Mars sextile Uranus

Mars and Uranus reached an exact sextile today, Mars in Leo and Uranus in Gemini, and from here they begin to separate. Mars is the planet of enterprise, frankness and a certain scorn of consequence. Uranus is the principle of sudden release, originality and the break that comes when a structure can no longer hold what is inside it. The sextile is one of the two aspects the tradition calls harmonious, so Uranus's abruptness works with Mars rather than against it. The condition carries a readiness to start something new, to act on an idea the moment it arrives, and to drop a method that has stopped working without much ceremony. It is at full strength now and loosens over the next few days as the two pull apart.

Sepharial counts both Mars and Uranus among the malefics, yet holds that such planets produce good effects when they meet in good aspect. That is what this contact describes. The urge to break routine has somewhere useful to go, and an inventive solution is easier to reach for than usual. This sits more noticeably for anyone with the Sun or Moon in the early degrees of Leo or Gemini.

The wider picture has also shifted since yesterday. Mercury's square to Pluto has ended, and with it the T-square that ran from Mars and Pluto through Mercury has dissolved. That figure had no exit. Mars's push ran into Pluto, both bore down on Mercury, and the pressure kept returning to thought and speech. With the circuit open, the mind is less caught between two forces. Mars still opposes Pluto, but the contact is easing. Astrocábala and modern practice agree that Pluto is the higher octave of Mars: assertion gone deep and sustained. The counsel while it fades is the usual Plutonian one. Do not let frustration accumulate, and do not let another person's authority quietly stand in for your own judgment.

The Moon entered Virgo today and almost at once squares Uranus, exact and still applying. The Moon gives adaptability, variableness and a love of change. Ptolemy counts the square as discordant. Set against Uranus, that tends toward a restless, interrupted mood that shifts faster than plans can follow, with a sharp impulse to rearrange whatever feels confining. So Uranus is touched twice today: easily by Mars, awkwardly by the Moon. The same urge to break routine is simple to act on and harder to feel settled about. The lunar square passes within a day. Pavitt gives cornelian under Virgo, and records Marbodus's eleventh-century belief that it stilled angry passions and preserved concord.

Neptune and Black Moon Lilith are in exact square, and the contact is still tightening. Neptune in Aries is a standing condition, and Lilith is passing across it. Neptune is the principle of dissolution, the loosening of the edges between one thing and another. Sepharial ties it to involved affairs and double-dealing. Lilith is read as what refuses to be accommodated: the part that will not be made palatable or traded away for acceptance. Under the square, the line a person will not cross becomes harder to see. Ground can be given without noticing. A refusal can come out muddled. The terms of belonging grow vague. The same loosening can also make it easier to see who has been left outside. This bears harder on anyone with personal planets in the first few degrees of the cardinal signs.

Mercury and Venus met in Scorpio and are now separating, with Venus retrograde. Sepharial notes that Mercury takes on the nature of the planet it is with, and calls the conjunction good where Venus is involved. The mind has been leaning toward taste, fine feeling and gentler speech. But Venus's square to Mars is tightening. Venus's softness meets Mars's bluntness on discordant terms, so friction between affection and assertion is building rather than fading. Mercury's own square to Mars is easing.

The Sun's opposition to Saturn is loosening. Ptolemy places both in their fall, the Sun in Libra and Saturn in Aries, each where its own quality is at its weakest. The pull between self-assertion and duty has been real, and neither side has had full strength to settle it. That tension is now passing.

New today, Mercury forms a quincunx to Saturn. Ptolemy does not recognise this angle at all. Modern practice reads it as adjustment between two bodies with nothing in common, and the tradition divides here. On the modern reading, quick thought and slow method keep needing small corrections to work together.

With Mars and Uranus at their best this week, choose one routine that has outlived its use and change it plainly. Then, while Neptune blurs the edges, check that nothing you value has been quietly given away in the process.