Chart patterns
Grand cross
Two T-squares sharing their ends, with nothing left empty
- Planets involved
- 4
- Built from
- hard aspects
- Focal point
- None
What it is
Four planets evenly spaced around the wheel at 90 degree intervals. That makes two oppositions crossing at right angles, with four squares connecting the ends. Drawn on a wheel it is a square standing inside the circle.
All four are normally in signs of one modality, so a chart carries a cardinal, fixed or mutable grand cross. As with the T-square, a body over a sign boundary makes it dissociate.
A grand cross contains four T-squares, one for each planet taken as apex. That is why the site reports the cross and not its parts.
How it reads
The tradition reads it as a closed system of demand. Every planet in it is square or opposite every other, so there is no direction the pattern can move without pulling on itself, and no empty point to work through the way a T-square has.
What is consistently associated with it is capacity rather than misfortune: a great deal is being held at once, and the pattern is described as difficult mainly because none of it can be set down. Traditional sources are notably respectful about people who have one.
The modality is where the specific reading sits. A cardinal cross is associated with starting more than can be finished, a fixed cross with holding a position past the point of usefulness, a mutable cross with scattering.
There is no apex, and that is the point. A T-square has one to work through and a grand cross does not, which is the whole of the difference between them.
How common it actually is
Genuinely uncommon: 0.78 per cent of charts, about one in 128. Of the shapes that occur often enough to have accumulated a tradition, this is the rarest.
What to watch for
Fatalism. Older texts on this pattern are among the harshest writing in astrology and none of it survives contact with the number of ordinary people who have one.
Do you have a grand cross?
The birth chart tool checks for this and the other seven, and names the planets involved. Whether you have one depends on your birth date, time and place, and on the orbs used: this site detects grand crosss on the ten planets, without the angles.
The other patterns
- T-squareTwo planets opposite each other, both square a third
- Grand trineThree planets each 120 degrees from the other two
- YodTwo planets sextile, both quincunx a third
- KiteA grand trine with a fourth planet opposite one of its points
- Mystic rectangleTwo oppositions joined by two trines and two sextiles
- Grand sextileSix planets evenly spaced: six sextiles, six trines, three oppositions
- StelliumThree or more planets in one sign