Opposition

Meaning

An opposition joins two bodies on opposite sides of the zodiac, half a circle apart. Their signs are six apart: they share a modality (both cardinal, fixed or mutable) and a polarity, and their elements complete each other, fire with air, earth with water. Aries faces Libra, Taurus faces Scorpio: two answers to one question.

The opposition is a polarity. The two functions pull in opposite directions, like the two ends of a see-saw, and the first way of living it is often to swing from one end to the other, or to hold on to one end and meet the other in someone else: a partner, a rival, a colleague. This is why the opposition is so often read through relationships.

Its gift is perspective. The two ends see each other across the whole sky, which no other aspect allows. Once both ends are owned, the opposition gives a balance wider than either side alone: the capacity to hold two truths at once, and to choose between them consciously rather than by reflex.

The opposition is also the fullest point of a cycle. The Full Moon is the opposition of the Sun and the Moon; read as a phase, it is the moment when what began at the conjunction comes into full view, and the cycle turns from growing to sharing what it has grown.

In practice

• The Sun opposite the Moon marks a birth near the Full Moon, with will and needs on opposite sides. Often lived as a tug between what one wants and what one needs, eased when each is given its time.
• Venus opposite Saturn: affection meets caution across the chart. Closeness is offered carefully and, once given, tends to last.
• A body opposite the Ascendant stands on the Descendant: it is met through others, in partnership.
• When a third body squares both ends of an opposition, the three form a T-square; two oppositions at right angles make a grand cross.

Across traditions

• Indian astrology gives every planet a full glance at the seventh sign from its own. The opposition is therefore the one glance all planets share, and the only one that is always returned.
• Chinese astrology says that branches six apart clash (chōng), such as the Rat and the Horse: an opposition of position, read as movement, conflict or change.
• Human Design has no aspects, but its wheel holds the same polarity: the Earth stands exactly opposite the Sun, and the two are read together.

Origin and history

In the Tetrabiblos (2nd century), Ptolemy describes the opposition as the relation of two signs diametrically apart, containing two right angles, six signs or 180°. He counts it with the square among the discordant configurations, while the trine and the sextile are harmonious. In the twentieth century, Dane Rudhyar read it as the full phase of every planetary cycle, the moment of greatest visibility between two conjunctions (The Lunation Cycle, 1967).

How Ulune calculates it

• The orb is 8° in a birth chart, to the angles as well. In synastry it is 6°, or 7° when the Sun or the Moon is involved.
• The two ends of an axis are always exactly opposite, so they are never listed as an opposition: the Ascendant and the Descendant, the Midheaven and the IC, the two lunar nodes, the Vertex and the Anti-Vertex.
• For the same reason, a body conjunct one end of an axis is opposite the other. The Table shows the two once, under the end that names the axis (the Ascendant, the Midheaven, the North Node or the Vertex), with the other as its mirror beneath.
• An opposition between signs that are not six apart, such as 28° Aries to 2° Scorpio, is marked out of sign.
• The opposition takes part in four of the configurations Ulune looks for: the T-square, the grand cross, the kite and the mystic rectangle.

Correspondences