Square

Meaning

A square joins two bodies a quarter of the circle apart. Their signs are three apart: they share a modality (both cardinal, both fixed or both mutable) but differ in element and in polarity. Aries squares Cancer and Capricorn: fire meets water and earth, all three eager to begin, each in its own way.

The square is the aspect of friction. The two functions want different things at the same moment, and both go about it in the same manner, so they block or interrupt each other. It is often felt as impatience, an inner argument, or a problem that keeps returning in new clothes.

Friction is also traction. A square does not let the two functions settle into a comfortable truce, and that pressure moves things: many people’s most solid abilities grow out of a square they have worked with for years. Read well, it is less an obstacle than a source of effort and drive that asks to be steered.

Readings in the line of Dane Rudhyar tell apart the two squares of a cycle. The waxing square, like the first quarter of the Moon, asks for decisive action: what began at the conjunction has to push through resistance. The waning square, like the last quarter, asks for a change of outlook: what was built has to be reorganised, and part of it let go.

In practice

• Moon square Mars: feelings turn quickly into action. Often read as a short fuse that, with awareness, becomes the courage to defend what matters.
• Mercury square Neptune: precise words meet a wide imagination. Misunderstandings at first, and in time a gift for images and stories.
• A square is waxing when the faster body stands 90° ahead of the slower one in the order of the signs, and waning when it stands 90° behind: the Moon 90° ahead of the Sun is the first quarter.
• A body square the Midheaven is square the IC as well, linking public life and private roots through one planet.
• An opposition with a third body square to both ends forms a T-square; four squares around two oppositions make a grand cross.

Across traditions

• Indian astrology gives Mars a special glance at the fourth sign from its own and Saturn one at the tenth: both are squares counted by sign.
• Cosmobiology and the Hamburg School read the chart on a 90° dial, on which squares, oppositions and conjunctions fall together: the square there is the base of the whole family of hard aspects.

Origin and history

In the Tetrabiblos (2nd century), Ptolemy describes the square as a distance of exactly one right angle, three signs or 90°, and counts it with the opposition among the discordant configurations, because it joins signs not of the same kind. Dane Rudhyar’s cyclical reading, with its waxing and waning phases, comes from 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.
• A square between signs that are not three apart, such as 28° Aries to 1° Leo, is marked out of sign.
• Ulune does not label a square as waxing or waning.
• Squares make two of the configurations Ulune looks for: the T-square and the grand cross.

Correspondences