---
title: "Aspects in Astrology: A Comprehensive Guide to Interpretation"
author: "Sue Tompkins"
year: 1989
shelf: "myth-and-religion"
purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Aspects+in+Astrology+Sue+Tompkins"
in_stock: false
related: ["hand-planets-in-transit", "greene-saturn-new-look", "arroyo-astrology-psychology-four-elements", "sasportas-twelve-houses"]
collections: []
content_type: "book-commentary"
key_takeaways:
  - "Tompkins' central move is relocating the chart's life from signs to aspects — and reframing aspect patterns as Jungian complexes — which turns the horoscope from static character description into a dynamic portrait of inner conflict."
  - "The book's principles-then-cookbook architecture teaches synthesis rather than lookup: master ten planetary principles and the geometry of the circle, and every pairwise delineation becomes a derivable dialogue rather than a memorized verdict."
  - "She inverts the traditional benefic/malefic valuation of aspects on psychological grounds — trines breed complacency while hard aspects drive growth, and the less conscious an aspect remains, the more literally it erupts as outer events."
references:
  - "Tompkins, S. (1989). Aspects in Astrology: A Comprehensive Guide to Interpretation. Element Books."
  - "Jung, C.G. (1948). A Review of the Complex Theory. Collected Works, Vol. 8. Princeton University Press."
  - "Greene, L. (1976). Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil. Weiser Books."
  - "Hillman, J. (1964). Suicide and the Soul. Spring Publications."
  - "Bettelheim, B. (1976). The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Knopf."
glossary_terms:
  - "astrology"
  - "saturn"
  - "shadow"
  - "projection"
scholar_prompts:
  - "Tompkins reads aspect configurations as the astrological form of Jung's complexes — feeling-toned clusters that 'have' the person rather than the reverse. How does this compare with Liz Greene's treatment of Saturn as the shadow in *Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil*, where a single planet rather than a relationship carries the repressed material?"
  - "Tompkins argues that the less conscious an aspect is, the more it manifests as literal outer events. How does this claim relate to the classical Jungian formula that what remains unconscious meets us as fate, and to Robert Hand's parallel argument about transits in *Planets in Transit*?"
  - "If soft aspects breed complacency and hard aspects force development, what does Tompkins' revaluation imply for a psychology of suffering — and where does it converge with or depart from Kalsched's view that defensive structures both protect and imprison?"
seo_title: "Aspects in Astrology by Sue Tompkins — Planetary Aspects as Jungian Complexes | Seba"
seo_description: "On Sue Tompkins' Aspects in Astrology — the standard aspect manual read psychologically: aspects as complexes, hard angles as engines of growth."
---

**The Life of the Chart Is in Its Aspects, and the Aspects Are Complexes**

Sue Tompkins opens with a correction of emphasis that has quietly organized psychological astrology ever since: popular astrology fixates on signs, but "it is the aspects that provide the energy in the chart." A horoscope without aspects would be inert — a list of dispositions with nothing at stake. What the aspects describe, she argues, is the raw material out of which a life must be built, and she is explicit about the psychological register of that claim: aspect configurations describe what psychologists call complexes. She invokes Jung directly — it is not so much that people have complexes as that complexes have people — and the whole interpretive method follows from that inversion. A Moon–Saturn square is not a verdict about mood; it is a feeling-toned knot of early experience that behaves autonomously until it is made conscious. Where Liz Greene's *Saturn* gave one planet the weight of the shadow, Tompkins distributes the psychodynamic load across every planetary relationship in the chart, so that reading a nativity becomes something closer to mapping a person's complex-structure than describing their character.

**Principles First, Cookbook Second — Interpretation as Synthesis, Not Lookup**

The book's architecture is its pedagogy. Part One builds the working parts: the ten planets as principles, the geometry of dividing the circle, the meaning of each aspect family — conjunction, opposition, trine, square, down through the quintiles and quincunxes that most manuals skip — and the practical craft of weighting, orbs, and applying versus separating aspects. Only then comes the famous Part Two "Planetary Cookbook" of pairwise delineations, and Part Three on the angles. The order carries the argument: every cookbook entry is a derivable dialogue between two planetary principles, not an oracle to memorize. This is what separates the book from the fortune-telling shelf it superficially resembles. Tompkins is teaching a combinatorial grammar — the same skill a clinician develops in reading how two complexes interact — and her celebrity charts (Nixon and Marx among them) function as worked examples rather than proofs. The estate's aspect-table readings lean on exactly this grammar: the delineations are quotable because they are principled.

**Hard Aspects Grow People; Soft Aspects Let Them Sleep**

Tompkins inherits astrology's oldest moral vocabulary — benefic trines, malefic squares — and inverts it on explicitly psychological grounds. Soft aspects, especially the trine, can give rise to complacency; the hard aspects offer the potential for growth. The square forces negotiation between principles that will not blend; the trine lets them cooperate so smoothly that nothing is ever examined. And she adds a subtler law with a distinctly Jungian shape: the less conscious an aspect — the semi-squares and sesquiquadrates she calls more deeply buried in the unconscious — the more it tends to erupt as concrete outer events. What is not suffered inwardly arrives outwardly. That is the projection mechanism in astrological dress, and it aligns her with the depth-psychological tradition running from Jung's complex theory through Greene's shadow-Saturn: the chart's difficult geometry marks where the personality will be forced, sooner or later, to do its real work.

**Fated to Integrate, Free in How**

On the question every aspect manual must eventually face — determinism — Tompkins takes a position depth psychology can recognize as its own. We are fated to integrate the given planetary combinations; we are free in how we do it. Her family delineations show the method at its best: the Moon–Saturn child who learned early that need is unsafe, the Moon–Jupiter native whose mother's expansiveness left hunger behind it. These are not accusations against parents but descriptions of the prima materia — her alchemical term is deliberate — that a life is given to work. Her Saturn section states the goal in the alchemists' own image: turning lead into gold, becoming genuinely adept precisely where one was most defended. Bettelheim on fairy tales and Hillman on Pluto appear at the edges of the book, marking how wide her psychological reading runs beneath the technical surface.

*Aspects in Astrology* earns its place on this shelf as the reference grammar for planetary relationship — the book the astrology room reaches for when a reading needs the standard delineation of a square or the psychological logic of an opposition. Read alongside Hand's *Planets in Transit*, which applies the same anti-fatalist psychology to timing, it supplies the structural half of a working astrological library: what the chart's tensions mean, and why meeting them consciously matters.