The Trine

A trine is two planets 120° apart — four signs away, in the same element. It is the aspect of ease: two planets that speak the same native language and cooperate without friction.

Trines are gifts. They are also the aspects most likely to be taken for granted and least likely to produce development, precisely because nothing about them demands attention. What comes easily is rarely examined.

The trine divides the circle by three, and trined signs are always in the same element — fire trines fire, water trines water. This elemental kinship is the whole explanation for why a trine flows: the two planets are made of the same stuff.

The tradition ranked the trine as the most benefic aspect, stronger and more fortunate than the sextile. Ptolemy grouped trine and sextile as the aspects of harmony.

A grand trine — three planets in the same element, each trine the others, forming an equilateral triangle — was considered exceptionally fortunate, though modern astrologers note its shadow: a closed circuit of self-sufficiency that can insulate a person from the friction that would otherwise develop them.

Read a trine as a channel that is always open. Venus trine Jupiter: charm and generosity that flow together without effort. Moon trine Saturn: emotional steadiness that does not have to be manufactured.

Trines describe what a person does not have to work at — and therefore what they may not value, since it never cost anything. Ask someone about their trines and they will often say "doesn't everyone do that?"

A trine can also be a groove worn too deep. The path of least resistance is still a path, and a strong trine can carry a person along it for a lifetime without ever asking whether they chose it.

Find your trines — planets four signs apart in the same element, within about 6°.

Then ask: what do I do so easily that I have never counted it as a strength? That is the trine, and it is usually something others find remarkable and you find unremarkable.

And the harder question: is this ease serving me, or carrying me? A trine used deliberately is one of the best things in a chart. A trine merely coasted on is a talent slowly turning into a habit.

Venus at 8° Gemini trine Pluto at 8° Libra, 0.3° orb.

An almost exact trine between love and the underworld. The capacity to go into the dark with another person — to be present to what is buried, without flinching — is native to this chart. It costs nothing. It has always been there.

And that is the difficulty. Because the channel is open and effortless, ordinary intimacy feels thin by comparison. A Venus trine Pluto does not want to be soothed; it wants to be remade, and it can spend years quietly unmoved by perfectly good relationships that lack a door into transformation.

The trine is a genuine gift and a genuine appetite, and the work is learning that intensity and depth are not the same thing. Not every dark thing is a door. This is what a trine looks like when it goes unexamined: a real talent, running unsupervised, quietly setting a standard the person never consciously chose.

• Sue Tompkins, Aspects in Astrology — trines and the grand trine, with their shadows.
• Stephen Arroyo, Astrology, Psychology and the Four Elements — why elemental kinship produces ease.