Almagest

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Mercury trine Pluto

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

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart Mercury trine Pluto is read, like the sextile, as a mind naturally seeking truths, looking for hidden layers and zoning in on core meanings. The tradition names the trine the more dynamic expression of the two harmonious Mercury-Pluto contacts, this same investigative depth, perceptiveness and strategic thinking arriving as a steady undertone to how the person reasons rather than a resource called upon only when useful. Between two charts, one person's Mercury trine another's Pluto is read as a partner who opens the other up to new ways of thinking, sources describing an appreciation for Pluto's own intensity and a connection that works especially well for therapeutic or professional relationships, the same qualities the tradition names for the sextile, here felt with the least friction of any Mercury-Pluto 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 carries one office among the Greeks that suits this pairing exactly: psychopomp, the guide who leads the souls of the dead down to Hades's own kingdom, a role his Roman counterpart Mercury keeps as well, leading newly deceased souls to the afterlife. At the trine's easy angle, the psychopomp's crossing costs little: the mind descends to what is buried and returns with its account without the toll the harder angles exact, depth and clarity arriving together rather than as a trade.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Mercury:Pluto:trine.