Opposition

What it means

Two things facing each other. An opposition is read as awareness and tension together, the two bodies looking straight across the chart at one another.

The geometry of the opposition

An opposition divides the circle by two and draws a straight line through its centre. Opposite signs are six apart, and they always share a modality: Aries and Libra are both cardinal, fire facing air; Taurus and Scorpio are both fixed, earth facing water. Fire and air, earth and water, are the pairs the tradition treats as complementary, which is why opposite signs are read as two answers to the same question, independence against partnership or possessions against what is shared.

Every chart with houses has oppositions built in: the ascendant faces the descendant, the midheaven faces the IC, and each house faces the one six places round, so that the seventh is the only house opposing the rising sign.

How the opposition is read

The tradition reads an opposition as polarity: two planets that see each other clearly and pull in opposite directions, so the task is balance rather than choosing one side. It is often read as lived out through other people, with the self holding one end and a partner, rival or circumstance the other. Between fast planets it is read as a swing between two needs. The Sun opposite the Moon, the full Moon, is read as a tension between will and feeling; Venus opposite Mars as attraction charged with rivalry.

With a slow planet the opposition is read as a long negotiation. The Moon opposite Saturn is read as emotional needs weighed against duty, and Mars opposite Jupiter as enthusiasm inclined to overreach. Mercury and Venus never oppose the Sun, since they stay within about 28° and 47° of it. Among transits, Saturn opposes its own birth position at about fourteen and again at about forty-four, and Uranus does so somewhere around forty, so everyone of those ages shares them.

Orb, applying and separating

This site gives the opposition the same orbs as the conjunction, 8° between planets and 10° with the Sun or the Moon, and 8° on the compatibility page. An applying opposition, the faster body still moving towards 180°, is read as tension coming to a head, and a separating one as the moment of clarity having passed. The full Moon is the plainest example in the sky: an exact opposition of Sun and Moon that starts to separate the moment it is reached.

Where you meet an opposition

In a birth chart oppositions are drawn as red lines straight across the wheel, often close to its centre. A third planet square to both ends makes a T-square, two crossing oppositions a grand cross, and two oppositions joined by trines and sextiles a mystic rectangle, all on the aspect patterns page. In synastry an opposition between two people’s planets is read as strong attraction and strong difference at once, and among transits it is read as a stretch of weighing one thing against another. Opposite houses, such as the first and seventh, are read on the same principle.

Common confusions

An opposition is not a fight to be won. The tradition reads it as the aspect of relationship and perspective, and its hard label means demanding, not doomed. It is also easy to miss across sign boundaries: 29° Taurus and 3° Sagittarius are 184° apart, an opposition by degree between an earth sign and a fire sign that do not normally face each other, so it is read as less clearly polar than one between truly opposite signs.

An opposition worked out

Mercury at 6° Gemini and Jupiter at 11° Sagittarius are 175° apart, 5° short of exact and inside the 8° allowed here: an opposition between two mutable signs, air facing fire. The Moon at 2° Leo and Saturn at 23° Capricorn are 171° apart. That is 9° wide, too much for two planets, but the Moon is one of the pair and the 10° orb takes it in. It is out of sign as well, since the sign facing Leo is Aquarius.

Opposite the Sun

The Moon opposes the Sun once in each lunar month, at the full Moon, a little under fifteen days after the new one. Only when it is also close to one of its nodes does that opposition become a lunar eclipse. A planet beyond the Earth’s orbit that stands opposite the Sun rises at sunset and is up all night, at its closest and brightest, and it is always retrograde then. So any chart with the Sun opposite Mars, Jupiter or Saturn has that planet retrograde. Mars comes to opposition about every 26 months and Jupiter about every 13.

Why the opposition is called hard

Older authors gave the opposition the nature of Saturn. Counted from Cancer and Leo, the signs of the Moon and the Sun, the signs Saturn rules in the traditional scheme, Capricorn and Aquarius, lie directly across the wheel. The same line gives the dignity called detriment: a planet is in detriment in the sign opposite the one it rules, so the Moon is in detriment in Capricorn and the Sun in Aquarius.