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Neptune sextile Neptune

the transiting Neptune's passage in sextile to its own natal place, or one person's Neptune sextile another's in synastry

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show Neptune sextile itself, since a single body cannot stand at an angle from its own degree; the tradition instead reads this key through transit, a station reached well before the halfway point of Neptune's own approximately one hundred and sixty four year circuit. Cafe Astrology's transit reading describes this passage as a time of getting more in touch with one's own dreams, intuition and ideals rather than simply flowing along with the ones held to date, quietly going one's own way, subtly enhancing an innate attraction to imaginative, idealistic and mysterious activities and topics, and building more confident trust in one's own intuition. Between two charts, a sextile from one person's Neptune to another's is read through the same imaginative, idealizing character the tradition gives Neptune generally, an easy, cooperative note on questions of belief and vision; because Neptune moves so slowly, partners of noticeably different ages are needed to produce this angle at all between two separate natal charts, rather than the near conjunction that similarly aged partners already share.

The story

A sextile is sixty degrees, a sixth of the circle, one of the four configurations Ptolemy names, formed between signs of the same gender; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls the sextile, together with the trine, harmonious, and Wikipedia's own summary describes it as similar in influence to the trine but less intense, indicating compatibility and harmony that eases communication and opens opportunity. Neptune meeting Neptune has no myth of doubling to draw on. Neptune's own page instead gives his single story: son of Saturn and Ops, and, in the Greek-inspired tradition the page also names, a brother of Jupiter and Pluto with whom he presides over heaven, the earthly world and its underworld, and the seas, the sea and fresh water falling to Neptune as his own particular share. His festival, the Neptunalia, fell at the height of summer, when water ran shortest. Neptune meeting its own natal place at this cooperative angle is read through the same fluid character that page gives Neptune, imagination and belief shifting gently enough to be worked with.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Neptune:Neptune:sextile.