Mars trine Saturn

Mars in Leo is forming a trine to Saturn in Aries, and the two are drawing closer to exact over the coming days. This pairs the two planets the older books treat as the hardest to handle. The tradition still reckons this particular contact a good one, and the reasons are worth knowing.

Start with the planets themselves. Ptolemy describes Mars as strongly heating and drying, fiery by nature. He describes Saturn as producing cold and dryness, more cold than dry, because Saturn is the planet most remote from the Sun's heat. So the two are opposites in temperature, but they share dryness, the quality that firms and sets rather than softens.

Sepharial describes the same pair in terms of character. Mars confers ambition, executive ability, frankness and what he calls a "scorn of consequence," and it stirs people toward new projects. Saturn gives sober thought, patience, endurance, method and a liking for routine. Its results are "slow but sure," and they come in proportion to the labour put in.

Now the aspect. Sepharial counts Mars and Saturn among the malefic planets, harmful when they meet in conjunction, square or opposition. But he is explicit that they "nevertheless produce good effects when in good aspect," and the trine is one of the two good aspects.

Ptolemy gives the reason a trine is harmonious. It spans four signs, a third of the circle, and so it always joins signs of the same kind. Here those are two masculine signs, Leo and Aries. A square, by contrast, joins signs of different natures, which is why he calls it discordant. The trine's ease is not luck. It comes from the two places in the zodiac being alike.

Put together, the trine lets Mars's heat be held by Saturn's cold rather than fight it. The urge to begin, act and dare finds a structure that will carry it. The patience to persist finds the energy to move. At full strength this is a condition for work that needs force and staying power together, the kind of effort neither planet manages well alone.

The practice follows from that. Take one piece of work you have wanted to force through all at once, and give it a method instead. Set an amount of effort, at a set time, that you could repeat tomorrow and the day after. Let Mars supply the start and Saturn the rhythm. At the end of the day, judge it by the labour done rather than by how far the work got.

That is the bargain Sepharial attributes to Saturn: results that match the labour. A trine from Mars is the condition under which Mars's impatience can most easily accept those terms. While the contact tightens, it is a good stretch for building the habit rather than chasing the finish.