Aspect

every reader

What the tradition reads

An aspect is the angular distance between two planets, or between a planet and a chart angle, measured along the ecliptic and read as a live relationship rather than a coincidence of geometry. Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, in the chapter on the mutual configurations of the signs, names only four such configurations: opposition at a hundred and eighty degrees, trine at a hundred and twenty, quartile at ninety, and sextile at sixty; the conjunction is not among them, since the chapter treats signs configurated with one another, and Ptolemy did not count a sign as configured with itself. He calls the trine and sextile harmonious because they join signs "of the same kind," both masculine or both feminine, and the quartile and opposition discordant because they join signs "of different natures and sexes." Wikipedia's account of the astrological aspect groups these same four with the conjunction as the five aspects sometimes called Ptolemaic, and separately calls the conjunction "the most powerful" of the aspects, its character depending on whichever two bodies are joined there. Vedic astrology reads a related but distinct doctrine of drishti: every planet casts a full aspect on the seventh house from its own position, and Mars, Jupiter and Saturn each cast additional aspects forward from their own house, a scheme built on whole houses rather than exact degrees. Both traditions agree an aspect is strongest when exact and weakens as it departs from the angle, the allowance for that departure being the orb.

The story

The five major aspects, conjunction, sextile, square, trine and opposition, are sometimes called the Ptolemaic aspects because they were defined and used by Ptolemy, though his own chapter, titled by the Ashmand translation the mutual configurations of the signs, sets out only four of the five and never the conjunction; "five Ptolemaic aspects" is Wikipedia's own later grouping of the scheme, not Ptolemy's own count. The word aspect descends from the Latin aspectus, a look or sight, itself from aspicio, to see or catch sight of, carrying the sense of two planets looking at one another across the chart. Centuries later Johannes Kepler, writing in his Harmonice Mundi of 1619, described thirteen aspects built from smaller fractions of the circle, each corresponding to a regular polygon, from the triangle and square down to figures such as the pentagon and decagon, widening Ptolemy's four whole number divisions into a much larger harmonic set. Vedic astrology's own drishti tradition, by contrast, is not organised around degree based aspects at all: a planet's gaze is cast house by house, so that Jupiter's aspects on the fifth, seventh and ninth houses from its own position, for example, are read as a single benefic doctrine rather than as three separate angles.

Written from

Corpus key glossary:aspect.