Out-of-sign aspect

Meaning

Most aspects join signs that match the angle. A trine joins two signs four apart, which share an element; a square joins two signs three apart, which share a modality. Because an aspect is allowed an orb, though, the degrees can make an aspect that the signs do not. Mars at 29° Aries and Saturn at 1° Virgo are 122° apart, a trine within 2°, yet Aries and Virgo are five signs apart and share neither element nor modality. Such an aspect is called out of sign, or dissociate.

The usual reading keeps the aspect and adds a nuance. The angle still links the two bodies, but the signs do not bring the harmony or the friction the aspect normally carries. An out-of-sign trine flows without the shared element that makes trines feel natural; an out-of-sign square joins signs that do not share a modality, so its friction takes an unexpected form. Many astrologers describe such a contact as one that works, but in an unexpected key.

Schools differ on how much it counts. Some read it fully, as the degrees say. Some give it less weight. Those who work with aspects between whole signs, where an aspect is a relation between two signs, do not count it at all and read instead the relation the two signs themselves make.

Out-of-sign aspects occur near the borders of signs, and most often with the aspects that are given wide orbs: the conjunction, the opposition, the square and the trine.

In practice

• The Sun at 28° Leo and Mercury at 2° Virgo are conjunct across a border: will and voice are fused, yet each speaks in its own sign’s manner, Leo’s warmth for the Sun and Virgo’s precision for Mercury.
• A trine from 29° Cancer to 1° Sagittarius flows between water and fire rather than within one element: easy in the degrees, less obvious in temperament.
• When a planet stands in the first or last degrees of a sign, look for this mark among its aspects. It often explains why a harmonious contact feels mixed, or why a tense one feels oddly relaxed.

Origin and history

The question exists because aspects have two histories. In Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos (2nd century), aspects are relations between signs: a whole sign looks at another whole sign, and signs one or five apart do not see each other. Later practice measured aspects in degrees, with orbs. William Lilly, in Christian Astrology (1647), calls an aspect partile when both planets stand at the same degree of their signs, and platic when they are only within orb. Once an orb could reach across the border of a sign, the degrees and the signs could disagree, and astrologers have had to choose which to follow.

How Ulune calculates it

• Ulune finds aspects by degrees and orbs, without regard to signs, then compares the signs. An aspect is marked “out of sign” in the Table when the two bodies’ signs are not the number apart shown in the table below.
• The semi-square and the quintile have no matching count of signs, so they are never marked.
• The mark changes nothing else: the orb, the strength and the phase are those of any aspect, and the aspect takes part in the configurations like any other.
• Without a birth time, the mark carries a ~ when one of the two bodies may change sign during the day.

Correspondences