Almagest

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Mercury trine Neptune

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mercury trine Neptune is read, like the sextile, as creative, perceptive and imaginative, the native drawing heavily on imagination and intuition. The tradition treats the trine as the more dynamic of the two harmonious Mercury-Neptune contacts, this same imaginative gift arriving as a steady undertone to how the person thinks rather than a resource reached for only when it happens to be useful. Between two charts, one person's Mercury trine another's Neptune is read as a partner who inspires the imagination and opens the mind, sources describing a shared appreciation for the arts and an ability to intuitively grasp each other's meaning, the same qualities the tradition names for the sextile, here felt with the least friction of any Mercury-Neptune contact.

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 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. At the trine's easy angle, the herald's exact word and the sea's own suggestion sit together without a fight, language finding the figurative turn it needs when it needs it, the poet's gift working here without the friction the harder angles bring.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mercury:Neptune:trine.