Almagest

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Mercury square Venus

Mercury square Venus between two charts in synastry (the two cannot stand at this angle within a single nativity)

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mercury cannot actually stand square to Venus: added together, the widest distance each can reach from the Sun, one sign for Mercury and two for Venus, comes to three signs, ninety degrees, exactly a square's own width, and modern measurements of each planet's real greatest elongation, eighteen to twenty-eight degrees for Mercury and forty-five to forty-seven for Venus, fall short of that ceiling rather than reaching it, so the two bodies are never actually found this far apart in a working chart. The tradition reads this key only where the constraint does not apply, between two separate people's charts. Between two charts, this square is read as the exciting exchange of ideas eventually becoming a source of some conflict: sources describe both partners competing a little in conversation, cutting each other off in their excitement to share their own stories, one side reading as shallow or unnecessarily factual and the other as vain or illogical.

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 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. Even set at this harder angle in name only, the sky itself will not actually hold Mercury and Venus this far apart within one nativity; the myth's own fused, two-sexed body and the sky's own tight leash on this pair arrive, from opposite directions, at the same plain fact, that Hermes and Aphrodite's child was never truly going to be found very far from either parent.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mercury:Venus:square.