Unaspected planets are rather simple to define: they have no connection to any planet in the chart. All the mathematical points like ascendant & mid-heaven are excepted as are the asteroids and the Arabians parts.
Karen Hamaker-Zondag way back in 1990, wrote about them in several of her books. She highlighted them in the title of the Yod Book and Unaspected Planets. She has very small orbs for her planets that applies even to luminaries (the sun and the moon), so in Steve Bannon’s chart below, he gets two unaspected planets: Mars and Saturn. 
Celestiology disagrees with that.
Not two…just one
Instead we feel, as we wrote here, that Bannon’s Mars is sextiled his Sun & also squared his Uranus. The latter is a constructive aspect because of his use of a Martian affinity for metal harnessed to Uranus’s electronics as a career. That works for Mr. Bannon who is a media mogul worth ten billion and counting, by hitching his wagon to electronic media — both on the Internet (the liberal HuffPo & the conservative Brietbart) and television (the agnostic Seinfeld series).
After trying every set of orbs out there, I finally decided to go with a minor variation of Bruno and Louise Huber’s method. AstroAmerica outlines their aspect-oriented approach well including their thirty-seven aspect patterns, many of which have very colorful names. Thus Celestiology uses orbs of twelve and half for the two luminaries and eight for the inners. Jupiter and Saturn (the traditional outer two) get seven. The “new three planets all get a six degree orb. The Astrology club in Arizona uses a similiar set of orbs except for the “new” planets. Their page on unaspected planets is very helpful as it discusses the one unaspected planet that Mr. Bannon does have: Saturn.
Hamaker-Zondag in another book², agrees with Marc Edmund Jones on aspects to the ascendant and midheaven that those aspects are not strong enough to change the dynamics of what is an “unaspected planet.” 1 For the record, Jones does not even utilize those aspects in any of his books, and I have noticed outside of Michael Munkasey most published astrologers do not either. In the text box I have attached a short note from that book. on her reasoning.
Mars Unaspected
Another person whom we did previously that has an unaspected planet is little Marie “Killer” Schneider. 
For Marie, her unaspected Mars works well in her chart — her desire for the the gold earrings, the quick push, the “I don’t know why” reason. The red line shown on her chart above is an opposition to the midheaven, that both we and Dr. Hamaker-Zondag ignore but at 03.19 Sagittarius suggest that her life will be marked by impulsiveness. The green line partly hidden by our notes, is a sextile to her ascendant that we also ignore on the same grounds — they are not planets just mathematical points and but are the only two aspects that we can find. The rest of the planets are blacked out following Marc Jones piano key method where only the planets under consideration are shown.
In short, unaspected planets though hard to find in a chart, are important because the individual overemphasizes them in their life. The British astrologer Sasha Fenton¹ has an unaspected Neptune and openly admits that she has “worked in every kind of Neptunian field, including prisons and mental health hospitals,” and so an unaspected planet works like another focal determinator in the chart.
Questions? Comments? Send them in. We are always willing to talk.
Footnotes:
- Fenton, Sasha, The Planets: Discover the power of the planets. London, UK: the Aquarian Press, an imprint of HarperCollins, c. 1994.
- Hamaker-Zondag, Karen, Aspects and Personality, York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, Inc. c. 1990
We constantly vet our posts for accuracy. This essay was updated on 19 September 2022.
Footnotes:
- 1For the record, Jones does not even utilize those aspects in any of his books, and I have noticed outside of Michael Munkasey most published astrologers do not either.
