☌ The Conjunction · Integration

Two planets at the same degree. They act as one, so you rarely meet either of them on its own. Whatever one of them is doing, the other is already in it. The most concentrated aspect; what it concentrates is entirely down to the pair.

The conjunction at a glance

• Angle0°
• Umbriel calls itIntegration
• Typical orbabout 8°
• Keywordsfusion, concentration, one voice

What the conjunction means

An aspect is the angle between two planets: how they talk to each other. At 0°, the conjunction is the aspect of two drives always arriving together, and how little distance there is to see either of them alone. In a chart it's associated with fusion, concentration, one voice, hard to separate.

We call this one Integration, after what the angle does rather than how it is supposed to feel. Elsewhere you will see the conjunction called a “neutral” or “blending” aspect. Same geometry. Both words are worth having, and we would rather hand you the mechanism first and let you decide how it feels.

Why conjunctions work like that

Zero degrees means the same place, which in practice means the same sign, so the two planets share everything a sign has to give: element, mode, polarity, ruler.

And there is no distance to see either of them across. That is the whole of it. Every other aspect puts a gap between two planets and lets you notice each one separately; the conjunction takes the gap away.

How close does it have to be?

About 8 degrees for the Sun and Moon and less for the rest, and the tighter it is the more the two behave as one thing. A conjunction inside a degree is not a stronger version of an eight-degree one, it is a different experience: at eight degrees you can still sometimes tell them apart.

This app prints the exact orb of every aspect it finds, because a number is more honest than the word strong.

Is it a good aspect or a bad one?

Neither, and this is the clearest case of why the question is put wrongly. The conjunction concentrates. Whether concentrating those two particular drives is welcome depends entirely on which two they are.

Venus conjunct Jupiter and Mars conjunct Saturn are the same geometry. The tradition called one fortunate and the other difficult, and it was describing the planets, not the angle.

How common is it?

Geometrically among the least likely of the majors, along with the opposition: there is only one place on the circle a conjunction can happen, where a square, a trine and a sextile each have two.

But some pairs are far commoner than chance. Mercury never gets more than about 28 degrees from the Sun and Venus never more than about 48, so Sun conjunct Mercury is very common indeed, and Sun trine Mercury cannot happen at all. That impossibility is one of the things this site checks its own arithmetic against.

A question to sit with

Which two parts of you always arrive together, and when did you last meet either one on its own?

Working with it

Try naming the two separately for once: a line about what each one wants, on its own terms. Not to pull them apart, which you can't, but to find out whether you have ever seen either of them clearly.