Mars Trine Mars Synastry: When What Drives You Comes From the Same Kind of Sign

Every birth chart has a Mars. It is what drives you: your energy, your effort, your initiative, what you go after and how you go after it. In this contact your Mars and their Mars are about 120° apart, a third of the way round the zodiac.

A trine usually joins two signs of the same element: fire with fire, earth with earth, air with air, water with water. (Usually, not always: a trine that starts near the edge of a sign can reach into the next element.) The signs are four apart, so they differ in mode: some signs start things, some keep them going, some adapt as they go. That is the geometry, and it comes in four triangles, one for each element: Aries, Leo and Sagittarius for fire; Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn for earth; Gemini, Libra and Aquarius for air; Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces for water. Each sign is in trine with the other two in its triangle, so two Mars positions in trine usually fall in one such triangle. The reading built on it is likeness: what drives you and what drives them come from the same kind of temperament, whether lively, practical, talkative or tender, without being the very same place.

Each of you has a Mars, so the contact is the same from either side. Friends, siblings, colleagues, flatmates, a parent and their child, or partners can all have it, and it is one contact among many in any two charts.

Living near someone whose Mars is in the same element can feel like working beside a person who already knows what getting on with it means. The amount of effort you put into a task and the amount they do may match, and the reasons you start may sound alike even when the method is not.

Because the signs differ in mode, you may not do things in lockstep: the temperament can match while the way each of you moves through a job differs a little. The pair can look more complementary than identical, and neither of you may feel out of step.

Making a plan can be short. One of you proposes, the other has been thinking of something close, and the version you settle on may be one that neither needed to defend. A low day for effort can be met with company: one of you may do a little more that day, and the other may do the same another time.

A disagreement about how to do something may still come up. On a quiet evening you may each be at your own project, side by side, at a pace that suits both.

One thing this contact can give is effort that comes without friction. Each of you can give the other work done at a pace they can live with, and a kind of initiative they would be glad to have taken themselves.

Each of you can also give the other a sense that their own drive is a reasonable one. When someone else sets about things in the same spirit, it can be easier to trust that your own way is not odd.

What each may want is modest. Your initiative may matter to you more when it is appreciated and not just accepted. Your pace may matter more when it is allowed to differ now and then from the other's. In a trine these wants can be met without either of you working at it.

The sketches below are not reports; they are illustrations of moments this contact might bring to different kinds of pair.

• Siblings. Two siblings learn a ceilidh dance for a cousin's party. One counts the steps and the other follows the beat, and by the third run-through they turn on the same bar.
• Friends. Two friends at an ice rink find they speed up and slow down together. One pulls ahead for a lap, the other catches up, and the gap closes as if by arrangement.
• Parent and child. A parent and their child dig a drainage trench along the garden path. One takes the near stretch and the other the far, and the spades meet in the middle with the trench the same depth all along.
• Flatmates. Two flatmates build compost bins from pallets. One does the sawing and the other the nailing, and the first bin is up before either has had to ask for anything.
• Colleagues. Two colleagues prepare a booth for a trade fair. One begins to unpack at once, the other follows with the labels, and the booth is ready an hour early.
• Partners. Two partners write a grant application together. They draft pages in turn and swap them, each improving what the other wrote, and both feel the draft is theirs.

In each sketch the work moves along and neither person has to say how.

A trine usually joins two signs four apart, so the two of you share an element and differ in how it moves. In plain terms: fire is enthusiasm and action, earth is practical steadiness, air is talk and ideas, water is feeling. Taurus and Virgo, for instance, are both earth, one keeping things going and the other adapting as it goes; other trines combine the modes differently.

Fire. Both may have enthusiasm to spend. It might look like two cousins entering a sand-sculpture contest who both stake out the plot at once, each adding to the other's outline through the afternoon.

Earth. Both may value what lasts. It might look like two colleagues who run a community kiln day, taking turns to load, fire and glaze, each knowing the next step before it is called.

Air. Both may live in ideas. It might look like two friends who put together a club's yearbook, each adding to the other's drafts as they arrive.

Water. Both may go by feeling, in a way that each recognises in the other. It might look like two siblings who each start planning a send-off for a parent's retirement and find, comparing notes, that they have booked the same room.

A trine does not have to be about doing anything dramatic. Its texture may show most on ordinary days.

On a busy day, the two of you may share the load without a conversation about it. Folding tablecloths after a village event, each of you may take the stack nearer to hand and finish at the same moment. On a slow day, one of you may start something small and the other may drift into it, and an hour later both are surprised by how much has got done.

When one of you is tired, the other may sense how much to carry. When one of you is full of energy, the other may find it easy company and not an effort to match.

It can also show in what the two of you take for granted: that a job will be started, that it will be carried on, that two people can get through a list without either one managing it. These are the kinds of thing that may be most noticed when they are described to someone else.

The older sources used here say nothing about a Mars and a Mars a third of the circle apart. The one passage in them about the same planet in two charts is James Wilson's (*A Complete Dictionary of Astrology*, 1819, p. 381). It is about the same place, which is a conjunction, and it says nothing about places at an angle, so nothing from it is used here. Nothing in the sources used here tells a trine from a sextile.

The distinction this page makes, that a trine reads as likeness because it usually joins signs of the same element, is based on the kinds of sign a trine usually joins. It is an editorial reading, not something the older books say about Mars and Mars. The same goes for everything else on this page: what the contact is like, what each of you gives and may want, the element variations and the sketches, which are illustrations.

• A job can get started without either of you having asked the other to start it.
• Each of you may start something and find the other already half in it.
• You can work side by side without checking in about how it is going.
• Others describe your way of getting things done as easy to watch.
• Sometimes you each find you had picked the same thing to do next.