Almagest

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Mercury trine Venus

Mercury trine 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 trine to Venus: a trine's hundred and twenty degrees is well beyond even the generous ceiling Ptolemy's own stated limits allow the pair, one sign for Mercury and two for Venus adding up to at most three signs, ninety degrees, and modern measurements of each planet's real elongation fall shorter still. The tradition reads this key only between two separate charts, where each person's own Mercury and Venus are free of the constraint their own natal pairing would carry. Between two charts, this trine is read among the pairing's easy aspects: the Venus partner expands the Mercury partner's horizons in leisure and the arts, sources say, an easy flow of communication that helps smooth over other, more difficult areas of the relationship.

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 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 most flowing 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:trine.