Relationships (Synastry) in Sidereal Astrology

Synastry is the branch of astrology that compares two people’s birth charts for an understanding of how their lives meet. Because sidereal astrology is Divination for Liberation—the study of interpreting time as designating seasons for all things at their appointed time—we know that timing is everything, even when examining relationships through astrology.

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Relationships Synastry in Sidereal Astrology by The People's Oracle - Dayna Lynn Nuckolls

Planets are people first. People come from people and are shaped by people. That is to say, we each emerge from the biology of male and female (mother/egg and father/sperm which is Moon and Sun, respectively), and that as individuals we emerge from community.

This is critical when studying individual birth charts and even more so when studying two people’s charts together in synastry. Two people in relationship bring with them the stories and complexes of mother and father. Mother-Moon as home, belonging, family, and the body and its needs. Father-Sun as conscious awareness, perception, and judgement.

Natal Astrology versus Synastry

If natal sidereal astrology is the study of an individual’s emergence from family and community, then synastry (in sidereal astrology) is the study of how those two individuals’ narratives of emergence and becoming intersect at specific times and in specific ways. It is the interpretation of the moments that bring them together, or apart, and the impact it has on each individual’s continued becoming.

That relationship becomes another form of community from which each individual emerges. It is the opportunity and the venue for each individual to become more of who they are as promised in their natal chart.

Some questions answered via synastry in Sidereal astrology:

  • What moment in each individual’s life defines the emergence of this connection?
  • What are the primary narratives articulated by planets in each individual chart that bring the two together?

What About Predictions in Synastry?

In natal sidereal astrology we know that no transit or present astrological configuration can bring about anything that is not already promised in the birth chart. The same is true for synastry. There is no experience or moment that can come about between two people that is not already promised in each individual‘s natal chart.

Basics RE Planets in Synastry

The Sun has to do with how you think, how your mind works. It may also say something about the men in your life. Sympathetic contacts (aspects) to the Sun shows harmony in the way that you both think and how you see things. “Coming from a similar place”. Hostile contacts may show indifference or conflict between your ways of seeing things.

The Moon is a reflection of your background, family ties, or lack thereof. Contacts to or from the Moon relate to one’s sense of family, the mother, and significant women. The Moon tells what home is like.

As with all planets one must examine the way the planet functions in the individual chart before seeing how it connects to another’s. Your Venus conjunct his Moon may not productive or constructive if his or her Moon is in an inferior square with Saturn. Especially if the Moon is in Scorpio. This may be a person that has a tenuous relationship with family and kin. And your relationship with that person could trigger the anxiety or even bring up problems in that area of their life.

  • Are they ready to deal with it?
  • What transit indicates a season of this work for them?
  • And does this work mean that happily ever after for you?

How is your relationship with home, mother, family? If constructive and supportive, contacts to your Moon will magnify your sense of belonging. The person who has supportive contacts with your Moon may fit into your family and home life, your routine and habits.

Venus contacts tend to be the most prized. People think it promises love. Venus at its most positive shows love languages and experience of pleasure that are supportive and sympathetic to each other. But again, if that Venus is problematic showing issues with women or a hostile style of loving, then it might not bring love at all, or maybe unrequited love.

Mars. Again, folks think sex. At its most constructive it can show a similar way of solving problems and a sympathetic conflict style. But when Mars contacts are hostile in some way it can show antagonizing, constant bickering, or inability to work together. It can mean abrupt coming together and breaking up.

Jupiter contacts show how your belief systems relate, your philosophy and worldview. Are they congruent, sympathetic, or at odds.Is religion, community, accountability, and purpose important to you and not to your partner? Contacts to and from Jupiter will show why

And Saturn! That old Devil. Saturn is about your sense of responsibility & authority over yourself/your life, and your authority and power out in the world. It’s about how you reckon with real or perceived limits. It’s a tricky one, though. Sometimes it’s like glue making you feel obligated or responsible. It reflects being serious and committing. Other times Saturn is distance/separation that can’t be overcome. A heaviness and sense of burden and work. Sometimes it’s all of the above.

Now about the angles. This is the juice. This is the meat. Connections to and from the Ascendant are what draw people to each other. Your temperament can be the embodiment of something very significant to the other person. Like, their Venus on your Ascendant, you embody their sense of beauty and there is an ease of pleasure between you. Or, Mercury, an easy flow of communication.

The Astrology of Love

What do the planets have to say about love? As always, you know I’m going come at it from another angle. Read on about the Astrology of Love the sidereal way.

This content originally appeared in a thread of tweets on my Twitter timeline.  It has been edited for clarity and cohesion.

While Venus is often called the planet of love, sex, and pleasure, each of the planets speaks to us about love. Love can be defined in practical terms, spiritual terms, psychological, etc. But I’m going to include all of the above and then some as I share what the planets have to say about love.


Moon

I always start with the MOON because this is where you began—in your mother’s womb. Your first body, your first home, was not your own, it was your mother’s. It was there that your body was shaped. And only upon your emergence from that body did your body take a form of its own.

The MOON is home and family, it is the circumstances of your upbringing. It is all of the people, places, and things that are familiar to you, the fixtures in your environment that comprise “home”.

LOVE begins with mother—home. This is where you learn what your needs are, who will meet them, and how they are met. Your body is programmed by your upbringing to interpret one thing as a need, and another as optional. If you survived without it, then you don’t need it, right?

The MOON teaches us that LOVE is the incubator of necessity. LOVE defines what we cannot live without. As we are shaped by our home and upbringing, so too is our relationship to our body. LOVE teaches us what necessity feels like.

  • How has your mother, home, family, upbringing, and familiar environment during your formative years shaped how you define necessity in your life?
  • Are these necessities rooted in familiarity, or does your body call for these things at present?
  • Who are the people that fulfill necessity in your life at present?

Sun

The SUN is the sense of self shaped by the awareness that you are not your body. The mind that perceives can perceive the body. The mind is aware of itself, too. The SUN, experienced as FATHER, teaches us that our sense of self informs our level of entitlement to impact the world around us. LOVE, in this sense, is the drive to be seen as we see ourselves.

  • How has your experience of FATHER shaped your entitlement to impact the world you inhabit, your world?
  • Who and what is the self that seeks to be seen as it is? Is that really you?
  • How do you show yourself so that you can be seen?

Mercury

MERCURY is the underrated champion of LOVE. It is the words we think in, speak with, write with. As incantations of manifestation, words create the world we inhabit. They create the space and place where we exercise our entitlement to be.

When your world is named for you, it shapes how you perceive it. And when you are named, it shapes how you are seen and how you see yourself.

When you name your world, you shape your world. When you name yourself, you shape yourself.

  • What have you been called?
  • How has this shaped your becoming at present?
  • If you are to be seen as you are, what words have shaped your capacity to show up to be seen?

Venus

Now, we have arrived at VENUS: the capacity to change, assimilate, adapt, adjust, bend, and conform. The SUN says that your sense of self informs how you see the world. But VENUS says that LOVE means letting the world and the people in it change you, and how you see yourself.

Both are needed, you see? There is no self without LOVE. Because who you are and who you are becoming has and will always be shaped by the people in your life. Either by your resistance to conforming or by your willingness to change. This is the LOVE that VENUS teaches.

  • How willing or unwilling are you to be changed by the people in your life?
  • How do you find balance between maintaining the sense of self rooted in self perception vs the sense of self reflected back to you by the people in your life?
  • Even if you did not choose the reflection, the people in your life, can you still see yourself?
  • Can you still magnify the commonalities, however small they might appear? Perception is reality, right?

Mars

MARS, the defender of the body which emerged from Mother MOON. The one that severs the binding that necessity has created. The one that ventures out to flex the muscle of courage. It sustains and maintains the entitlement endowed by Father SUN.

The courage to stand your ground, preserve your life and body, and move as the force of life empowers you and impels you to act—this is MARS. This, too, is LOVE.

  • Who and what empowers you to save your own life?
  • Where do you find the strength to stand your ground when it matters most?
  • Who empowers you with a visceral awareness of the value of your life, your body, yourself?

Jupiter

JUPITER tells the story of who you are. It’s the teacher who shows and tells. It’s the culture that gives words meaning. It’s the experiences that give you meaning.

Framing the cultural narrative around belonging and community, JUPITER gives the context for how we interpret ourselves and our bodies within the society where we live. JUPITER teaches us that LOVE is finding connection beyond the primal and biological while reinforcing it at the same time.

Stories are tapestries of words that shape how we interpret the world, ourselves, and the people in it. This is JUPITER and this is LOVE.

  • How do these stories provide a way to interpret the impulses that arise in you?
  • What is the origin of these stories?
  • How do they empower intention and possibility in your life?

Saturn

SATURN is where it ends and begins, for birth, too, is a SATURN thing. Birth is the beginning of the discovery of where the limits of our body lie. And death is where we face the limits of life itself.

Life ends at death, so says Saturn. The awareness of your mortality brings an existential crisis that makes living urgent. Pressing you against the walls of possibility, narrowing the path forward, LOVE is urgent. LOVE is life and death. The only two guarantees in this world.

LOVE is the consequence of mortality. It grows from the awareness that life is not forever. So we must figure some way to make it last past the time our bodies are animated with life. LOVE is the legacy we leave as evidence of our lives.

  • How have you discovered the limits of your body?
  • Who are your partners is legacy creation?
  • How has the awareness of your mortality narrowed the path of possibility in your life, revealing who and what matters most?