Aspect

The fuller picture

Two planets are in aspect when the gap between them is close enough to one of five angles: together at 0°, 60° apart, 90°, 120°, or facing each other at 180°. "Close enough" is what an orb decides, and it's worth being clear that the planets have to be in orb, not merely in signs that aspect each other. Signs that see each other aren't evidence about the two bodies sitting in them.

Aspects are action and communication between planets, and that's the whole reason horary spends so much time on them. The chart is asked a question with two sides — the person asking and the thing asked about — and the working presumption is that an outcome needs a contact between the planets standing for those two sides. Where there's no aspect at all, nothing is under way that moves the person asking towards what they want. Should the thing arrive anyway, expect it to cost an extraordinary amount of work and to rest on an unstable footing. The pair we look for first is the ruler of the first house and the ruler of the house governing the matter; failing that, the Moon to the ruler of the matter will serve, since she stands in as the asker's second significator in every chart.

Here's the part a short definition can't carry: an aspect perfecting is not the same as a good outcome. Perfection means the two planets reach the exact angle — and a square perfects, an opposition perfects. What changes across the five aspects is how the thing arrives and what it costs, not whether it arrives. Read the geometry for the manner, and read the rest of the chart for whether the manner is bearable.

Aspects also carry tense, which is the other thing beginners run together. Every aspect describes an event. A separating aspect describes an event in the past; an applying aspect describes one still ahead. So a chart can be full of aspects and still promise nothing, if all of them have already happened.

Two refinements before you read one. First, the nature of the planet throwing the aspect qualifies the aspect: one traditional rule holds that a square or opposition from one of the benefic planets destroys nothing, and that a sextile or trine from one of the malefics profits nothing unless reception is present. That cuts both ways and it stops the geometry being read on its own. Second, an aspect isn't the only route to an outcome. Light can be carried between two planets that never meet, two significators can share a sign or a house, and one significator arriving in the house belonging to the other side of the question is named in its own right as a third path — listed alongside aspect and translation in the rule that says when a matter fails.

One departure is worth flagging, because you'll meet it. The quincunx at 150° isn't one of the five. The modern practitioner this glossary follows uses it anyway and says plainly that it isn't a traditional horary consideration: he reads two planets in quincunx as actively declining to see each other, and calls it a bad omen for harmony in a marriage question whatever else intervenes. We don't admit it — not as a perfection and not as a denial — and on his own worked charts he only ever uses it to corroborate something else.