Trine

A trine occurs when two planets sit a hundred and twenty degrees apart, usually in signs of the same element. The two functions operate in complete agreement, and the result flows without effort.

Trines describe genuine natural ability. Whatever the two planets govern works together automatically, without instruction, and generally without the person noticing it as a skill. This is the aspect's gift and the source of its one real disadvantage: things that arrive without effort are rarely developed, because nothing ever forces the issue.

The traditional caution about trines is complacency, and it is well founded. A person with a strong trine will often coast on it, producing decent results indefinitely and never becoming excellent, while a square in the same area would have driven them to work. Charts weighted heavily toward trines can belong to talented people with surprisingly little to show for it.

The element involved describes the character of the ease. A fire trine produces confidence and momentum; an earth trine produces practical competence; an air trine produces facility with ideas; a water trine produces emotional attunement that requires no explanation.

A trine is most valuable when combined with a hard aspect elsewhere in the chart, where the pressure from one supplies the motivation that the other cannot generate on its own.