb for several years once it forms, so that everyone born within that stretch, for instance those born between 1965 and 1969, carries the same aspect in the birth chart; it becomes a more personal, pronounced factor chiefly when the Sun, Moon or an angle is also involved. Between two charts, one person's Uranus sextile the other's Neptune is read as a pairing that inspires each side to pursue personal dreams and live up to shared ideals and humanitarian goals, their methods and activities read as inventive rather than traditional, with an understanding of each other that can feel unusually accurate and hard to explain by ordinary means.

The story

A sextile is sixty degrees, a sixth of the circle, one of the four configurations Ptolemy names, formed between signs of the same gender; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls the sextile, together with the trine, harmonious, and Wikipedia's own summary describes it as similar in influence to the trine but less intense, indicating compatibility and harmony that eases communication and opens opportunity. Uranus, the primordial sky, was born of Gaia to cover her on every side; together they produced the Titans, the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handers, but Uranus hated them and hid them away inside the earth. Angered, Gaia fashioned a sickle of adamant and urged her children to punish their father; only Cronus, the youngest Titan, agreed, and with the sickle Gaia had made, he castrated Uranus and ended his reign. Neptune's own page names him a brother of Jupiter and Pluto, the three presiding together over heaven, the earthly world and its underworld, and the seas, the sea itself falling to Neptune as his particular share. Set at this cooperative angle, the sky's ancient rupture and the sea's dissolving character are read as needing some active engagement before their ease is felt, invention meeting an imagination willing to entertain it rather than resist it.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Uranus:Neptune:sextile.