∠ Semi-square
Mercury semi-square Mars
Thought and drive collide. Traditionally read as arguing for its own sake, as impatience with slower thinkers, and as saying the true thing in the most damaging available way.
- Angle
- 45°
- Orb used
- ±2°
- Type
- Hard
- Bodies
- ☿ ♂
What these two are about together
Mind and drive. How fast thinking becomes speech, and how sharp that speech is.
What a semi-square does
A semi-square is exactly half a square, and the tradition reads it as the same kind of friction at a smaller scale. Where a square describes a conflict that has to be dealt with, a semi-square describes the sort of persistent low-grade annoyance that never quite forces the issue and never quite goes away either.
How it reads
Thought and drive collide. Traditionally read as arguing for its own sake, as impatience with slower thinkers, and as saying the true thing in the most damaging available way.
In practice
Read as irritation rather than demand. Kepler took the minor hard aspects seriously and much of the tradition since has treated them as real but secondary, which is the reading this site uses.
What to watch for
Accumulation. One semi-square is a footnote. Several of them to the same planet is the tradition's picture of somebody worn down by things too small to name.
The two planets
Mercury: Mind, language and how you process
Mars: Drive, anger and how you go after things
Mercury and Mars at other angles
- Mercury conjunction MarsTwo bodies at the same degree, acting as one
- Mercury semi-sextile MarsThirty degrees apart: neighbouring signs, with little in common
- Mercury sextile MarsSixty degrees apart: cooperation that has to be taken up
- Mercury quintile MarsSeventy-two degrees apart: a fifth of the circle, and the odd one out
- Mercury square MarsNinety degrees apart: two things that will not sit still together
- Mercury trine MarsA hundred and twenty degrees apart: the same element, working together
- Mercury sesquiquadrate MarsA hundred and thirty-five degrees: a square and a half
- Mercury quincunx MarsA hundred and fifty degrees apart: two things that cannot be compared
- Mercury opposition MarsDirectly across the chart: two ends of one axis
Find this in your own chart
A reading like this only tells you what the pairing is associated with. Whether Mercury and Mars actually make this angle in your chart depends on your birth date, time and place.