Sun Sextile Mars Synastry: When Who One of You Is Fits What Drives the Other, Across a Difference

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 about 60° from the other person's Mars, a sixth of the way round the zodiac.

A sextile usually joins signs in two different elements that get on: fire with air, or earth with water. The two signs are two apart. (Usually, not always: a sextile that starts near the edge of a sign can reach into a different pairing.) That is the geometry. The reading built on it is a fit between differences: the way one of you is and the way the other goes after things come from different kinds of nature, and the two kinds are on friendly terms.

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 are in different elements that get on. 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. Around the Mars person you may find that your wishes meet a style of action unlike your own and yet welcome: the way they set about a thing may not be how you would, and you may like seeing it done that way.

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 meet a kind of purpose you would not have come up with yourself, and still find you can work with it. Their sense of what matters may sit well beside your way of going at things, in a manner that is new but easy to take up.

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 two different ways of working that still back each other up.

Each of you may bring both a plan and the energy for it, and the two may come from different directions. Either of you can show the other a way of seeing a job that is not the one they would have taken, and either may be the one who proposes while the other finds it easy to take up.

What each may want is modest. Either of you may want your way seen as a way in its own right, and credit for the style you bring as well as the result. In a sextile these wants may be met by the difference itself: each of you can see what the other does, because it is not what you would do.

These are sketches, not reports: illustrations of how two friendly kinds of nature might show up across different kinds of pairs.

• Siblings. Two siblings borrow a small sailing dinghy for the afternoon. One watches the sky and the other the surface of the water, and between their two readings they find the gust.
• Flatmates. Two flatmates carve pumpkins on the kitchen floor. One has a design in mind. The other starts cutting a different shape around it, and the two fit together on the doorstep.
• Colleagues. Two colleagues count the raffle tickets at the staff fete, one in tens and the other by colour. The totals agree.
• Parent and child. A parent and their child build a snowman. Each adds a finishing touch the other had not thought of, and the hat has a tilt.
• Friends. Two friends try geocaching. One reads the clues aloud while the other reads the ground, and they swap at the hedge.
• Partners. One partner wants to build a small pizza oven in the garden. The other has a knack for the brickwork, and neither is sure afterwards who made the plan.

In each sketch the two ways of going about things are different, and both are in use.

A sextile usually joins one of two pairings, and each can run either way, with the Sun in the first element and Mars in the second, or the reverse. In plain terms: fire is enthusiasm and action, air is talk and ideas, earth is practical steadiness, water is feeling.

Fire with air. Action and ideas are on friendly terms. A Sun person whose way of being is bold may meet a Mars person whose energy goes into talk and plans, or the reverse. It might look like two friends who start a lunchtime badminton group, one booking the hall and the other writing the message that brings everyone in.

Earth with water. Practical steadiness and feeling are on friendly terms. A Sun person who is grounded may meet a Mars person whose effort follows what they care about, or the reverse. It might look like two siblings who pickle a glut of beetroot for a relative, one who knows the method by hand and one who knows exactly what the relative likes.

Fire and air are both quick, outward-moving elements, and earth and water are both slower and more inward. That is how the zodiac groups them, and the reading takes each pair to be on friendly terms.

A few ordinary moments show how two different rhythms can fit.

A plan may get made in two halves, one of you saying what they would like to do and the other saying how it might go, and on another day the halves may swap. A bad mood in one of you may be met by an offer of something to do that is not quite what you would have chosen, which may be why it suits. A decision may take a minute longer than it would between two people of the same kind, and both of you may find the minute interesting.

A disagreement about how to do a job can be a trade: your way for the first half, theirs for the second. A quiet evening may find one of you at a task and the other beside it with something else, in a peace that does not have to be matched.

The contact is a fit across a difference, and the fit may be noticed most on the days when the two of you are doing different things in the same place.

The older sources used here do not name a Sun and a Mars a sixth of the circle apart. 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 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. Nothing in the stored passages tells a sextile from a trine.

The sextile reading on this page, that a sextile reads as a fit between differences, is based on the kinds of sign a sextile 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.

• One of you may do things in a way the other would not have chosen and still enjoy watching it done.
• A plan can get made in two halves, a wish from one of you and a method from the other.
• You may each be good at a different part of the same job.
• When one of you suggests something, the other may add a twist that makes it better.
• Others may describe you as a pair with two styles and one result.
• You can be doing different things in the same room and both feel the afternoon is going well.