A Semi-sextile:
[30° with 1° – 2° orb] Keyword: Choice
“Planet X competes with Planet Y for expression. X unsettles Y creating unease. X and Y may exhibit difficulties or challenges because they feel alien to one another and show a need to be integrated.”
Theos assigns Ray 4 to Semi-sextiles: and offers that here is the essence of the disharmony so often initially experienced during the Crescent Phase of the Moon Cycle. As the Consciousness of the Soul proceeds apace, Semi-sextiles reveal unseen potential for the win/win outcome through integrating, blending, and merging incongruent energies into a harmonious expression. When Right Choice is made, followed by Right Action ~ remembering that thinking is the only true Action in this illusion ~ anything is possible.
The Aspect Potential for the Semi-sextile: Revealing Hidden Opportunities
Key Concepts for a Semi-sextile: In some ways, more than any other Aspect, the ultimate effect of combining these disparate energies depends on the choices you make about how to use the energies at any given moment.
This aspect involves planets in neighboring Signs. But are they good neighbors? That is to say: are they harmonious or at odds? Do they support each other or bicker? Do they bolster each other’s efforts or sabotage them?
A connection between two consecutive Signs indicates a connection between two opposing energies, because consecutive Signs always belong to different Elements and have different Qualities. For this reason Semi-sextiles are often thought of as connecting two planets that have difficulty working together, or indicate difficulties or challenges because two energies that feel alien to one another need to be integrated.
An irritating, frustrating energy that seeks to increase Awareness and appreciation of life’s complexities and subtleties. This aspect creates unease. From a different perspective, the good traits of one of the Signs can usually offset the less than wonderful traits of the other, especially if one learns to use them consciously.
For example, Gemini people can too often be glibly cerebral, and when they get that way about something that’s going on, Cancer reminds them of the emotions they’re glossing over. On the other hand, one of Cancer’s worst traits is to be hypersensitive and to take someone else’s remarks too personally, then withdraw in injured silence. Gemini teaches them to laugh at themselves and communicate with the person about what was meant. All too often, they didn’t mean what was thought they did, instead they were off on some track of their own.
The Semi-sextile reveals unseen opportunity. The type of opportunity will depend on the Planets involved and the Signs and Houses where they are located.
In a planetary cycle, the applying, (increasing toward perfection), Semi-sextile represents the beginning of the cycle, the act of extricating one from the past, of overcoming the previous cycle. It symbolizes the seed containing the necessary know-how for creation, a creation that will soon find its emergence in a Sextile.
In this Semi-sextile phase, it is necessary to focus on its new potentialities which are still only in the state of hypothetical probabilities. These new possibilities of growth must be implemented with the culmination of the Opposition as an aspiration, symbolizing the first half-cycle completed with its share of confrontations and tensions to overcome, and one must be aware of all the work to be done.
This “forced communication” demands adaptation ~ it forces intelligence to prevail over prejudice, it forces reflection and understanding. This reflection is accompanied by intellectual mobility, curiosity, more sociability, but not without versatility.
On the contrary, the separating, (decreasing as it moves away from the perfected angle), Semi-sextile is the symbol of final integration, the last straight line, the balance sheet that will determine the evolutionary “value” of the completed cycle.