Almagest

The library · The aspects

Mercury opposite Neptune

Mercury opposite Neptune, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mercury opposite Neptune is read the same way as the square: problems concentrating, the mind's own wish for a plain fact meeting Neptune's blurring of the picture into metaphor and suggestion. Facing each other directly, the opposition is read as placing the plain statement and the suggestive one at two genuinely different poles, each in charge only while the other, for the moment, recedes. Between two charts, this opposition belongs among the pairing's harder contacts: a partner vague and indefinite in communication, mistrust developing as Neptune answers deceptively or indirectly, and Mercury reading, in turn, as too rigid, the same difficulty the tradition names for the square, here made more visible by the opposition's own distance.

The story

An opposition is a hundred and eighty degrees, half the circle, the two bodies facing each other directly across it; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs groups it with the square as discordant, and Wikipedia's own summary of the aspect describes oppositions as prone to exaggeration, their dichotomous quality keeping whatever they touch in a real and often tense relation rather than letting it settle. Hermes is the god of clever speech, and Poseidon, whose Roman translation gives Neptune its myth, is the god of a domain that resists being spoken of plainly at all, its currents, depths and moods too large for any single description to hold. Facing each other directly, the herald's exact word and the sea's own boundless mood stand at two ends of the same effort to communicate, each fully in command only while the other, for the moment, recedes.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mercury:Neptune:opposition.