Almagest

The library · The aspects

Mercury trine Mercury

the transiting Mercury's periodic pass in trine to its own natal place, or one person's Mercury trine another's in synastry

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show Mercury trine itself, since no body can stand at an angle from its own degree; the tradition reads this key through transit, at the point in Mercury's own fast orbit where its transiting place trines its natal one. Cafe Astrology's own transit page describes this pass in terms similar to the conjunction's own return, favorable conditions for communication and for discovering exactly what needs discovering. Between two charts, one person's Mercury trine another's is read as thinking about problems from a genuinely similar perspective, sources describing a clarity of communication between the two that lets them plan and solve things jointly without the friction the square between the same two minds would bring.

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. Hermes meeting Hermes, or one chart's herald meeting another's, has no single myth of its own, since the god does not typically appear twice in the same story except as messenger to himself; the tradition instead reads the doubling as a mark of the god's own particular gift, recognition. Mercury is named a god of boundaries, commerce, communication, eloquence and travel, patron of the marketplace and the road where strangers meet as equals and come to understand each other's terms. Set at this most flowing angle, two minds carrying his signature need no effort at all to recognise each other's fluency, the same practical tongue spoken so naturally that neither side notices there was ever anything to translate.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mercury:Mercury:trine.