The Square

A square is two planets 90° apart — three signs away. It is the aspect of friction, tension, and forced development.

Squares are uncomfortable and they are also where almost all real growth in a chart comes from. A square will not let you ignore it. The two planets want incompatible things in the same domain, and the person has to do something about it, repeatedly, for a lifetime. What they build in response is usually the most solid thing they own.

Nobody develops from their trines. People develop from their squares.

The square divides the circle by four, and squared signs always share the same modality — cardinal squares cardinal, fixed squares fixed, mutable squares mutable — while differing in element and polarity. Two planets trying to move in the same way out of incompatible material. That is the mechanical source of the tension.

The tradition classified it as a hard or malefic aspect, and did not soften it. Ptolemy grouped square and opposition together as the aspects of discord. The modern reading — friction as the engine of development — is a genuine advance, but it should not erase the older honesty: squares hurt, and the growth is what you do with the hurt, not a consolation that removes it.

Read a square as two demands that cannot both be met as stated. Saturn square Venus: the need for love and the need for safety, pulling against each other. Mars square Neptune: the will to act and the pull to dissolve.

Squares produce action. Where a trine produces ease and a sextile produces potential, a square produces behaviour — usually compulsive behaviour, until it is understood.

The resolution is never to pick a side. A person with Saturn square Venus who chooses only safety becomes closed; one who chooses only love becomes reckless. The mature square finds a third thing that honours both, and it usually takes decades.

Squares to the nodal axis are the most important squares in a chart. A planet squaring both nodes is the apex of a T-square on the person's own direction — the gate everything must pass through.

Find your squares — planets three signs apart, within about 6°. Note the tightest.

Then ask: what conflict in me keeps recurring, in different costumes, across my whole life? Not a one-off problem. The pattern that shows up in your twenties, again in your thirties, again now, with different people and the same shape.

That is your tightest square, and it is not going to resolve. It is going to be worked.

Saturn at 29° Cancer square Chiron at 0° Taurus, 0.9° orb — and Saturn square Uranus at 3° Scorpio, 3.8° orb.

Two squares to the same Saturn, and they compound. The first: the structure that withheld holding, at right angles to a wound at the very first degree of a sign — raw, unprocessed, pre-verbal. Not being held and not being able to say it are not two problems in this chart. They are one square, and it is tight enough to be a defining fact.

The second: Saturn against Uranus. Everything built stands at ninety degrees to the lightning. Whatever structure this person constructs is subject to sudden rupture, and whatever ruptures gets rebuilt. That is a life pattern, not an event.

Read together, the two squares describe someone who builds carefully because the ground has proven unreliable, and who is broken open anyway, repeatedly — and whose eventual authority comes precisely from having done both. Squares do not resolve. They mature.

• Sue Tompkins, Aspects in Astrology — the most practical treatment of squares in print.
• Liz Greene, Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil — on hard aspects as the source of earned strength.