When we look at the stars with the eyes of tradition, what do we find? Saturn: a miserable old god keeping time with a scythe. Mars: a hot-headed warrior, constantly picking fights. And Venus? Oh, she’s all beauty and love, unless she’s retrograde, then she’s the ex you accidentally text at 2 a.m. But here’s the thing: what we often label as “malefic” in the chart—the squares, the oppositions, the planetary stinkers—are frequently the very sources of our metamorphosis. Through conflict comes transformation. The ego is forced into contortion, old identities are changed, and from this mess emerges a new version of you. Take Pluto, for example—Lord of the Underworld, right? But this is where you get taken into your own depths. Without it, you’d locked behind trauma’s gates. It’s brutally meaningful. The trouble with “good” and “bad” is the way they imply finality. As if the story ends there. So let us stop speaking of squares as if they’re evil and trines as if they’re messages from angels.

Traditional astrology, in all its ancient knowledge, was born in a time when life was hard, brutish, and very often short. It made sense, then, to name Saturn a malefic—he represented time, decay, loss, all the things that stripped us of our illusions. Mars was the aggressor, the bringer of war and rupture. But the ancients didn’t quite have the psychological scaffolding to appreciate what we now might call the evolutionary growth of the soul—a spiral journey through fate and meaning.

To say a square is “bad” is to suggest this conflict is unwanted. But nothing is born without it. The baby must press against the womb. The writer must battle the blank page. The lover must suffer the risk of heartbreak. So it is with the hard aspects—the infamous 90° and 180° angles in the chart.  When Mars squares Pluto in a chart, for example, it’s much more than aggression meeting compulsion. It is raw desire being plunged into the underworld, tested by fire, and made whole through confrontation. When Saturn opposes the Sun, it isn’t all daddy issues. It is the pressure of individuation. The weight forming the diamond. Growth, in the psychological and spiritual sense, rarely emerges from a hammock. We grow in discomfort. We evolve through contradiction. We find God in the pits where everything collapses and we are left with nothing but ourselves

Rather than resisting the hard aspects or wishing them away, try to see these aspects as the soul’s curriculum. It’s all a bit like a myth. The hero is never shaped by ease. The oracle never appears when things are going well. The transformation doesn’t happen at the picnic, but in the cave, in the belly of the whale, in the moments when we scream, “Why is this happening to me?”—only to one day say,  “Oh, That’s why.”

A Brief History of Ancient Astrology offers a telling insight. When the ancients spoke of “good” and “bad,” they weren’t dabbling in moralistic finger-wagging. They were operating within a cosmology—a world of light and dark, day and night, active and passive, odd and even. The Greeks especially adored this kind of symmetry, finding divine elegance in opposites. Pythagoras built a whole worldview on these dualities—odd and even, limited and unlimited, masculine and feminine. To them, it was the very scaffolding of the universe.

In astrology, this duality naturally seeped into the planetary significations. Jupiter and Venus, for instance, were deemed benefics—they bring gifts, abundance, pleasure, ease. Mars and Saturn, on the other hand, were called malefics—they bring severance, challenge, difficulty. But this wasn’t “good” and “bad” in the modern psychological sense—it was “light” and “dark,” “warm” and “cold,” “fertile” and “barren.” It was about function rather than morality. Jupiter expands, Saturn contracts. Mars incites, Venus seduces. They were seen as elemental forces, part of the play of opposites that keeps the world turning.

Where it gets interesting—and problematic for the modern mind—is when we try to fit these ancient classifications into our contemporary, post-Freudian psyches. We like complexity, shadow work, emotional intelligence. So when Saturn comes along and crushes our dreams, we don’t want to just call him “bad.” We want to know why. What’s the lesson? What’s the deeper meaning? It’s the evolution of consciousness. But it also means that the old labels start to feel too blunt, like calling a shamanic death ritual “unpleasant.”

The language we use shapes the stories we tell. Astrology, at its core, is storytelling with stars. When we call an aspect “bad,” we are telling a certain kind of story—one that may be steeped in fear, resistance, and duality. But if we say instead, “This is a challenging aspect, one that might provoke deep transformation,” we’re telling a different story. One where the darkness isn’t evil, it’s fertile. One where pain isn’t punishment, it’s rite of passage.

The ancients weren’t wrong—they were operating within a symbolic framework that reflected their world. But as our world—and our inner world—evolves, so too must our interpretations. The dualities remain, but they are no longer fixed camps of good and evil.

The ancient astrologers of Babylon and Alexandria, weren’t in the business of soul growth. They weren’t trying to help you unpack your mother wound or become your most actualized self. Their astrology was a divinatory tool, a calculus designed to read the tides of fate. It wasn’t meant to inspire personal evolution or invite psychological introspection. In ancient astrology, planets are good or bad; aspects benefic or malefic; dignified or debilitated. You were either under the protective gaze of Jupiter or the harsh rays of Saturn, and life didn’t care if you’d had a rough childhood. The chart was a fate-map. You didn’t grow into your chart; you lived out your chart. In some interpretations, it was practically deterministic.

Now, enter the modern psyche: a swirling realm of archetypes, traumas, shadow selves, and spiritual aspirations. We are no longer content to be told we’re doomed because Saturn’s in the 7th. We want to know why. We want to dig into it. We want to sit in the dark with Chiron, do our inner child work, confront the animus, light a candle, and emerge rebirthed.  Some of the ancient interpretations come off as brutal, black-and-white. Mars isn’t your inner assertiveness—he’s the bringer of war. Venus isn’t your capacity to love—she’s your access to favor. Certain planets and aspects took on bad reputations. Poor Saturn—so often cast as the grim reaper of joy. Mars is an angry adolescent.

Modern astrology—particularly psychological and evolutionary astrology—performs a kind of alchemy. It says: “What if the malefic is the mentor? What if the challenge is the call to awakening?” Instead of reducing the human soul to a code of goodness or badness, it expands the chart into a dynamic landscape. Still, we mustn’t sneer at the ancients for their categorical worldview. They gave us the scaffolding, the grammar of the stars. But what we’ve done with this language—is different now. We’ve taken their definitions and softened them, but we haven’t diluted their power. Many of the planets have been misrepresented. But only because we outgrew the old myth and had to write new ones.

In our modern world, we are conditioned to avoid pain like a pothole. To sedate it, silence it, swipe past it. But astrology, when approached as a living myth rather than a list of personality traits, invites us to go deeper. To see the dark nights of the soul as a time of transformation. The psychic process of pain, of suffering, of breaking apart, is as natural and necessary as sleep or hunger. Pain is the psyche’s way of saying, “Here. Pay attention. Something is stirring beneath the surface. Something vital. Something that will make you more you than you were before.” But to heed this call, one must descend. Into the underworld of one’s own consciousness. Into the realms of Pluto and Saturn, Hekate and Hades. Into the bits of the psyche that still carry wounds, childhood shadows, karmic knots.

Transformation cannot happen in the shallow end of experience. It happens in crisis, in collapse, in those moments where everything familiar falls away and we are left with only the bare bones of being. This is why, in astrology, the so-called “difficult” placements are often the most potent. They are the pressure points where the psyche is shaped. The pain is the pressure that births purpose.

Elizabeth Haich says: “There are no bad energies, only energies which are badly used.” This quote alone could sit atop every astrological textbook. The opposition and the square, so-called hard aspects, are far from bad. They are the sparring partners of the psyche. They bring  confrontation. Not ease, but evolution. It’s like being thrown into a mythic wrestling ring with your own potential—hard, frustrating, soul-stretching. These aspects don’t allow you to coast. They demand engagement.

The habit of calling things “good” or “bad,” is dividing things into tidy moral categories. But astrology, when truly lived, resists such dualism. A trine can lull one into complacency just as easily as a square can provoke revelation. A so-called benefic aspect might ease your path, but it can also swaddle you into inaction, delaying your reckoning. Whereas a tension-heavy chart, rife with oppositions and squares, might churn up more crisis, but crisis is where character is formed.

The conflict inherent in oppositions is an axis of awareness. It creates a psychic polarity, where the soul is pulled between two powerful points, forced to stretch. It isn’t about choosing one side or the other, but holding both until a higher synthesis is born. Squares, on the other hand, bring frustration, but also formation.

Let’s abandon the old vocabulary of fortune and misfortune. Let us speak instead in the language of energy, of potential, of transformation.

According to Charle’s Carter,

I must frankly say that I doubt if anything has done sane astrology more harm than our constant prating about  “good” and “bad” aspects, like children talking of “lovely sweets” and “nasty medicine.” Such a point of view is debilitating and unworthy, and it implies that astrologers are people whose chief concern in life is to find ease and comfort and avoid hardships. I do not mean that astrologers are of this frame of mind, but our language leads others to this conclusion. We must indeed employ the terms of ordinary language, but there is no need to speak as if comfort were the one good thing, and discomfort the one evil. It will be noticed that I have more to say about the inharmonious aspects than about the harmonious ones; this is not due to any perverse preference for the former, but to the fact that these have affinity with materiality and therefore manifest themselves more clearly and perceptibly. It will be noted that aspects are treated in each case more or less distinctly from two points of view – the interior or psychological, and the external or circumstantial. The Astrological Aspects