☍ Opposition
Sun opposition Neptune
The self is obscured. Traditionally read as confusion about direction, as a tendency to idealise people who do not deserve it, and as vitality that comes and goes for no clear reason.
- Angle
- 180°
- Orb used
- ±6°
- Type
- Hard
- Bodies
- ☉ ♆
What these two are about together
Identity and dissolution. What happens to a sense of self when the edges are not firm, which the tradition reads as both the artistic gift and the central difficulty of this pair.
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 is obscured. Traditionally read as confusion about direction, as a tendency to idealise people who do not deserve it, and as vitality that comes and goes for no clear reason.
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
Neptune: Imagination, dissolution and what you cannot see clearly
Sun and Neptune at other angles
- Sun conjunction NeptuneTwo bodies at the same degree, acting as one
- Sun semi-sextile NeptuneThirty degrees apart: neighbouring signs, with little in common
- Sun semi-square NeptuneForty-five degrees apart: half a square, and read as half its weight
- Sun sextile NeptuneSixty degrees apart: cooperation that has to be taken up
- Sun quintile NeptuneSeventy-two degrees apart: a fifth of the circle, and the odd one out
- Sun square NeptuneNinety degrees apart: two things that will not sit still together
- Sun trine NeptuneA hundred and twenty degrees apart: the same element, working together
- Sun sesquiquadrate NeptuneA hundred and thirty-five degrees: a square and a half
- Sun quincunx NeptuneA 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 Neptune actually make this angle in your chart depends on your birth date, time and place.