The cycle between these bodies runs close to five hundred years, so its quarter-points are separated by lifetimes. The last waning square fell in the early nineteenth century. The next, waxing, comes in the middle of the twenty-first, and every chart cast for a child born then will carry it. This ought to be said before anything else, because a reader who believes they have this aspect has almost certainly misread an ephemeris or been given a chart with an implausibly wide orb.
Where it does fall, it sets a function that dissolves against a function that destroys, and both are absolute in their methods. On the historical scale such a period is one in which what people believe and what actually holds power come apart violently, with neither able to correct the other. For an individual born into it, the aspect will be shared by every classmate, and the reading must therefore proceed as with any generational square: to the two houses involved, and to whatever personal planet is drawn into the pattern.
The likely individual expression is a recurring collision between what the native surrenders to and what the native cannot let go of. Faith against control, compassion against ruthlessness, the wish to disappear against the wish to prevail. It comes in episodes rather than as a settled trait, provoked when a transit strikes either end. Squares are productive, and this one will produce natives with an unusual grasp of how power conceals itself. It will also produce a good deal of self-deception in the service of survival.
What It Gives
- ◆grasp of how power conceals itself
- ◆compassion tested against hard fact
- ◆capacity to survive dissolution
- ◆belief examined under real pressure
What It Costs
- ◆self-deception in aid of survival
- ◆surrender and control at odds
- ◆collisions arriving without warning
This is one line of a whole chart. The rest of it — every placement, house and aspect at once — is a birth date away.
Cast Your Birth Chart