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Mercury trine Mars

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mercury trine Mars is read, like the sextile, as a mind that is restless, quick, practical, perceptive and brave, an expressive and lively conversationalist who means what they say. The tradition treats the trine as the more dynamic of the two harmonious Mercury-Mars contacts, this same readiness to act on a thought arriving as a steady undertone to how the person thinks rather than a resource they have to reach for, decisions still often made, and made well, at the very last minute. Between two charts, one person's Mercury trine another's Mars is read as the easiest flow of stimulation the pairing offers: the Mars partner fuels the Mercury partner's ideas into action with the least friction of any Mercury-Mars contact, conversations lively and productive, each partner challenging the other's thinking in a way that stays vigorous without tipping into conflict.

The story

A trine is a hundred and twenty degrees, a third of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls it, together with the sextile, harmonious, since the signs it joins are of the same kind, all masculine or all feminine, and Wikipedia's own summary of the aspect calls the trine extremely beneficial, indicating harmony, ease and what is natural, one of the two aspects the tradition sets against the square and opposition's discord. 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 most flowing angle, the household's two gifts need no effort to work together, Mercury's own quick mind and Mars's own readiness to act moving as naturally as brothers raised in the same house.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mercury:Mars:trine.