An aspect is the distance between two pieces of the chart, measured in degrees, and that is what says whether they work together, ignore each other or fight. The previous series describe each piece on its own: the planet in the sign, the planet in the house. This one describes what happens between two of them.

There are five distances that tradition calls the major aspects: the conjunction (0°), the sextile (60°), the square (90°), the trine (120°) and the opposition (180°). Each has its own way of putting two pieces in contact, and none of them is good or bad, what exists is what each one charges and what each one delivers.

And there is the number almost no text gives: the orb. Two pieces at exactly 90° form a square; at 97°, they form nothing. This blog uses 6 degrees for the major aspects, and outside that they are two pieces in the same chart, which is another thing. That is why an aspect is not found out from the date: it needs the calculated chart.

And there is a reading order that changes everything, and that almost no site respects: the aspect comes last. It describes the relationship between two pieces, and there is no reading the relationship without knowing both. Whoever arrives here without having read each piece in the sign and in the house is reading the conversation without knowing who is speaking.

The aspect between Sun and Moon says whether who you are and what you feel pull the same way. The Sun is the identity: what the person is building, what she wants to be. The Moon is emotion: what she needs in order to feel safe. When the two go together, life runs in one direction. When they do not, the person spends a life choosing between what she wants and what she needs.

It is the most-read aspect of all, and for a good reason: it is inner coherence, and that shows up in everything. Someone who wants one thing and needs another spends half her energy negotiating between the two, and it is energy that comes out in no work at all.

And here is what hardly any text writes down: an aspect is a RELATIONSHIP, and not one more piece. It does not add a trait to your chart, it says how two traits that are already there get along with each other. Here that matters more than in any other pair: a Sun in Aries and a Moon in Cancer exist in the same chart even with no aspect between them. The aspect says whether they speak to each other.

It is worth giving the number before any reading, because without it there is no aspect: this blog uses a 6-degree orb for the major aspects. Outside that they are two pieces in the same chart, which is another thing. And the orb needs the calculated chart, and the Moon moves thirteen degrees a day, which means it changes aspect within hours. Without the hour of birth, this is the aspect most often guessed wrong.

The conjunction fuses the two: the person wants exactly what she needs, and that is uncommon. She is born at New Moon, and it shows: there is a unity in her that others read as steadiness. There is no conflict between will and need, because the two are the same thing, and she usually finds it strange that other people live divided.

The cost is the lack of distance. Whoever has no inner conflict also has no outside angle on herself: this person takes a long time to notice when she is wrong, because there is no second voice in her to disagree.

The sextile and the trine leave will and emotion talking with no effort. The person can explain what she feels and feel what she wants, and that makes her easy to live with in a way she does not value because she never knew the opposite. She is usually the balanced person in a family where nobody else is.

The cost is what it always is: it was never tested. Whoever did not have to negotiate with herself did not build the muscle, and the day life demands a choice between what she wants and what she needs will find her with no practice.

The square and the opposition set will and emotion against each other, and it is that friction that produces almost every piece of work worth having. The person wants what frightens her and needs what limits her. She is born in a tense moon phase, and lives inside a negotiation others do not see. It is tiring, and it is the source of a self-awareness the easy aspects do not give.

The fix is not choosing a side: it is giving each one its hour. The will decides the direction, the emotion decides the pace, and most of the suffering of this aspect comes from the person trying to make both decide the same thing at the same time.

It shows up in the distance between what this person says she wants and what she looks for when she is tired. They are concrete signs, the kind one recognizes in one's own week, and they hold for any of this pair's aspects, because the subject is the same and what changes is the friction:

• wants one life and needs another, and knows it
• makes a big decision and then misses what she gave up
• is read as firm by some and as indecisive by others
• changes direction when her sense of safety tightens
• has a clear will and a way of resting that does not match it
• recognizes an old subject in her own contradictions

Notice what this list does not say. It does not say the person is indecisive or contradictory, two labels this pair carries that describe the extreme, not the aspect. It says her will and her need speak different languages.

This is the inversion most texts do not make, and it holds for every pair: what runs with no friction was never tested, and what bothers is what produces. The trine between Sun and Moon delivers the result with no effort, and for that reason the person usually does not build the muscle, and finds that out on the day the ease is not enough. And the square delivers the opposite: a whole life of inner negotiation, which produces the person who understands herself.

In this pair that is especially visible, because the split between wanting and needing is the subject of half the literature there is. The Shelly Method reads every archetype through four faces, the light, the shadow, the excess and the deficiency, and in an aspect they get distributed between the two pieces: almost always one of them is in excess and the other in deficiency, and the fix goes through the weak side.

It matures when the person stops choosing between the two and starts giving each one its hour. That usually happens after the first Saturn return, when it becomes clear that a life built only on the will does not hold up, and one built only on need does not go anywhere.

Maturity here is not the will beating the emotion nor the other way round. It is the person knowing which of the two is speaking in each decision, and it is that distinction, and not peace between them, that turns division into depth.

No honest text gives an exact age for this: the arc depends on the whole chart.

It says how those two pieces get along, and not who you are. A chart with Sun square Moon may belong to someone very accomplished, and one with a trine may belong to someone who never had to try. The aspect describes the mechanism, and not the result.

Which signs and which houses the two fell in changes everything: a Sun in Aries with a Moon in Capricorn in a square is someone who demands of herself what she wants; a Sun in Pisces with a Moon in Gemini, in the same square, is another thing entirely. See The Sun in the 12 signs and The Moon in the 12 signs, which describe each piece on its own, and that is the reading that comes before this one.

A limit said out loud, because it is part of reading seriously: none of this is prediction. Astrology describes a tendency and gives vocabulary for what the person already lives, it does not replace your work or your decisions.

And the questions that come up most on this subject, with the short answer: