⚼ Sesquiquadrate
Sun sesquiquadrate 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
- 135°
- 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 sesquiquadrate does
A sesquiquadrate is a square plus a semi-square, and it is read as the same family of friction arriving later and more awkwardly. The tradition associates it with tension that surfaces after the fact: the consequence of something already done, rather than the pressure to do it.
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 an aftermath. Where a square describes an argument in progress, a sesquiquadrate more often describes the clearing up, and the discovery that the matter was not as settled as it looked.
What to watch for
Treating it as a square. It is genuinely weaker, and a chart read as though every minor hard aspect carried full weight becomes a list of problems nobody recognises.
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 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 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.