Understanding Aspects in Astrology

This week in my astrology immersion course, the Divine Art of Astrology, we dove deeply into aspects in the natal, working to understand their influence on how our planets express their energies. This is the part of learning astrology that often elicits the most “eek!” feeling, as interpreting aspects requires a lot of working memory and an understanding of how energies flow via sacred geometry.

I see aspects as a kind of alchemy that happens between the planets, as the various aspect formation suggest that some planets pressurize, heat up, or overpower one another, just like elements in an alembic.

Without aspects, we lose the alchemical details of the natal, where we find nuance in terms of a person’s psyche and unique life path.

Aspect doctrine is rooted in research and discovery that took place in the Hellenistic period in the fields of optics and geometry.

Chris Brennan states that "Greek optical theories often posited that there was a physical connection between the eye of the observer and that which was seen through vision." This creates a lovely macro-microcosm feeling, doesn't it?

In this theory of optics, seven geometrical rays are emitted from the eye, the objects which the rays fall on are seen, and the objects that fall outside of the rays are unseen - this is why we can't see around corners, because the rays from the eye are straight lines only.

We believe that Hellenistic astrologers followed this doctrine, positing that the planets themselves are like eyes emitting rays, which allows them to see each other.

Aspects are thus conceptualized as specific types of stances, or orientations that the planets have to one another, based on that quality of “sight.” Some are helpful and some are stressful.

I wonder, now, with this idea of the planets as eyes emanating rays of light, if aspects are a bit easier to conceptualize, or understand.

Remembering too that the planets were seen as the gods moving through the sky, we can see the aspects as the vision of the gods in their path through the cosmos.