The conjunction in astrology

The conjunction places two planets at the same longitude, close enough that their meanings run together and act as one compound. It is the loudest statement the aspect system makes and the least predictable, because its quality depends entirely on which two bodies have met. Nothing about the angle itself is easy or difficult; the planets involved decide that.

Same degree, and therefore no angle at all

The conjunction is measured at zero degrees of separation, and it divides nothing. Where the square takes a quarter of the circle and the trine a third, the conjunction marks the place where two bodies arrive at the same longitude and no arc remains between them. Since the zodiac runs in twelve signs of thirty degrees each, planets within a few degrees of one another almost always occupy the same sign, which means they share an element, a modality and a polarity. There is no contrast of quality for an astrologer to weigh. Whatever tension the figure carries comes from the natures of the two planets, not from the ground they stand on.

One exception is worth naming. A planet at twenty-eight degrees of Taurus and another at two degrees of Gemini stand five degrees apart, and most modern practice would count them as conjunct, yet they sit in different signs. Older astrology, which reckoned aspects between signs before it reckoned them between degrees, would not have joined them at all. Pairings of that kind are called out of sign, and they tend to behave like a conjunction with a seam running through it.

How the tradition ranks it

It stands first among the five Ptolemaic aspects, the ancient set inherited from Hellenistic practice and set out in the Tetrabiblos beside the opposition, trine, square and sextile. The older writers were careful with the word. Aspect means a looking, and two planets in one degree do not behold each other; they are merely together, a condition the Greek sources described as being in the same place. Several traditional authors therefore treated the conjunction as a circumstance rather than a ray. That distinction survives in how it reads today: an opposition sets two functions facing one another, while a conjunction leaves two functions that have stopped being separable.

In a chart the effect is fusion. The planets lose their independent operation and work as a compound, and the person rarely notices the compound as unusual, never having experienced either planet alone. This is why the conjunction resists description in the abstract. Venus with Jupiter and Mars with Saturn are identical geometry and nothing alike in a life.

Orb and exactness

Contemporary practice grants the conjunction the widest allowance of any aspect, commonly eight to ten degrees between two planets. When the Sun or Moon is one of the pair the allowance usually stretches further, to ten or twelve degrees, on the old principle that the luminaries carry more light and so reach further. Exactness counts for more than the allowance. A conjunction within a single degree, called partile, describes a merger so complete that the two significations cannot be told apart in the living; one at nine degrees describes a tint, and often shows only under transit or in hindsight. Where a chart offers several competing readings, the tightest aspects are the ones to trust first.

What the conjunction does not settle

The habit of sorting aspects into good and bad does not survive contact with this one, which belongs to neither camp and which the tradition itself declined to classify. The wider sorting deserves the same scepticism. Aspects called soft describe capacities that arrive unasked, and what arrives unasked is often never developed, since nothing ever forced the question. Aspects called hard describe two functions that will not cooperate quietly, and that refusal is what produces attention, practice and eventual skill. A conjunction can fall either way depending on its company. No aspect in any chart forecasts an outcome; it describes a relationship between two parts of a person, offered as a tendency and open to correction by the life itself.

The orb this app allows

8° by default, plus 2° when the Sun or Moon is one of the two bodies, and half the allowance for asteroids and calculated points. The orb preset in Settings scales the whole table if you prefer to read tighter or wider.

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The other aspects

Opposition · Trine · Square · Sextile · Quincunx · Semisextile · Semisquare · Sesquiquadrate · Quintile · Biquintile