Learn · The six aspects
The opposition
An opposition sets two needs against each other so that both have to be held: two planets on opposite sides of the zodiac, pulling you in two directions until you find room for both.
You want to be left alone, and you want to be asked, and on the same evening you feel both. Neither is a mood or a pose. An opposition is two parts of the chart standing across the wheel from each other, each seeing the other clearly and neither able to become it.
Where the conjunction merges, the opposition faces. The old books rated it hard, and it is, but hard in the way a balance is hard: nothing is held level except between two things that pull apart.
In your chart
An opposition is counted at 180° with 8° of room, or 10° when the Sun or Moon is involved, and the orb is recorded. The wheel draws it as a red line across the centre, and the grid as two small circles joined by a stroke. A Sun–Moon opposition means you were born near the full Moon, and the analysis reads that phase as part of how the two work together. An opposition to the Ascendant is an opposition to the Descendant, so it concerns partnership; one to the Midheaven touches the fourth house, so it concerns home.
From a real analysis
In her chart: Venus opposition Pluto · wide at 3.8°
You love steadily and in plain view, yet a deeper part of you wants all of a person, every corner. Your gentle Venus and your intense Pluto face each other across the chart, a little wary. The same Venus gets along with your patient Saturn, and patience is what turns that wanting into trust. You are at your best when you let people come back to you on their own.
Themes
An opposition is a seesaw. You live one end and meet the other in somebody else, a partner, a rival, a friend who has exactly the quality you keep in reserve, until you learn to hold both. Moon opposite Saturn is feeling and duty taking turns. Venus opposite Mars is attraction that argues with itself. The signs give the theme, because opposite signs are always paired: Aries and Libra are self and other, Taurus and Scorpio are keeping and changing, and so on round the wheel.
The catch is the pendulum. Swinging from one end to the other feels like change and is only movement. What ends it is finding the place in the middle where both needs are met.
Two make a shape
One opposition squared by a third body forms a T-square. Two oppositions crossed by squares form a grand cross, the tension of the seesaw drawn four ways.
How the analysis treats it
Each opposition appears in the grid with its orb, and both bodies’ chapters take it up. The analysis asks which end you live and which end you meet in other people, and how you hold the balance between them.
Your chart records how close to exact each aspect is, so the analysis can give a close one more weight than a loose one.
Sources: every position and date here comes from NASA JPL’s DE440 ephemeris and is checked against NASA’s JPL Horizons. How it is checked.
The oppositions in your chart
Your chart lists every opposition between your planets, and the two parts of you each one joins. Free, and it takes a minute.