Direct Aspect

The fuller picture

Aspects are how planets act on one another, so a horary chart wants one between the two planets standing for the sides of the question. When they apply to each other with nothing in between, that's a direct aspect, and it's the most straightforward way an outcome comes about. The pairing looked for first is the ruler of the person asking and the ruler of the thing asked about; failing that, the Moon to the ruler of the thing asked about will serve, since the Moon is the querent's second significator in every chart.

Only the five Ptolemaic aspects count: conjunction, sextile, square, trine, opposition. The quincunx is where that gets interesting, because it's a live disagreement rather than a settled point. The practitioner this glossary follows uses it, says plainly that it is not a traditional horary consideration, and reads it as two planets that mix badly and actively decline to see each other — on "will I marry this person", a quincunx between the two rulers is a bad sign for the harmony actually available, whatever else in the chart intervenes. Our engine rejects it by design, so a quincunx will not appear as a perfection here.

Applying, not separating. A separating aspect is a contact already made and gone; it describes something that has happened, not something coming. The worksheet records a separating aspect between the significators because it's a fact about the chart, and the judgment doesn't count it as perfection.

Here's the part that surprises people. Hard aspects perfect. An applying square between the two significators is a yes in the ruled baseline — the matter completes through difficulty and effort. An applying opposition can also complete, through conflict or exhaustion; its geometry alone does not prove that the result later comes apart. The order of strength among the soft affirmative aspects is conjunction, then trine, then sextile, and a sextile without reception carries about half a trine's force, so it perfects with markedly more strain.

The planets have to be within orb of each other, and this is the one place where the doctrine we follow runs wider than both the tradition and our own code. One chart in the source rests its entire judgment and its only timing on a trine at twelve degrees and six minutes of orb, against a Lilly moiety sum of eight degrees for that pair — an aspect our engine will not report at any setting consistent with Lilly, and without it that chart has no perfection, no timing and no judgment at all. Orbs are deliberately left unresolved in our own rulings rather than settled by fiat, so treat a borderline aspect as a question rather than a fact.

Two things count as direct contact without being aspects. The first is one planet ruling both houses, where there is nothing to wait for because the two parties are already one body. The second is co-presence: both significators in the same sign, and more strongly in the same sign and the same house. Same house but different signs is not a perfection here — a shared arena with no bodily contact. There is also a refinement of an ordinary applying aspect worth noticing on a chart, where both planets are moving towards each other rather than one chasing the other; that reads as both parties actively pursuing the matter.

A direct aspect is also the sturdiest route. Our engine gives direct perfection the strongest confidence and caps every indirect route at moderate, and a direct perfection survives a pile of counter-evidence that would knock an indirect one down to uncertain. That difference is doing real work: it is the reason a chart perfecting through a go-between reads as a more qualified yes than one where the two parties reach each other.