☍ Opposition
Sun opposition Moon
The self you are building and the comfort you require want different things. Read as the person who cannot rest while succeeding or succeed while resting, and traditionally as a tension carried from the two parents wanting different outcomes.
- Angle
- 180°
- Orb used
- ±6°
- Type
- Hard
- Bodies
- ☉ ☽
What these two are about together
The two lights, and the oldest question in a chart: whether what you are becoming and what you actually need are pulling in the same direction. Every tradition treats this pair as the most important relationship in a birth chart.
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
The self you are building and the comfort you require want different things. Read as the person who cannot rest while succeeding or succeed while resting, and traditionally as a tension carried from the two parents wanting different outcomes.
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
Sun: Identity, vitality and what you are becoming
Moon: Need, instinct and what settles you
Sun and Moon at other angles
- Sun conjunction MoonTwo bodies at the same degree, acting as one
- Sun semi-sextile MoonThirty degrees apart: neighbouring signs, with little in common
- Sun semi-square MoonForty-five degrees apart: half a square, and read as half its weight
- Sun sextile MoonSixty degrees apart: cooperation that has to be taken up
- Sun quintile MoonSeventy-two degrees apart: a fifth of the circle, and the odd one out
- Sun square MoonNinety degrees apart: two things that will not sit still together
- Sun trine MoonA hundred and twenty degrees apart: the same element, working together
- Sun sesquiquadrate MoonA hundred and thirty-five degrees: a square and a half
- Sun quincunx MoonA 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 Sun and Moon actually make this angle in your chart depends on your birth date, time and place.