☍ Opposition
Moon opposition Mars
Need and drive collide. The traditional reading is irritability, defensiveness and reacting before understanding, often traced to a home where anger was either everywhere or forbidden.
- Angle
- 180°
- Orb used
- ±6°
- Type
- Hard
- Bodies
- ☽ ♂
What these two are about together
Need and drive. How quickly feeling becomes action, and what a person does with anger.
What a opposition does
An opposition puts two planets exactly across from one another, in signs that are traditionally paired rather than unrelated. It is read as tension between two things that genuinely belong together, which is what separates it from a square. The tradition frames it as a problem of balance and, very often, as something a person meets through other people rather than alone.
How it reads
Need and drive collide. The traditional reading is irritability, defensiveness and reacting before understanding, often traced to a home where anger was either everywhere or forbidden.
In practice
Read as a see-saw. Whichever end is being favoured, the other end is being neglected, and the aspect tends to describe the swing between them rather than a settled position.
What to watch for
Projection. Oppositions are the aspect most associated with meeting your own unowned half in somebody else and disliking it there.
The two planets
Moon: Need, instinct and what settles you
Mars: Drive, anger and how you go after things
Moon and Mars at other angles
- Moon conjunction MarsTwo bodies at the same degree, acting as one
- Moon semi-sextile MarsThirty degrees apart: neighbouring signs, with little in common
- Moon semi-square MarsForty-five degrees apart: half a square, and read as half its weight
- Moon sextile MarsSixty degrees apart: cooperation that has to be taken up
- Moon quintile MarsSeventy-two degrees apart: a fifth of the circle, and the odd one out
- Moon square MarsNinety degrees apart: two things that will not sit still together
- Moon trine MarsA hundred and twenty degrees apart: the same element, working together
- Moon sesquiquadrate MarsA hundred and thirty-five degrees: a square and a half
- Moon quincunx MarsA hundred and fifty degrees apart: two things that cannot be compared
Find this in your own chart
A reading like this only tells you what the pairing is associated with. Whether Moon and Mars actually make this angle in your chart depends on your birth date, time and place.