Sun Trine Mars Synastry: When Who One of You Is Meets What Drives the Other, in the Same Language

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 120° from the other person's Mars, 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. The two signs are four apart, so they differ in 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 trine that starts near the edge of a sign can reach into the next element.) That is the geometry. The reading built on it is likeness: the way one of you is and the way the other goes after things can come from the same kind of temperament, whether lively, practical, talkative or tender. It is not the very same spot, as in a conjunction, but the same kind of spot.

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 the same element. Call them the Sun person and the Mars person.

If you are the Sun person, you are mostly just being yourself: wanting what you want from the day, and having a view about how it might go. Around the Mars person that view can meet energy that fits it. What you would like to do may be the kind of thing they can easily get behind, and you may find you spend less time explaining than you do with other people.

If you are the Mars person, you are mostly just getting on with what you are getting on with: the task, the plan, the training session, the repair. Around the Sun person your effort can feel recognised. They may see why you go at things the way you do, and what they want to do can be close to what you would have wanted to do yourself.

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 backing, in both directions: each of you may find that the other's way of acting supports your own.

Either of you may be the one with the plan and the one with the energy for it. In a trine both come from the same element, so a plan from one of you and energy from the other may feel like parts of one movement, and a wish can turn into a day's work at a pace that feels natural, neither rushed nor dragged.

What each may want is modest. Either of you may want your own direction counted as a real direction, and your own effort counted as effort. In a trine both of these may be met without either of you asking.

These are sketches, not reports: illustrations of how a shared kind of temperament might show up across different kinds of pairs.

• Siblings. Two siblings enter a scarecrow contest at the village show. Each sketches a design on the back of a different envelope, and when they compare, both scarecrows are wearing the same hat.
• Flatmates. On a wet Sunday two flatmates drift into the kitchen at the same moment. One reaches for the flour, the other for the pan, and breakfast is under way without a word about it.
• Parent and child. A parent and their child both come out to the back step on a clear night, one with a telescope and the other with a star chart, and both lean in at the same moment.
• Colleagues. Two colleagues each write half the clues for a treasure hunt at the team away day without comparing notes. Put together, the rhyme runs on from one half into the other.
• Friends. Two friends hire a tandem bicycle on holiday. They find their rhythm within a few turns of the pedals, and the first hill is behind them before either mentions it.
• Partners. Two partners reach the new bowling alley and ask for the same lane without having discussed it.

In each sketch two people's wishes and efforts run in the same direction without either having arranged it.

The element a trine falls in shapes how the likeness feels. In plain terms: fire is enthusiasm and action, earth is practical steadiness, air is talk and ideas, water is feeling. Because the two signs are four apart, you share an element and differ in how it moves. Aries and Leo, for instance, are both fire, one cardinal and one fixed.

Fire. Both have enthusiasm to spend. It might look like two friends who build a bonfire for the street's autumn evening, one stacking the wood while the other is already fetching more.

Earth. Both value what is practical. It might look like a parent and their grown child who spend a Saturday clearing a gutter and repainting the downpipe, each picking up the next job as the other finishes.

Air. Both live in ideas. It might look like two colleagues drafting a talk by passing a notebook back and forth, each sentence taking up where the other's stopped.

Water. Both go by feeling. It might look like two flatmates who each quietly learn the words of a song for a third flatmate's birthday, and find out when they hum it in the kitchen.

A few ordinary moments show what backing each other up can look like.

A plan can get made without much weighing up. One of you says what they would like to do, the other thinks it over for about as long as it takes to put a cup down, and the afternoon has a shape. Which of you speaks first may change from one day to the next.

A bad mood in one of you may be met by the other getting on with something close by, so that the mood has company and nobody has to explain it. A decision may arrive as a shared nod. A disagreement about the order of jobs can be settled in a sentence, because both of you were already picturing a similar day.

A change of plan may be absorbed without fuss, because the energy involved is of a kind both of you recognise, and the day may be reshaped in a couple of sentences.

A quiet evening can be two people each busy with something of their own in the same room, at a similar speed. A task that one of you has been putting off may get done because the other's energy is already moving in that direction, and a stretch of time that might have felt long may feel short.

The older sources used here do not name a Sun and a Mars a third 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 trine from a sextile.

The trine reading on this page, that a trine reads as likeness, is based on the kinds of sign a trine 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 know how much energy the other would welcome, and it may be close to what you would bring yourself.
• A shared pace, such as the same walk or the same weekly chore, may have come to mean "this is going fine" to both of you.
• You can get on with things side by side without it feeling like a silence you have to fill.
• Others may describe time with you as easy.
• When one of you wants to do something, the other may already be reaching for the same thing.
• A plan can feel like it was half made before you started talking about it.