Sun Conjunction Mars Synastry: When Who One of You Is Meets What Drives the Other, Almost at the Same Point

Every birth chart has a Sun and a Mars, and they do different jobs. The Sun is who you are: your core self, what you want, the direction you steer by. Mars is what drives you: your energy, your effort, your initiative, what you go after and how you go after it. In this contact, one person's Sun is within a few degrees of the other person's Mars.

Two points that close usually share a sign, and so an element (fire, earth, air or water) and a mode, which is how a sign moves: cardinal signs start things, fixed signs keep them going, mutable signs adapt as they go. (Usually, not always: a conjunction that starts near the edge of a sign can reach into the next one.) That is the geometry. The reading built on it is fusion, or mirroring: the way one of you is and the way the other acts can come from the same temperament, so a decision in one and a move in the other may be difficult to tell apart.

It can turn up between friends, siblings, colleagues, flatmates, a parent and their child, or partners, and it is one contact among many in any two charts.

In this contact one of you brings the Sun and the other brings Mars, and the two sit very close in the zodiac. Call them the Sun person and the Mars person.

If you are the Sun person, you are mostly just being who you are and wanting what you want: a direction for the afternoon, a way you would like something done. Around the Mars person your sense of direction may find company quickly. A wish may meet their energy before you have finished voicing it, and what you decide can look, from outside, like something the two of you were already doing.

If you are the Mars person, you are mostly just going at what you are going at: the task, the plan, the training session, the repair. Around the Sun person your effort may find a direction close by. What they are set on can feel like a starting signal, and you may find yourself moving before you have quite decided to. Equally, what you start may show them what they had settled on.

If the link also runs the other way, from the Mars person's Sun to the Sun person's Mars, each of you is both.

One thing this contact can give is speed without much negotiation, in both directions.

Either of you may be the one with the plan and the one with the energy for it, and which is which can change from one task to the next. A decision by one of you can set the other moving, and each of you may get a quick sight of your own intention in action, before it has had time to go stale. A wish that might have stayed a wish can become a Saturday. Either of you may be the one who proposes.

What each may want is plain. Either of you may want a decision to feel like a choice you made, not like something already under way. Either may want effort recognised as theirs, and not only as part of someone else's plan. Both of you may want a moment to check that the pace suits you.

On ordinary days this can show in how plans form. One of you says what they feel like doing, and a minute later both of you may be putting on shoes. A bad mood may be met by doing something side by side. A quiet evening may begin with a small move from one of you and a matching one from the other.

These are sketches, not reports: illustrations of how a wish and a first move might meet across different kinds of pairs.

• Siblings. Two siblings wake to snow and both reach for the same pair of gloves. Nobody has mentioned the slope in the back garden, and the old sledge is already out of the garage.
• Colleagues. Two colleagues each arrive with a plan for the office sale: one has brought piping bags, the other icing in the team colours. They look at the two bags side by side on the desk.
• Friends. At an orchard, one friend is still weighing up which row of apples to try when the other sets off down the nearest one. It was the row the first friend would have picked.
• Parent and child. A teenager mentions that a neighbour is giving away a piano. The parent has been thinking the same for a week and is already checking the width of the stairs.
• Flatmates. Both flatmates are standing on the balcony when one begins to speak, and the other holds up a tape measure. The words "greenhouse shelf" come a moment later.
• Partners. Planning a weekend away, two partners say "lighthouse" at the same moment. The map is already open on the table.

In each sketch a wish and a first move arrive within the same minute.

Because a conjunction usually keeps to one sign, that sign's element can shape the whole contact. In plain terms: fire is enthusiasm and action, earth is practical steadiness, air is talk and ideas, water is feeling.

Fire. A decision and a start may come almost together. It might look like two friends who agree at breakfast to enter the relay at the village fun run and are stretching on the green by lunchtime.

Earth. The decision and the move may both be slow and physical. It might look like two cousins who settle on building a low stone wall, one marking the line with string while the other carries the first stones over.

Air. The decision may become a message, and the message a plan. It might look like two colleagues who agree on a monthly reading list and have the shared document set up before the call is over.

Water. The feeling may be the drive. It might look like two friends, one of whom mentions that a neighbour has had a rough month, while the other is already filling a basket to take round.

A conjunction can fall near the edge of a sign, so the two planets may sit in neighbouring signs. In that case the contact can carry a trace of two elements, and the quickness described here may be less even.

A contact this close can be quick, and quickness has a side that belongs to this pair of planets.

When a decision and a move arrive together, there may be less time between them. One of you may find a plan under way that you meant only to mention. If one of you changes your mind, the other may already be some way along. It can also be difficult afterwards to say whose idea something was, and some pairs may enjoy that.

Pace is part of what this contact is like to live with, and it may show most when a day has several small things in it: a shopping list, a repair, a walk that has not yet been decided on.

The older sources used here do not name a Sun and a Mars in the same place. The only stored passages that name Mars with the Sun, William Lilly's (*Christian Astrology*, 1647, Book III, p. 638) and James Wilson's (*A Complete Dictionary of Astrology*, 1819, p. 381), give the same rule about the Sun or Mars opposite Mercury or the Moon, so they do not name the conjunction and nothing from them is used here. Two general passages elsewhere, on the Sun in another planet's place and on the Sun and Moon, are too general, and too much at odds with each other, to use; they are not stored as extracts.

The conjunction reading on this page, that a Sun and a Mars close together read as fusion or mirroring, is based on the kinds of sign a conjunction usually joins. This is an editorial reading, not something the older books say about the Sun and Mars, and the same goes for the rest of this page, including the sketches, which are illustrations.

• A wish from one of you and a first move from the other can show up in the same minute.
• One of you may know what the other is about to start, and why, before it is said.
• A plan can be under way before either of you remembers agreeing to it.
• When one of you is restless, the other may already have found something to do.
• Others may describe your pace together as quick, and the two of you may not agree on who set it.
• Now and then one of you is surprised to find the plan has already begun.