⚺ Semi-sextile
Sun semi-sextile Mars
Effort comes easily and in your own interest. Associated with physical confidence and with people who do not need to be talked into starting.
- Angle
- 30°
- Orb used
- ±2°
- Type
- Soft
- Bodies
- ☉ ♂
What these two are about together
Identity and drive. What you are becoming, and the force you are willing to use to get there. The tradition treats this as the pair that decides whether somebody acts on their own behalf.
What a semi-sextile does
A semi-sextile puts two planets in adjacent signs, which share no element, no quality and no polarity. The tradition treats it as the mildest contact in the table and disagrees with itself about whether it is helpful at all: some read it as a small supportive link, others as a low-level irritation between two things that simply do not speak the same language. Both readings agree it is quiet.
How it reads
Effort comes easily and in your own interest. Associated with physical confidence and with people who do not need to be talked into starting.
In practice
Read as a minor note rather than a theme. A semi-sextile is worth mentioning when almost nothing else is in orb, and worth leaving out of a summary when anything major is.
What to watch for
Overreading it. Adjacent signs are genuinely awkward together, but at this strength the tradition does not expect the awkwardness to be conspicuous.
The two planets
Sun: Identity, vitality and what you are becoming
Mars: Drive, anger and how you go after things
Sun and Mars at other angles
- Sun conjunction MarsTwo bodies at the same degree, acting as one
- Sun semi-square MarsForty-five degrees apart: half a square, and read as half its weight
- Sun sextile MarsSixty degrees apart: cooperation that has to be taken up
- Sun quintile MarsSeventy-two degrees apart: a fifth of the circle, and the odd one out
- Sun square MarsNinety degrees apart: two things that will not sit still together
- Sun trine MarsA hundred and twenty degrees apart: the same element, working together
- Sun sesquiquadrate MarsA hundred and thirty-five degrees: a square and a half
- Sun quincunx MarsA hundred and fifty degrees apart: two things that cannot be compared
- Sun 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 Sun and Mars actually make this angle in your chart depends on your birth date, time and place.