Aries and Virgo Compatibility: When the Work Changes Hands

An Angle Outside Ptolemy's Five

Counting forward from Aries, Virgo is the sixth sign, 150 degrees along the wheel. Ptolemy, in the first century, worked with five aspects, the conjunction, sextile, square, trine and opposition, still sometimes called the Ptolemaic aspects. Apart from the conjunction, each of them cuts the circle into equal parts: halves, thirds, quarters, sixths. The quincunx is five twelfths of the circle and does not divide it evenly, and modern references file it among the minor aspects, with a narrow orb of about three and a half degrees.

Minor is a matter of classification rather than force. What the label means in practice is that tradition handed this angle no ready temperament. The sextile and trine are counted easy, the square and opposition hard, and the quincunx appears on neither list; its reading rests mostly on the planets, signs and houses involved.

The two signs bear that out. Whichever name comes first, Aries and Virgo or Virgo and Aries, the columns of the sign table come up empty: fire beside earth, cardinal beside mutable, positive beside negative, Mars as one ruler and Mercury as the other. One description of the quincunx suits them, that parts of a life not usually in communication may come together. Between these two, those parts are the beginning of a thing and the finishing of it, and nobody gave them a shared language in advance.

A Vegetable Bed From April to August

The bed went in on the first warm Saturday of April. The Aries dug it in an afternoon, bought most of the seed packets on the rack, and had carrots, beets, lettuce and a row of sunflowers in the ground before dark, the rows a hand's width apart because measuring would have meant stopping. Then the sprouts came up, crowded and small, and the Aries, pleased and already sketching a plan for the fence, stopped going out there much.

The Virgo started going out instead. First to water, since nobody else was, then with a kneeling pad and a pair of scissors, thinning the carrots to one every few inches so that any of them could grow.

In July the Aries walked out to the bed and did not quite recognize it. Half the sunflowers were gone, cut to give the beets light. Nothing looked wrong, exactly; it looked like someone else's garden, and the Aries said, a little too lightly, that it used to be fuller. The Virgo heard what sat under the sentence: that a month of kneeling in the dirt had been taken as taking over.

Both readings are accurate. One had made something and given it away without saying so; the other had received it unasked and kept it alive without saying so either. What helps these two is plain: naming the moment a project changes hands, and letting the one who started it choose one thing that stays. In August the carrots came up straight, and the tallest sunflower was still standing by the gate.

Credit at the Start, Credit at the End

On the Aries side, you pay in ownership. You begin more than you keep, and a partner who finishes things well will end up holding much of what you started. Each handover is reasonable on its own. Over a few years they can add up to a home where your beginnings are everywhere and your name is on very little, and to a quiet suspicion that your part is only ever the rough draft.

On the Virgo side, you pay in visibility. The start of anything is easy to see: the new bed, the booked trip, the announcement over dinner. The months after it are not. You can find yourself running the long middle of projects you never chose, noticed chiefly on the day something slips.

Underneath both costs sits a disagreement about what counts as done. For one of you the achievement is getting a thing moving; for the other it is getting it right. The keyword lists for the modalities say as much: cardinal signs carry action and initiative, mutable signs adaptability and resourcefulness. Neither list mentions finishing. A couple can go a long time assuming the other one was in charge of that part.

What Venus, the Moon and Mars Settle

Venus is the natural place to begin, because tradition is cool toward it in both of your signs. The dignity tables list Aries among the signs of Venus's detriment and give Virgo as the sign of its fall. That describes the planet when it stands in those signs, not anyone's Sun, and modern practice allows any placement to go easily or with difficulty. It does mean that neither sun sign says much about how you show affection; Venus in each actual chart does.

The Moon carries the aftermath: whether one of you needs to talk a bad handover through that evening while the other needs a day first. Mars carries the push itself, the speed at which each of you moves a thing along, and a Virgo born with Mars in Aries or Sagittarius may turn out to be the one who wants to get on with it.

Past these placements lie the angles between the two charts. Your Mercury may sit a sextile from their Mars while your two Moons square each other, and a pair of Suns 150 degrees apart can turn out to be the least of what connects you. Aries compatibility and Virgo compatibility take each of you through the other eleven signs and your own. The name for the full comparison, planet against planet, is synastry.

Finding Where Your Charts Meet

One of you may have the birth certificate filed in a labeled folder, and the other may need to call a parent and ask. The compatibility calculator asks each person for a date, a place and a time of birth, and marks the time as optional, so a date and a place from each of you will do to begin. From those it draws two charts and reads one against the other, placement by placement. The hour is still worth the phone call. It settles three things a date cannot: where the Moon stood, which sign was rising, and how the houses fall. A missing time blocks nothing; it only means the Moon and the houses are best read as approximate until someone finds the paperwork.