Sextile in Astrology: The 2-Sign Aspect

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A sextile is two planets two signs apart in the zodiac — for example, one in Aries and one in Gemini.

The same ratio as the trine, the shorter interval

In Tetrabiblos I.14, Ptolemy groups the classical aspects by musical ratio, and the sextile shares its ratio (3:2) with the trine — they are the two aspects built from that interval, sextile being the shorter one (2 signs) and trine the longer (4 signs). A sextile connects signs of the same "gender" in the old classification (both traditionally read as active or both as receptive), which is part of why it and the trine are grouped together as the more workable of the five aspects, as opposed to the square and opposition.

Sign to sign, not degree to degree

We read aspects the way the Hellenistic sources describe them — sign to sign, not degree to degree. Robert Hand, editing Paulus Alexandrinus's Introductory Matters (tr. Robert Schmidt, Project Hindsight), puts it plainly: "There do not seem to be any orbs as they are known in the modern West. Any point in Aries is in trine to any point in Leo or Sagittarius, regardless of orb. … Despite misleading footnotes by modern commentators, Ptolemy also seems to have used aspects from sign to sign." The "orb tables" many sites use today (Saturn 10°, Jupiter 12°, and so on) trace back to a 19th-century translator's footnote, not to Ptolemy himself. We show the exact degree difference too, as background information — but it is not what decides whether the aspect exists.

For a sextile, this means any point in Aries is in sextile with any point in Gemini or Aquarius, regardless of exact degree.

What we do and do not add

We calculate every sextile in your chart from your actual birth data, and show the exact degree gap as reference information — never as the deciding factor. We do not inflate a sextile into a guarantee of ease; the source texts describe it as a workable relationship between the two planets involved, not a promise.

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