Minor Aspects

When you start learning astrology, you focus on the five major aspects: conjunct, sextile, square, trine, and opposition. These are the base for you to learn off of, but there are many other minor aspects as well. And just because they’re called minor aspects doesn’t mean they’re not important. Often, the more you dig into them, the more you understand that they’re crucial in understanding your chart fully.

The major aspects are the most known, talked about, and studied. Far, far less is known about most of the minor aspects, in part because there are so many more of them. Because of this, it takes a lot of trial and error and true study to see how they work in your chart and life. Many will cast minor aspects aside because of this, preferring to use information that’s already available to you and not do much work yourself, but you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you do.

There are 45 potential aspects in your natal chart between the ten planets, and most of them are in major or minor aspect to one another, though there‘ll usually be a few that aren’t. When you only study the major aspects of your chart, you need to realize that they only occupy, as a guesstimate, about one-third to one-half of your aspects. The rest of the aspects in your chart are minor aspects, meaning that if you only study the major ones, you’re getting a horribly incomplete picture of your natal chart. If you’re trying to use your chart to better yourself and your life or to gain more understanding, why would you want to use a picture that’s incomplete?

Once you begin to study your minor aspects, you’ll find that they complete the picture and fill the holes. Where some parts of your chart may not have made much sense, or where parts of your life or personality seemed to be missing, you’ll find a minor aspect to explain. A chart that seems negative when interpreted with only major aspects may have a copious amount of nice minor aspects, bringing balance, while a chart that seem too easy when interpreted with only major aspects may have some difficult minor ones that help develop character.

Some of you may even find that the most important aspect in your chart is actually a minor one. That turned out to be the case for me, with my Sun and Moon being both quindecile and quinqueundecim, two minor aspects. Finding out about those two made an incredible amount of sense for me, and helped to show me parts of myself through my chart that would’ve been missed otherwise.

No matter what you’re coming across in astrology, it’s important that you study it before you cast it aside. No matter how small it may seem, it could be the thing that breaks it all open for you. Keep an open mind with whatever you’re learning about, even if it’s called minor. For you, it could be the most major information that you’ll come across.

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