On Mars and the opposition

An opposition is not a wound. It is a sightline.

Two planets a hundred and eighty degrees apart can only see each other, and the tradition reads that geometry as a subject a person keeps meeting through other people. What sits across the chart from you tends to arrive wearing someone else's face. The argument is real, the other person is real, and the axis is still an axis.

Mars is the planet of the flare — the heat that gets you out of a chair and into the argument. It is not treated as a fault to be corrected. Mars is how anything gets defended, and a chart without it would be a chart of someone who never stood up. But Mars unaimed simply burns whatever is nearest, and the classical remedy is not to cool it. It is to give it a direction.

The Aries–Libra axis is the one that runs between having a self and having a relationship, and nobody resolves it permanently. It comes round again. What changes, across enough passes, is how quickly you recognise it when it does.

Written for this collection in the idiom of a modern astrological column.

About this passageAn "opposition" is an aspect formed when two planets sit on opposite sides of the chart, a hundred and eighty degrees apart. Mars is the traditional ruler of Aries and, in classical astrology, of conflict, appetite and the will to act. The Aries–Libra axis pairs the sign of self-assertion with the sign of relationship and balance.

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Astrological readings written for this collection
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https://github.com/Jjzme2/peace-finder