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Mercury sextile Neptune

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mercury sextile Neptune is read as creative, perceptive and imaginative: the native draws heavily on imagination and intuition, sources say, without the conjunction's fuller merger of the two faculties, a thinker who can move between the precise and the suggestive as the occasion calls for it. Between two charts, one person's Mercury sextile another's Neptune is read as a partner who helps inspire the imagination and open the mind: sources describe a shared appreciation for the arts and for spiritual topics, along with mutual understanding and an ability to intuitively grasp each other's meaning without it needing to be spelled out.

The story

A sextile is sixty degrees, a sixth of the circle, one of the four configurations Ptolemy names, read through the compatible signs it joins and asking for a degree of active engagement before its ease is felt; Wikipedia's own summary of the aspect calls it similar to the trine but less intense, indicating compatibility and harmony. 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. Set at this easier angle, Hermes keeps his own gift for exact speech while still being able to visit Poseidon's harder to describe domain and bring something useful back from it, the old image of the herald crossing between the solid world of the marketplace and the shifting world of dream or oracle without losing his footing in either.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mercury:Neptune:sextile.