Mars Sextile Saturn Synastry: When What Drives One of You Meets What Keeps the Other Steady, from Two Different Places

Every birth chart has a Mars and a Saturn, 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. Saturn is what keeps you steady: your patience, your sense of limits, the pace you can keep up for a long time, and your habit of finishing what you started. In this contact, one person's Mars is about 60° from the other person's Saturn, 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 Saturn. Call them the Mars person and the Saturn 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 Saturn person's Mars to the Mars person's Saturn, each of you is both.

One thing this contact can give is a job that goes the distance. Either of you may get it started and either may keep it going, and as the two styles differ, the result may suit a wider range of days than either would alone.

Either of you may also bring a different view of the same task to it.

What each of you may want is to hear what the other thinks a good length for a working stretch would be.

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

• Flatmates. Two flatmates put a box of seed catalogues in alphabetical order. The start and the system arrive in the same hour.
• Friends. Two friends dry apple rings on strings across a kitchen. The strings are tied, and a rack is built from a coat hanger.
• Siblings. Two siblings sew a draught excluder for a front door. The stuffing and the stitching go in turns.
• Colleagues. Two colleagues write a monthly letter to an old workmate who has moved away. A draft, a date for sending and a folder for replies all exist by the close of the meeting.

These are moments from tasks that have both a start and a rhythm.

The older sources used here have no stored passage that bears on a Mars and a Saturn 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 Saturn. Everything else on this page is editorial as well: who the Mars person and the Saturn person are, what each gives and may want, and the sketches, which are illustrations.

• A start from one of you and a rhythm from the other may both appear in the work.
• The way one of you works is not the way the other would, and you may both find it useful.
• An offer of a pace can be there for a while before it is taken up.
• You may sometimes each wait for the other to say how long a stretch feels right.