Separating

The fuller picture

When two planets have gone past exactness they begin to separate, and the orb starts to grow again. For a separating aspect the orb is the distance travelled since the contact was exact, which makes it a rough measure of how long ago the thing happened rather than how long until it does. The tradition reads that plainly: applying aspects are events in the future, separating aspects events in the past.

This is the distinction worth the page, because a separating aspect is not a weakened applying one. It isn't the same event at lower volume — it's a different tense. A trine two degrees past exact isn't a bit of good fortune on its way; it's good fortune already spent. Reading a separating trine as a mild yes is one of the commonest ways a beginner talks themselves into an answer the chart never gave.

The practice this glossary follows takes the strictest available line and says so against Lilly, who happily read a separating square as testimony: within this approach, only applying aspects are interpreted, because a separating aspect represents action already taken. What the separation is good for is description. On one worked chart a separating square is read as a plain statement of past fact about the querent's life — an expensive trip five months earlier — rather than as evidence towards the verdict. That's the honest use of it: the chart is telling you where this person has been, which is often exactly what they need to hear, and it isn't an argument about what happens next.

Two places a separation does real work, though. The first is translation of light, where a faster planet has to have come off one significator before applying to the other — that prior separation is the entire difference between a go-between and an interloper who's simply beaten everyone to it. The second is a question about the past. Where someone asks whether a thing has already happened, a completed contact between the two significators is the affirmative answer, graded by how exact it was, and a separating square still means it happened — badly, or leaving something unfinished. Valence isn't occurrence. A hard aspect in the past records a meeting that went wrong, never the absence of a meeting.

Our own position sits between the two. We keep separating aspects visible and never let one carry a yes on a question about the future: where the two rulers make no applying aspect, a recent separation between them is reported as context — the matter has lately been in contact, retrace recent steps — with more weight the tighter it is, and none at all beyond ten degrees.