Almagest

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Mercury square Neptune

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mercury square Neptune is read the way the tradition reads every hard contact between them: problems concentrating, sources say plainly, thinking that reaches for the plain fact while Neptune keeps blurring the picture into metaphor and suggestion instead. The square is read as friction rather than fusion, an imagination that will not simply cooperate with the mind's own wish for a clear, checkable statement. Between two charts, this square is read among the pairing's harder contacts: a partner who is vague and indefinite in communication, sources say, with mistrust able to develop as Neptune answers deceptively or indirectly and Mercury comes across, in turn, as too rigid for Neptune's own taste.

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. 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 harder angle, the herald's own exact word and the sea's own refusal to be pinned down work against each other outright: the mind reaches for a plain statement and finds only current, and the tradition reads the resulting fog as friction rather than as a gift.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mercury:Neptune:square.