Sun Square Mars Synastry: When Who One of You Is Sparks Against What Drives the Other

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 90° from the other person's Mars, a quarter of the way round the zodiac.

A square usually joins two signs of the same mode (cardinal, fixed or mutable) that sit in elements that differ: fire or air with earth or water. (Usually, not always: near the edge of a sign, the pattern can shift.) That is the geometry. The reading built on the elements is friction between two kinds of nature, and friction is energy: it is how this contact makes itself felt, and it can mean plenty of drive and the occasional need to adjust plans.

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 come from different elements. 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. The Mars person may set about things in a way that is not the way you would have picked, and you may notice a moment of adjusting when your plan meets their way of going at it. The day around you can be lively, because there are two ways of going about it.

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. The Sun person's sense of direction may point somewhere other than where your energy was heading, and you may notice a moment of adjusting when your way of starting meets it. Either of you may be the one who adjusts first, and it may be a different one on a different day.

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 energy that neither of you would have had alone.

Each of you can show the other a way of getting started that is not their own. Either of you may be the one with the plan and the one with the energy for it, and the two can sit differently in each of you. Either of you may start a plan, and either may meet it with something different.

What each may want is plain. Either of you may want your way of starting taken as a way of its own, and your sense of direction taken as simply yours. In a square these wants can go unspoken, since a plan that has to be adjusted can seem a small thing to say anything about.

These are sketches, not reports. Each shows two people whose ways of starting differ, and each stops partway.

• Siblings. Two siblings share a bunk bed and are rearranging the room. One wants to shift the furniture tonight. The other wants to measure first. The bed is half out from the wall.
• Friends. Two friends reach the crazy golf course on a bright afternoon. One heads straight for the first hole. The other stops to read the scorecard and the rules. Both clubs are in hand.
• Flatmates. One flatmate wants to string a washing line across the yard now, before the rain. The other would like to look at the options for a rotary dryer first. The rope is on the step.
• Colleagues. At a team away day, one colleague is up for a round of darts straight away. Another had hoped for a quieter hour to talk through the next quarter. The darts are on the board and the notes are on the table.
• Parent and child. A parent and their child are building a raised bed for vegetables. The child wants to fill it with soil at once. The parent wants the frame level first. Both are holding something.
• Partners. One partner wants to repaint the hall this weekend. The other would like to go to the flea market. The paint tin and the market list are on the same shelf.

In each sketch two ways of starting meet, and the plan is still being worked out.

A square usually joins a fire or air sign with an earth or water sign, so there are four pairings. In plain terms: fire is enthusiasm and action, earth is practical steadiness, air is talk and ideas, water is feeling. Each pairing can run either way, with the Sun in the first element and Mars in the second, or the reverse.

Fire and earth. Enthusiasm and practical steadiness. It might look like two neighbours building a treehouse: one wants to nail the first plank today, and the other would like to measure the branch. The plank is propped against the trunk for now.

Fire and water. Bold action and feeling. It might look like two friends on a harbour front choosing a boat trip: one is ready to board the first departure, the other wants to ask which boat is gentler on the swell. Neither has bought a ticket yet.

Air and earth. Ideas and practical steadiness. It might look like two siblings after a blown fuse, one wanting to read up on how a fuse box works, the other already at it with a torch.

Air and water. Reasons and feeling. It might look like two colleagues on a canal towpath at lunchtime, one wanting to plan a route along the water, the other content to watch it for a while first.

Friction is a kind of energy, and between a Sun and a Mars it may show up in a few ways.

It can bring a way of starting you took for granted into view. When the other starts differently, your own way becomes something you can name. It can mean a plan gets said aloud, since neither of you can assume the other has the same one in mind.

It may widen what each of you tries. Living near a way of acting that is not yours, you might pick up some of it. And it can supply a lot of drive: two kinds of nature meeting may produce more activity than one.

In a day, the friction may show as a pause, the second between one person's suggestion and the other's answer in which two ways of starting become visible. Whether that pause is brief or long, and whether either of you notices it, varies from pair to pair.

The older sources used here do not name a Sun and a Mars a quarter 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 square from an opposition.

The square reading on this page, that a square reads as friction between two kinds of nature, and the reading of that friction as energy, are based on the kinds of sign a square usually joins; the angle and the elements are the geometry of the zodiac. 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.

• You may each have a plan, and the two plans are not the same plan.
• One of you says "let me think" and the other says "let's go", and on another day it is the other way round.
• A day with the two of you in it can be busy.
• One of you may have learned a way of doing a job by watching the other do it differently.
• Your disagreements may be about how and when to start, not about whether you want to do things together.
• A plan sometimes changes shape on the way, and you may both find that interesting.