∠ Semi-square
Sun semi-square 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
- 45°
- Orb used
- ±2°
- 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 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
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 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
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 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
- Sun opposition MoonDirectly 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 Sun and Moon actually make this angle in your chart depends on your birth date, time and place.