Almagest

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The Sun square Mercury

the Sun square 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 stand ninety degrees apart: Ptolemy states that Mercury never reaches a greater distance from the Sun than the space of one sign, and modern delineators confirm that conjunction is the only major aspect the two bodies can make in one nativity, a square's distance being well beyond Mercury's own reach from its Sun. What this key names, mind pressed at a hard angle against identity, cannot be a natal placement, and the tradition reads it only where the two bodies actually belong to different people. Between two charts, one person's Sun square another's Mercury is read as a mind that does not always see eye to eye with the other person's course of action: sources describe the Mercury person becoming readily critical of the Sun person's plans, a friction the tradition treats as the square's ordinary character, a strong and unavoidably felt tension rather than active hostility.

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 itself rather than about any one pair of planets. Mercury's myth still supplies the terms even where the angle is a hard 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. Mercury went on to serve as Jupiter's messenger and, in the tradition's reading, Apollo's own occasional critic as much as his ally; heralds, in every myth that keeps them, are expected to say the plain thing rather than the flattering one. A mind squared against another's identity is simply Mercury's oldest office, carried out less gently than usual.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Sun:Mercury:square.