Almagest

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Mercury conjunct Venus

Mercury conjunct Venus, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mercury conjunct Venus is, astronomically, one of the ordinary states the two bodies can be found in, both kept close to the Sun and so to each other: Ptolemy states Mercury never exceeds one sign's distance from the Sun and Venus never exceeds two, keeping the pair's own possible separation modest to begin with. Cafe Astrology reads the fusion itself as charm and grace, poetic self-expression and, in most cases, real politeness, thought and affection sharing a single, considerate register. Between two charts, one person's Mercury conjunct another's Venus is read as an exchange of ideas that is exciting to both people: sources say the interaction can go either way, but that it is very likely the two find a lot of common ground and complement each other well, conversation itself becoming one of the relationship's genuine pleasures.

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 and Aphrodite are, in Ovid's telling, the parents of Hermaphroditus, a beautiful youth whose body a nymph's own prayer fused permanently with hers after she attacked him in her pool, so that the two, once separate, became a single 'creature of both sexes.' It is a story about two distinct natures pressed into one form, and the sky keeps its own quieter version of the same fact: Mercury and Venus, each bound to a close orbit around the Sun, are never actually found very far apart. Fused together outright, the myth's own image of two-sexed union is echoed almost exactly: word and desire sharing a single register so completely that the tradition, like Ovid's own pool, treats the two as barely separable to begin with.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mercury:Venus:conjunction.