Sextile

What it means

An opening rather than a push. Two bodies a sixth of the circle apart are read as cooperative, but lightly: the chance is there if it is taken up.

The geometry of the sextile

A sextile divides the circle by six, and six of them draw a hexagon. Signs a sextile apart are two signs from each other, like Aries and Gemini or Taurus and Cancer. Those pairs always sit in elements the tradition treats as compatible, fire with air and earth with water, and always in different modalities: Aries is cardinal, Gemini mutable, Aquarius fixed. Friendly elements acting in different ways are the geometry behind the reading.

The sextile is half a trine, since two of them make 120°. By sign count, the third and eleventh houses stand a sextile from the rising sign, and neither was among the old difficult places.

How the sextile is read

The tradition reads a sextile as opportunity that needs some effort to use: the two planets support each other, less insistently than in a trine, and nothing happens without a little initiative. Between personal planets it is read as a practical talent. Mercury sextile Venus is read as tact and a pleasant way with words, and it is one of only two aspects those planets can make: Mercury and Venus are never more than about 76° apart, so they can reach a sextile or a conjunction but never a square. Mars sextile Jupiter is read as energy that finds openings.

With a slow planet at one end, a sextile is read as a steady resource. The Moon sextile Saturn is read as patience and emotional steadiness, and Venus sextile Pluto as depth in affection without the struggle a square would suggest. Between two outer planets it is generational: Neptune and Pluto have stayed close to a sextile for most of the time since the 1950s, so most people alive today were born with one.

Orb, applying and separating

This site counts a sextile within 5°, or 6° when the Sun or the Moon is one of the pair, the tightest orb of the five, because the tradition treats it as the lightest contact. In synastry the compatibility page narrows it to 4°. Whether a sextile is applying or separating depends on the faster body: Venus moving up to 60° from Saturn is applying, and once past it, separating. Traditional astrologers read an applying sextile as a chance still arriving and a separating one as a chance already met.

Where you meet a sextile

In a birth chart sextiles are drawn in the same cool colour as trines. They take part in several aspect patterns: the yod, where two planets a sextile apart both stand 150° from a third, and the kite and the mystic rectangle, where sextiles join the corners. In synastry a sextile between two people’s planets is read as an ease that has to be acted on, and among transits it is one of the lighter contacts a moving planet makes to a natal one.

Common confusions

The commonest mix-up is counting by sign. 29° Aries and 1° Cancer are only 62° apart, so they make a sextile by degree even though Aries and Cancer are square signs; this out-of-sign sextile joins fire with water and cardinal with cardinal, and is read with less of the usual ease. The other is treating soft as unimportant. A sextile is read as quiet, not absent, and a chart with many of them is read as full of usable openings.