Mars sesquiquadrate Chiron

What these two are about together

Assertion and the sore place. Associated with what happens to somebody who was punished for wanting things, and with the particular difficulty of acting on your own behalf.

What a sesquiquadrate does

A sesquiquadrate is a square plus a semi-square, and it is read as the same family of friction arriving later and more awkwardly. The tradition associates it with tension that surfaces after the fact: the consequence of something already done, rather than the pressure to do it.

How it reads

Wanting is where it catches. Read as hesitation about pursuing anything for yourself, and as anger that turns inward rather than outward.

In practice

Read as an aftermath. Where a square describes an argument in progress, a sesquiquadrate more often describes the clearing up, and the discovery that the matter was not as settled as it looked.

What to watch for

Treating it as a square. It is genuinely weaker, and a chart read as though every minor hard aspect carried full weight becomes a list of problems nobody recognises.

The two planets

Mars: Drive, anger and how you go after things

Chiron: The injury that does not close, and what it made you able to do

Mars and Chiron at other angles

• Mars conjunction ChironTwo bodies at the same degree, acting as one
• Mars semi-sextile ChironThirty degrees apart: neighbouring signs, with little in common
• Mars semi-square ChironForty-five degrees apart: half a square, and read as half its weight
• Mars sextile ChironSixty degrees apart: cooperation that has to be taken up
• Mars quintile ChironSeventy-two degrees apart: a fifth of the circle, and the odd one out
• Mars square ChironNinety degrees apart: two things that will not sit still together
• Mars trine ChironA hundred and twenty degrees apart: the same element, working together
• Mars quincunx ChironA hundred and fifty degrees apart: two things that cannot be compared
• Mars opposition ChironDirectly across the chart: two ends of one axis