Venus square Mars

Venus in Scorpio and Mars in Leo are square to each other today, as close to exact as the angle comes. That makes it a good day to learn what the tradition means by a square, and why a square between these two planets is a meeting of opposite natures.

Start with the planets. Ptolemy describes Mars as chiefly drying and strongly heating, fiery by nature. Venus he calls temperate, but leaning the other way. The warmth she takes from nearness to the Sun is less than the moisture she generates, so her quality tilts moist.

Sepharial translates those qualities into character. Venus gives fine feeling, good taste, gentleness and love of pleasure, and signifies love affairs, domestic relations and pleasures. Mars gives ambition, executive ability, frankness and what Sepharial calls scorn of consequence. He stirs new enterprises and signifies strife.

Now the angle. Ptolemy counts the square, three signs or ninety degrees, among the true configurations: parts of the zodiac with a real connection to each other. But he sorts those connections into two kinds. The trine and sextile join signs of the same kind, and he calls them harmonious. The square and the opposition join signs of different natures, and he calls them discordant.

That is the reason behind the teaching. A square does not cut two planets off from each other. It binds them across a difference they cannot dissolve.

Put that onto today. The planet that weighs how something feels to the people it touches is bound to the planet that moves without counting the cost. Neither wins by default. Where affection and ambition, or the wish for ease and the wish to act, have been running side by side, a square tends to make them collide. Frankness can land as harshness, and care can feel like obstruction.

The square is also one leg of a T-square with Pluto, with Venus at its apex. So the strain gathers on the Venus side, around love, relations and pleasure, rather than on the drive itself.

The practice follows from Ptolemy's reasoning. A discordant configuration is still a configuration: the two natures are connected and have to be handled together. So wherever you notice yourself about to push something forward today, stop once and ask the Venus question: who does this touch, and how will it land? Then act, with that answer built in.

Where you have been holding back for the sake of peace, do the reverse. Let Mars have the plain word, and say it with Venus's fine feeling. The aim is not to soften either planet. It is to let each one correct the other while the angle is this close.