Sun sextile Jupiter

The Sun and Jupiter are in sextile today, and the contact is effectively exact: the Sun in Libra is sixty degrees from Jupiter in Leo and still closing. It is at its tightest now and will loosen over the coming days as the Sun moves on.

Start with what each body brings. Ptolemy describes the Sun as producing heat and moderate dryness, and its power as the easiest of all to perceive, since its movement visibly makes the seasons. Jupiter, he says, sits between the cold of Saturn and the burning heat of Mars, and so has a temperate influence. It promotes warmth and moisture together, with the warmth predominant, and in his image it produces "fertilizing breezes". Put simply, one body gives heat and the other turns heat into growth.

Sepharial, writing in 1920, translates this into character and affairs. He calls the Sun noble, loyal and fearless, the significator of the vital principle and of position, and he links it with the favour of those in authority and with handling one's own affairs well. Jupiter, in his account, gives optimism, generosity and "a rich and fruitful mind", and is the significator of increase.

Then there is the sextile itself, and here Ptolemy gives a reason, which is why this is a teaching rather than a list. He builds the aspects geometrically. Draw the diameter of the circle, then divide the half-circle into halves and into thirds. One third of it, two signs or sixty degrees, is the sextile. He then explains why it counts as harmonious. Like the trine, the sextile always joins signs of the same kind, so the two places it connects share a nature. The square and the opposition join signs of different natures, and he calls them discordant. A sextile is a meeting of like with like, which is why it eases things rather than straining them.

Read together, today's contact joins the body of standing and vitality with the body of increase, across an angle the tradition calls naturally compatible. What it tends to favour is warmth that becomes generous, and confidence that looks for room to grow. Of the two, the sextile is the gentler harmonious aspect: it opens a door rather than pushing anyone through it.

The practice follows from that. While the contact holds, take one matter you are already responsible for and ask plainly for what would let it grow. That might be support, a resource, or a word from someone placed to give it. Alternatively, offer that same increase to someone else. The Sun supplies the standing to ask and Jupiter the impulse toward increase, and the sextile is a good moment to start or to ask, never a promise of how the answer comes back.