∠ Semi-square
Moon semi-square 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
- 45°
- Orb used
- ±2°
- 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 semi-square does
A semi-square is exactly half a square, and the tradition reads it as the same kind of friction at a smaller scale. Where a square describes a conflict that has to be dealt with, a semi-square describes the sort of persistent low-grade annoyance that never quite forces the issue and never quite goes away either.
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 irritation rather than demand. Kepler took the minor hard aspects seriously and much of the tradition since has treated them as real but secondary, which is the reading this site uses.
What to watch for
Accumulation. One semi-square is a footnote. Several of them to the same planet is the tradition's picture of somebody worn down by things too small to name.
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 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
- Moon opposition MarsDirectly across the chart: two ends of one axis
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.