Inter-aspects

Definition

Inter-aspects are the aspects that form between a planet in one person's birth chart and a planet in another's — the building blocks of a synastry comparison. To find one, you measure the gap in zodiacal longitude between a planet in chart A and a planet in chart B and check it against the usual aspect set: conjunction, opposition, square, trine, sextile, plus the minor aspects if you allow wider orbs. Each inter-aspect is either applying or separating — drawing together or moving apart — depending on how the two planets were moving at each person's birth.

In Tradition

Modern Western astrologers treat inter-aspects as the heart of any synastry reading. The shared view is that the personal planets — Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars — and the angles carry the most felt charge across two charts. Flowing aspects (trine, sextile) read as places where things come easily, hard aspects (square, opposition) as places that get switched on and rub; the conjunction depends on which planets meet. Saturn and outer-planet inter-aspects read as what holds a bond, idealises it, or transforms it.

In Practice

To work inter-aspects, you build a grid of every cross-chart aspect using moderate orbs — usually around 6° for the Sun and Moon, 4–5° for the personal planets, 2–3° for the slow outer planets — and look at the tightest ones first. Aspects that echo back the other way, such as each person's Venus touching the other's Mars, are flagged as double-whammies and weighed heavily. You also check how each contacted planet sits in its own birth chart, since a cross-chart contact tends to amplify a pattern that was already there rather than create a new one. Whether an aspect is applying or separating reads as the difference between a tension still building and one that is already a settled part of the picture.

Historical Origin

The full cross-chart aspect grid is a 20th-century Western development. Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos IV.5 weighs two charts only by their lights and angles, but the disciplined inter-aspect grid took shape through the modern psychological-astrological line — Greene's Relating (1977), Hand's Horoscope Symbols (1981), Tompkins' Aspects in Astrology (1989). The Hellenistic, Arabic, and pre-modern Western sources do not carry it at the depth of present-day practice.

Etymology

Origin: Latin. Meaning: From inter (between) + aspectus (a looking at), literally "looks between" two charts.

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Etymology

Further Reading