Almagest

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Mercury conjunct Mercury

the transiting Mercury's periodic return to conjunct its own natal place, or one person's Mercury conjunct another's in synastry

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show Mercury conjunct itself, since no body can stand at an angle from its own degree; the within-chart version of this key belongs to transit, where Mercury's own fast orbit, a little under three months around the Sun, carries it back around to conjunct its own natal place several times within a single year. Cafe Astrology's own transit page reads this specific pass as a time bound to bring information the person needs at just the right moment, a strong period for objective observation and discussion. Between two charts, one person's Mercury conjunct another's is read as a striking similarity in the manner the two people speak and think, so close that the tradition says neither side wastes time picking at what the other one said, since both are, in effect, already saying it the same way.

The story

A conjunction sets two bodies at, or close to, the same degree, with no real angular distance between them; Ptolemy's own chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs measures the opposition, trine, square and sextile by the number of degrees separating two positions, yet Wikipedia's summary counts the conjunction among the five traditional major aspects sometimes called Ptolemaic, and reports that conjunctions are said to be the most powerful aspects, because they mutually intensify the effects of the involved planets. Hermes meeting Hermes, or one chart's herald meeting another's, has no single myth of its own, since the god does not typically appear twice in the same story except as messenger to himself; the tradition instead reads the doubling as a mark of the god's own particular gift, recognition. Mercury is named a god of boundaries, commerce, communication, eloquence and travel, patron of the marketplace and the road where strangers meet as equals and come to understand each other's terms. Fused together, or, in transit, met by his own former place, the herald recognises his own old terms exactly, the same fluency meeting itself and finding, unsurprisingly, nothing lost in translation.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mercury:Mercury:conjunction.