Almagest

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The Sun sextile Mercury

the Sun sextile Mercury between two charts in synastry (the two cannot stand at this angle within a single nativity)

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart the Sun and Mercury cannot actually stand sixty degrees apart: Ptolemy states plainly that Mercury never reaches a greater distance from the Sun than the space of one sign, and modern delineators confirm that a conjunction is the only major aspect the two bodies can form in one nativity, since a sextile's distance lies well beyond Mercury's own possible range from its Sun. The configuration this key names, mind at an open angle to identity, is therefore not a natal placement at all, and the tradition reads it only where it can actually occur, between two separate charts. Between two charts, one person's Sun sextile another's Mercury is read as a contact that stimulates the wish to communicate in both directions: the two people encourage each other to talk about anything and everything, rarely making one another feel uncomfortable, an ease the tradition treats as a sextile's characteristic requiring a little active engagement to take up rather than arriving for nothing.

The story

A sextile is sixty degrees, a sixth of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs names it, together with the trine, harmonious, since the two signs it joins are of the same kind, all masculine or all feminine, in contrast to the discordant square and opposition, a judgment that holds regardless of which two bodies happen to occupy the angle. The myth again gives Mercury his place at the sun god's side, though here as a separate voice rather than a fused one. As an infant Mercury was already credited with inventing the lyre from a tortoise shell; separately, Apollo, the god most closely tied to the sun's own light, awarded him a magic wand that became the caduceus, the staff of two entwined snakes that stayed his lasting symbol. Mercury went on carrying Jupiter's messages and, by extension, translating what the brighter light cannot easily say for itself into ordinary speech. A sextile, asking for a little willingness on both sides, suits an exchange freely offered.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Sun:Mercury:sextile.