∠ Semi-square
Sun semi-square Mars
Drive and identity argue. Read as somebody who either overreaches and burns out or holds back and resents it, and traditionally as a person who had to learn what to do with their own aggression rather than being taught.
- Angle
- 45°
- Orb used
- ±2°
- Type
- Hard
- 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-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
Drive and identity argue. Read as somebody who either overreaches and burns out or holds back and resents it, and traditionally as a person who had to learn what to do with their own aggression rather than being taught.
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
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-sextile MarsThirty degrees apart: neighbouring signs, with little in common
- 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.