This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Major Aspects gathers the five whole number divisions of the zodiac circle that both the ancient and the modern tradition treat as aspects proper, the five configurations Ptolemy himself admitted, and the group is the one place in the aspect scheme where ancient and modern astrology are not really arguing.
The Conjunction, zero degrees, was not originally counted as an aspect at all. Greek astrologers called it a synodos, a coming together, and kept the word aspect for figures planets make by looking at each other across a distance, since a planet cannot look at itself. Modern practice inverts this and reads it as the strongest configuration there is. Traditional astrology adds a distinction modern work usually drops, that a planet near the Sun is combust and weakened while one within about seventeen arc minutes of exact is cazimi and strengthened.
The Sextile, sixty degrees, the Square, ninety degrees, and the Trine, a hundred and twenty degrees, complete the geometric family, joining signs by shared polarity and element, by clashing element, and by shared element respectively. The Trine is the one point of real agreement across the whole tradition, read as fortunate in every era. The Square carries a Hellenistic refinement mostly lost to later Western astrology, that of two planets in square the one tenth in sign from the other is said to overcome it.
The Opposition, a hundred and eighty degrees, is read classically as enmity and, since the twentieth century, psychologically as projection, a reinterpretation with no basis in the older sources, which describe the same configuration without any such claim.