Almagest

The library · The aspects

Mercury square Mars

Mercury square Mars, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mercury square Mars is read as a mind quick on the trigger with its verbal reactions, not always courteous, discreet or tactful in expressing an opinion, and inclined to compete for the floor when ideas, thoughts or opinions are being exchanged. The tradition still credits the contact with a mind that is very sharp and critical, insatiably curious, the square's friction sharpening the thinking even while it roughens how the thinking gets said. Between two charts, this square is read as the exciting exchange of ideas eventually becoming a source of conflict: the Mars person can lack patience with the Mercury person's communications, sources note, interrupting or goading rather than simply listening, even while the exchanges themselves stay stimulating and vigorous and each partner keeps genuinely challenging the other's ideas.

The story

A square is ninety degrees, a quarter of the circle, one of the four configurations Ptolemy names; Wikipedia's own summary of the aspect calls the square a hard aspect that creates a strong and usable tension requiring adjustment or a decision, and Ptolemy calls it, together with the opposition, discordant. Mercury and Mars share a father without sharing a mother. Mercury is, in the standard telling, the son of Jupiter and Maia, daughter of the Titan Atlas. Mars is usually named son of Jupiter and Juno, though Ovid tells a stranger version, in which Juno, angry that Jupiter had produced Minerva without her, conceived Mars entirely on her own, by the touch of a magic flower, so that even the family's own genealogists cannot fully agree on his mother's part in the matter. Whichever telling is kept, the two gods stand as Jupiter's own children, one built for words and one for force. Set at this harder angle, the two half brothers compete rather than cooperate, Mercury's own words sharpened into something closer to a weapon, Mars's own impatience given a tongue quick enough to keep the argument going long after the point has been made.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mercury:Mars:square.