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The Sun sextile Neptune

the Sun sextile Neptune, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart the Sun in sextile to Neptune is read as identity given access to imagination without losing its own outline: unlike the conjunction's fusion, the sextile keeps the self intact while opening a cooperative channel to Neptune's gifts of sensitivity, inspiration and artistic appreciation. The tradition names this contact, especially alongside the trine, as favoring writers, artists and musicians, a dreamy and inspired side of the personality that softens the ego without dominating or overwhelming it, and pairs naturally with humanitarian impulses and a felt connection to suffering and to animals. Between two charts, one person's Sun sextile another's Neptune is read as one of the more positive, stimulating contacts the pairing can make: sources describe a level of forgiveness and mercy in the chemistry between the two people, room to share dreams with a real sense of freedom, and a tolerance the tradition calls soothing and settling rather than merely pleasant.

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, a judgment about the angle itself that applies here as it does to every pairing. Neptune's myth, adopted for a planet the ancients never saw, is Poseidon's sea, ruled as one of three brothers who divided sky, water and underworld between them, a domain that gives abundance and storm in the same breath and never quite holds a fixed shape. Set at an easy angle rather than fused directly with the Sun, the sea god's planet offers the self a visit rather than a flood, the imaginative and the oceanic made available on workable terms, much as old sailors' prayers asked not that the sea be tamed but that it be, for one crossing, cooperative.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Sun:Neptune:sextile.