Perfection

The fuller picture

Four different things get called perfection in the literature, and running them together is the commonest way a beginner's reading goes wrong. The first is the one that matters most: an aspect perfects when a planet arrives at the degree that puts it in exact aspect with another — joined in degree and minute. The second is exactness proper, where two planets share degree, minute and second of arc. The third is partility, which means the two planets share the same degree number in their respective signs; that is a degree-number match, not an orb window, so a planet at 15°58′ of one sign and one at 15°02′ of another are partile while 15°02′ and 16°00′ are not. And there's a fourth, looser use, the one you'll hear at the table — the matter perfected in three days, meaning the thing actually happened.

Here's the important part. Perfection describes contact completing, and nothing else. A square perfects. An opposition perfects. Whether the outcome is welcome is a separate question answered by the question itself, the planets' condition and reception, and any independent testimony. An opposition describes a route through conflict or exhaustion; its geometry alone does not prove later separation or reversal.

The aspects that perfect a matter affirmatively are the conjunction, the trine and the sextile, in that order of strength — the conjunction is the strongest connection because the two bodies simply meet. A trine perfects powerfully whether or not the planets receive each other; a sextile carries about half a trine's force, so without reception it still perfects but with markedly more difficulty and effort. That asymmetry is why you settle the reception before you interpret the aspect.

The opposite of perfection has its own name: impedition. Something got in the way. Bryan's chapter places hard aspects inside that source-specific taxonomy and also names absence of any aspect; the engine's ruled C-007 baseline is narrower and does not make a direct square or opposition an impediment by geometry alone. Actual interruption remains separate: prohibition, strict frustration and refranation are three named ways an aspect that was going to perfect may fail, and each has its own page here.

Contact between the two significators isn't the only route. A faster planet can carry the matter between them by translation of light, or a slower and weightier planet can gather both their aspects by collection. There's a third indirect route in the practice this glossary follows that our engine has never implemented, and it's worth knowing about because it changes what an unaspected chart means. It goes by "dwelling in houses": one significator arriving bodily in the other's house perfects the matter — the ruler of the thing asked about turning up in the first house, or the ruler of the person asking turning up in the house of the matter. What settles that it's a genuine third path rather than a decorative gloss is where it appears: inside a rule about when a sale fails, listed alongside absence of aspect and absence of translation. It also runs in both directions and gets extended from significators to plain benefics.

One last route needs no aspect either, because there is nothing to wait for. Seven planets rule twelve houses, so the ruler of the person asking and the ruler of the thing asked about are frequently the same planet — and where they are, that identity is itself the connection. And a caution on how far forward you're allowed to look: you don't push the Moon past her next aspect to a later, more agreeable one. If chaining future aspects were permitted, prohibition and frustration would mean nothing and no chart could ever deny anything, which would make the whole method useless.