The Sextile

A sextile is two planets 60° apart — two signs away from each other. It is a soft, helpful aspect, but a quiet one: an opportunity rather than a gift.

The distinction from the trine matters. A trine flows whether you cooperate or not. A sextile requires you to notice it and pick it up. It is a talent that stays latent unless used — which is why sextiles are the most commonly wasted aspects in a chart.

The sextile is one of the five Ptolemaic aspects, formed by dividing the circle by six. Signs sixty degrees apart share the same polarity — both masculine/diurnal (fire and air) or both feminine/nocturnal (earth and water) — but differ in element. Fire sextiles air; earth sextiles water.

That is precisely why it is friendly but not effortless. The two planets are compatible in temperament and different in substance. They understand each other without being the same, which is the structure of a good working partnership.

The tradition ranked it as benefic but weaker than the trine — the lesser of the two easy aspects.

Read the sextile as an available skill. Mercury sextile Saturn: the capacity for disciplined, structured thought — genuinely present, and only realised in people who apply it. Venus sextile Mars: an easy relationship between desire and affection, available to be used well.

Sextiles do not force themselves on you. A person can go a whole life with a beautiful sextile and never develop it, and nothing in their life will announce the omission. This is the opposite of a square, which will not let you ignore it.

Because they are soft, keep orbs tight — 3° to 4° at most. A wide sextile is barely audible.

Find your sextiles — planets two signs apart, within a few degrees.

Then ask: what am I good at that I have never bothered to develop? Sextiles are usually things a person can do easily, has always been able to do, and has therefore never taken seriously — because it never felt like an accomplishment.

The instruction for a sextile is simple and rarely followed: pick it up on purpose.

Mars at 10° Leo sextile Pluto at 8° Libra, 1.1° orb.

A tight sextile between the personal will and the underworld. This gives the fire access to buried material — the capacity to act on what has been survived, to bring force to bear on what most people flinch from. It is a genuinely powerful combination.

And it will sit unused for decades if the person never deliberately reaches for it, because nothing about a sextile insists. There is no crisis attached to it, no friction demanding resolution. The chart is simply offering a channel between the will and the depths, and the offer stands or lapses depending entirely on whether the person picks it up.

That is the lesson of every sextile: available is not the same as active.

• Sue Tompkins, Aspects in Astrology — sextiles by planetary pair.
• Robert Hand, Horoscope Symbols — on the difference between opportunity and gift.