Mars Sextile Jupiter Synastry: When What Drives One of You Meets What Widens the Other's World, from Two Different Places

Every birth chart has a Mars and a Jupiter, and they do different jobs. Mars is what drives you: your energy, your effort, your initiative, what you go after and how you go after it. Jupiter is what widens your world: your encouragement, optimism and generosity, and the sense that there is more to try and room to try it. In this contact, one person's Mars is about 60° from the other person's Jupiter, a sixth of the way round the zodiac.

A sextile usually joins signs of two different elements that get on: fire with air, or earth with water. (Usually, not always: a sextile that starts near the edge of a sign can reach into a different pair.) That is the geometry. The reading built on it is a fit between differences: the two do not come from the same temperament, but they can suit each other, like two different tools that do a job together.

This pairing can appear between friends, siblings, colleagues, flatmates, or a parent and their child as readily as between partners, and it is one contact among many in any two charts.

In this contact one of you brings Mars and the other brings Jupiter. Call them the Mars person and the Jupiter person.

The contact does not say which of you is which in daily life, and either of you may recognise both sides in yourself. If the link also runs the other way, from the Jupiter person's Mars to the Mars person's Jupiter, each of you is both.

One thing this contact can give is an opening. Either of you may offer a first step, and either may see what it could lead to. As the two ways of working differ, a plan may take a form neither of you would have drawn on your own.

Each of you may also give the other a second angle on the same goal, in terms the other can take up.

What each of you may want is to hear what the other makes of an idea before it is settled.

These are sketches, not reports: illustrations of how the contact might look across different kinds of pairs.

• Friends. Two friends become pen pals with a class in another country. Letters, a map with pins and a plan to visit all begin in the same week.
• Siblings. Two siblings sort a jar of shells. Some go into a labelled tray, and some into a story about where they came from.
• Flatmates. Two flatmates hang a mobile of paper birds over the hallway shelf. Threading them is one job, and deciding where else to hang more is another.
• Colleagues. Two colleagues screw a row of key hooks beside the office door. The hooks go up, and a chart of who borrows which key is drafted.

These are single moments; in each, the opening is there to be taken up or not.

The older sources used here have no stored passage that bears on a Mars and a Jupiter in any aspect. One of them, Vivian Robson's *A Students' Text-Book of Astrology* (1922), has a list on p. 141 that names the pair, not an aspect. That line is not among the passages checked for this page, and nothing from it is used.

Nothing in the older sources used here tells a sextile from a trine. The distinction this page makes, that a sextile reads as a fit between differences, rests on the kinds of sign a sextile usually joins: fire with air, or earth with water. It is an editorial reading, not something the older books say about Mars and Jupiter. Everything else on this page is editorial as well: who the Mars person and the Jupiter person are, what each gives and may want, and the sketches, which are illustrations.

• A start from one of you meets an idea from the other, and both are used.
• The way one of you goes about a job is not the way the other would, and you may both like that.
• An opening can be there for a while before either of you takes it up.
• You may each sometimes wait for the other to go first.