Cradle Aspect Pattern: One Opposition, Two Trines, Three Sextiles

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A cradle is a four-body figure that spans about half of the chart. Two bodies are in opposition, and two more sit between them on one side, so that the four are spaced roughly 60° apart along that half circle. The result is one opposition, two trines and three sextiles. Drawn on the wheel, the long opposition line is the base and the three short sextile lines curve around one side of it, which is where the name comes from. The general checking method is on how to find aspect patterns.

Bodies, orbs and the chart: examples here draw on the Sun, Moon, Mercury through Pluto and Chiron. Each of the six legs gets the same flat orb the free birth chart uses (6° for a sextile, 8° for the other four major aspects, edge value included), with no extra allowance for the Sun or Moon. The Lunar Nodes, the angles and Lilith stay out of the worked example by choice. On the wheel you will see single aspect lines only: no pattern label, no list of aspect numbers. Everything below was confirmed by hand from the table, using each body's tick on the inner ring when its glyph is moved aside.

The definition used here

The shape is taken from Astrotheme's guide to composed aspects, which describes the cradle as four planets forming three sextiles, two trines and one opposition in one area of the zodiac. That page is used for the definition only; its orbs and its interpretations are not adopted here. Some writers use "hammock" for this figure and some use that word for other shapes, so the legs below are what counts, not the name.

Call the four bodies A, B, C and D in order along the half circle.

Six pairs, six legs, each checked on its own. Three sextiles are the hard part: the sextile window is the narrowest of the five, and a cradle needs three of them at once.

A worked example

Elif is a fictional person. Her positions are the calculator's for London on 26 August 2012 at 12:00.

All six hold. The Mars-Pluto sextile is the closest call, 0.73° inside the edge. Every leg is in sign: Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn and Pisces alternate earth and water, each two signs from the next.

A second cradle sharing three corners

Neptune at 1°41' Pisces, retrograde, is 5.83° from Chiron. Put it in Chiron's corner and check its three legs: opposite the Sun at 178.08° (orb 1.92°), trine Mars at 119.88° (orb 0.12°) and sextile Pluto at 54.61°, only 0.61° inside the window. So Sun, Mars, Pluto and Neptune form a second cradle. As body combinations, Elif has two; on paper there is one shape with a doubled end. Counting habits matter here: list two combinations if you are tallying, read one cluster when you interpret.

Reading the four together

The opposition is the axis of the figure. The Sun in Virgo facing Chiron in Pisces is often read as a pull between practical self-reliance and a more sensitive, less defended side. In a cradle that tension is not left on its own: Mars and Pluto sit along one side and link to both ends, each with a sextile to its neighbour and a trine across. One way to read Elif's figure is that drive (Mars in Scorpio) and persistence (Pluto in Capricorn) give her ways to work between the two ends of the opposition, step by step rather than all at once. Neptune doubling Chiron's end may add an idealistic note to that side. As with every figure on these pages, this is a set of possibilities to explore, not a forecast.

Near misses in the same chart

Saturn in Mars's corner. Saturn at 25°44' Libra is 6.07° from Mars, a conjunction across the Libra-Scorpio boundary. It looks as if Saturn could stand in for Mars, but its legs say otherwise: 52.13° from the Sun (1.87° short of the sextile window), 71.34° from Pluto (5.34° past it) and 131.78° from Chiron (3.78° past the trine window). Only its trine to Neptune (125.95°) holds. One leg out of three is nowhere near a cradle.

A rectangle that is not there. A mystic rectangle also has two trines and two sextiles, but it needs a second opposition. In Elif's chart that would need a body opposite Mars, near early Taurus, or opposite Pluto, near early Cancer. Venus at 18°14' Cancer is 168.84° from Pluto, 3.16° short of the opposition window, so there is no rectangle.

The Nodes. The North Node at 0°21' Sagittarius is square both the Sun and Neptune. A program that treated the nodal axis as an ordinary opposition would report a "grand cross" here. These guides do not count it: the opposition between the two Nodes is built into their definition, so a body square the axis always forms that shape.

Birth time

On 26 August 2012 all nine legs of the two cradles held at every whole minute from 00:00 to 23:59, so the figures do not depend on Elif's birth time. One day earlier they did. On 25 August the Mars-Pluto separation came down through 66° during the morning and the sextile held only from 09:50 onward, so a birth on that date before 09:50 has neither cradle. Without a birth time, the free chart calculates the planets at local noon as a reference for the date, which would show the cradles on both dates. That noon chart is not evidence. Only the whole-date check separates the two cases. The Moon, which moves 12° to 15° a day, cannot be assumed into a cradle without a reliable time; the free chart draws no Moon lines in that case.

Cradle, rectangle, kite and grand sextile: a schematic comparison

Schematic only, not a chart: imagine six points spaced exactly 60° apart around the circle and numbered 1 to 6. Several named figures are subsets of those six points.

The table explains the family resemblance and why one chart can hold several of these at once: a cradle contains two minor grand trines (1, 2, 3 and 2, 3, 4), and a grand sextile contains six cradles. Real charts never sit on exact 60° points, which is why each leg is checked separately with its own orb.

How often cradles turned up

In the sample used across these pattern guides, London at 12:00 local clock time on every date from 1 January 1920 to 31 December 2059 (51,135 dates), with the Sun, Mercury through Pluto and Chiron and without the Moon, the calculator's positions at code version 512fc104 contained at least one cradle on 4,909 dates, 9.6% of the sample. There were 8,059 body combinations in all, because one cluster often gives more than one, as in Elif's chart. Some cradles are made only of slow bodies and are shared by everyone born over several weeks; the generational aspect patterns page has examples. These are shares of calendar dates in one sample, not of people.

Wheel and glyphs

The four cradle bodies in Elif's chart are spread out, but Chiron's glyph is drawn about 6° from its tick because Neptune sits so close, and the Mars glyph about 6° from its own. The lines run between the true positions, so trace the figure from the ticks and confirm it from the table. The table's minutes are truncated from positions rounded to 0.01°, which is plenty for a 0.73° margin but not for one within a minute of an edge.

To try this on your own chart, generate your free birth chart, list the oppositions, and look for bodies at roughly 60° and 120° from one end. Questions about a specific figure can go to Ask the Astrologist.

Related articles

• Sun Opposite Chiron
• Mars Sextile Pluto
• Sun Trine Pluto
• Sun Opposite Neptune
• Aspect Patterns in Astrology