Almagest

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Mercury sextile Venus

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mercury sextile Venus is read as politeness put into practice: the native chooses words with care and with love so as not to offend anyone, sources say, affection shaping how the mind expresses itself without the two faculties needing to be fused outright the way the conjunction fuses them. Between two charts, one person's Mercury sextile another's Venus is read among the pairing's easy aspects: the Venus partner expands the Mercury partner's horizons in leisure and the arts, sources say, an easy flow of communication that can smooth over other, more difficult areas of the relationship rather than adding friction of its own.

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 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. Set at this easier angle, still well within the narrow room the sky allows the two of them, word and desire cooperate rather than fuse, Mercury lending Venus's own affections a considered, careful shape.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mercury:Venus:sextile.