Almagest

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The Moon square Mercury

the Moon square Mercury, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart the Moon square Mercury is read as a fundamental conflict between emotional and intellectual impulses, described as a wavering, see-saw effect in which a person swings between emotional irrationality at one moment and pure logic the next. These natives are chatty, witty and engaging storytellers, yet moody and hypersensitive, in part because they absorb an unusual amount of whatever is happening around them; the resulting indecisiveness, the tradition notes, tends to stay internal rather than translate into action the way the conjunction's fused impulse more readily does. Between two charts, this square is read as the most challenging of the five contacts this pairing can make: sources caution that Mercury should avoid being critical or overly analytical of the Moon person's feelings, since the Moon person can perceive plain analysis as harshness while Mercury, in turn, feels the Moon person is oversensitive. Success is said to depend on sympathetic listening and clear communication that attends to meaning over exact wording.

The story

A square sets two bodies ninety degrees apart, a quarter of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs names it, together with the opposition, discordant, since the signs it joins are, in his words, of different natures and sexes, a judgment about the angle regardless of which bodies stand in it. Hermes is remembered, in the Homeric Hymn that bears his name, as a trickster from infancy, stealing Apollo's sacred cattle before his first day had ended, and as the inventor of the lyre; Selene, in her own myth, is patience itself, crossing the sky each night and loving the sleeping Endymion without hurry. Squared rather than eased together, the Moon's slow feeling and Mercury's quick, occasionally deceptive tongue press against each other here, the herald's speed outrunning, or the Moon's feeling refusing to be outrun by, whichever side happens to move first.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Moon:Mercury:square.