iVillage

Throughout the long history of astrology, the two great archetypical kinds of planetary patterns, the yin and the yang of aspects, have been the Trine (120-degrees) and the Square (90-degrees) aspects. The Trine aspect has ever been called the easy aspect, the “good” aspect, while the Square aspect has been marked as difficult, the so-called “bad” aspect.

And these two kinds of aspects, the easy and the hard, reach almost mythic proportions when they appear in the sky as the whole-chart patterns: the Grand Trine and the T-Square (or Grand Cross). These whole-chart patterns are what I call StarTypes, and they are to be distinguished from single aspects by the fact that single aspects link together, aspect to aspect, to form a complete pattern that runs a full 360-degrees around the chart, ending at the aspect where it began.