Aries and Virgo compatibility

Love and romance stands at 35. The angle weighs more than anything else in this facet, and here it is the weak input. The neutral rulers contribute the most.

Ptolemy explains why he leaves this distance out. Parts of the zodiac five signs from each other, he says, are “considered inconjunct, because they divide the whole circle into unequal parts”. His word for such signs is “inconjunct and separated”.

The passages we hold from Alan Leo on Virgo do not speak of affection, so we add no comparison of characters here.

Trust is the lowest facet, 32. Steadiness counts a cardinal sign for half and a mutable sign for nothing, so the pair’s average is small, and the weak angle weighs on trust too.

Virgo is one of the signs our data calls mutable; Ptolemy’s name for that group is bicorporeal. He says these signs, lying between the fixed signs and the ones that open a season, “participate in the constitutional properties of both”. Treating that as low steadiness is the formula’s step, not his.

Alan Leo names a failing for each sign, each under a condition. Of Virgo: “When running along personal lines, these persons become more selfish than those of the other signs, since they are always alive to their own interests”. Of Aries: “Their greatest fault when perverting their gifts is deception, and they are often clever enough to deceive successfully”. Printing the two together is our choice; he wrote them in separate chapters and about people who fall short of their sign.

Communication is the highest facet at 44. Adaptability supplies the largest part, with the elements next.

Ptolemy gives Virgo to Mercury: “the remaining two signs, Gemini and Virgo, are allotted to him”. Alan Leo’s Virgo people “always seem to have their wits about them”. He also calls them “the most critical of all individuals, but they usually turn this criticism also upon themselves”. Aries people, in his chapter on that sign, are “never at a loss for a word” and “very self-willed and often self-opinionated”. Our reading of the four phrases is a ready talker with firm opinions beside a quick critic who spares nobody, the critic included.

Emotions scores 37. The elements carry close to half of this facet, and fire with earth gives a middling return.

William Lilly, who lists the qualities of signs for judging a chart and is not describing people, has Aries “hot and dry, cholericke” and Virgo “earthly, cold, melancholly”. Dryness is the thread Ptolemy supplies. “Mars is dry in nature”, he writes, and Mercury takes his exaltation in Virgo, “in which sign the autumnal dryness makes its first appearance”. The season is that of the northern hemisphere. Linking the two remarks is our doing.

Alan Leo’s Virgo people are “self-analytical, and seem to be always taking themselves to pieces”. Of Aries people he says “it is exceedingly difficult to restrain them”. Seen together, and the pairing is ours, one turns inward to examine and the other presses outward.

Values comes to 33. The elements give the largest part; low steadiness and the weak angle hold the rest down.

Two of Alan Leo’s sentences nearly mirror each other. On Aries: “This sign gives extreme ideality, and those born under it are more ideal than practical.” On Virgo people: they “tend more toward the practical than the ideal”. Connecting the two statements is our doing, not his.

Shared activities scores 43, a little below communication. Adaptability counts here again.

Alan Leo’s Aries people are “always inclined to act upon impulse without waiting to mature their plans”. Virgo people are “careful and cautious, and usually act somewhat methodically, or with much apparent forethought”.

That contrast is ours to draw, and so is one likeness. Aries people “as a host or hostess they are full of little plans for making those around them happy”. Virgo people “can so readily adapt themselves to the requirements of those around them that they make excellent entertainers and splendid social companions”. Noticing the likeness is our part.