Chart patterns
T-square
An opposition with something caught in the middle of it
- Planets involved
- 3
- Built from
- hard aspects
- Focal point
- Yes
What it is
Two planets sit opposite one another, 180 degrees apart. A third sits square to both, which puts it 90 degrees from each and at the midpoint of the opposition. Drawn on a wheel it is a right-angled triangle with the third planet at the point.
The three are usually all in signs of one modality, all cardinal or all fixed or all mutable, because that is what the geometry produces. When one has drifted over a sign boundary the angles still hold and the pattern is called dissociate.
How it reads
The tradition reads a T-square as an opposition that has been given somewhere to go. An opposition on its own is a standoff between two things that will not agree; the third planet is where the argument comes out.
What is consistently associated with the pattern is drive. The two ends supply a tension that does not resolve, the apex supplies a direction, and the result is usually described as a person who works hard at the thing the apex planet governs, whether or not they chose to.
The empty point opposite the apex is a long-standing part of the reading. There is no planet there, and the tradition treats that vacancy as where the pattern is most easily neglected and most usefully addressed.
Where the reading sits
The apex, the planet square to both others. It is where the tension of the opposition is said to be expressed, and it is the placement most worth reading closely.
How common it actually is
The most common shape built from angles, and close to ordinary rather than a mark of a difficult chart. Measured across 73,049 charts it appears in 23.3 per cent of them, so roughly one chart in four has at least one.
What to watch for
Being told this is a hard chart. It is the commonest pattern there is, most people have one, and the tradition associates it with productivity at least as often as with strain.
Do you have a t-square?
The birth chart tool checks for this and the other seven, and names the planets involved. Whether you have one depends on your birth date, time and place, and on the orbs used: this site detects t-squares on the ten planets, without the angles.
The other patterns
- Grand trineThree planets each 120 degrees from the other two
- Grand crossTwo oppositions at right angles: four planets, four squares
- YodTwo planets sextile, both quincunx a third
- KiteA grand trine with a fourth planet opposite one of its points
- Mystic rectangleTwo oppositions joined by two trines and two sextiles
- Grand sextileSix planets evenly spaced: six sextiles, six trines, three oppositions
- StelliumThree or more planets in one sign