Because Mercury and Venus are never more than about seventy six degrees apart, the sextile is the outermost real relationship between them, and it has a different quality from the conjunction. Here the two are near neighbours rather than one household. The native can think about what they like instead of simply liking it, and can make something pleasing without losing track of whether it is true. That small separation is an advantage. It supplies the critical distance the conjunction lacks, and it supplies it only to those who use it.
Where it is used, the results are specific rather than grand. The native learns languages with pleasure and therefore learns them. They are good company at dinner without needing to hold the table. Correspondence is kept up. Money, when it is discussed, is discussed without embarrassment, which is rarer than it sounds and worth a great deal in a partnership. Many with this contact end up in editing, teaching, translation, retail buying or the arts administration that keeps artists solvent, and are unusually pleasant colleagues in all of them.
Unused, the sextile leaves a person who is agreeable and slightly underemployed. The talent for arranging words and objects goes into home decoration and well phrased opinions about other people's work, and never risks anything of its own. Nothing about that is painful, which is precisely why it persists. The activation is simple and small: one thing made, regularly, and shown to somebody with standards. This contact does not need a crisis to develop, only an audience willing to say the piece is not finished yet.
What It Gives
- ◆clear thinking about what one likes
- ◆easy grace in company
- ◆aptitude for languages and editing
- ◆candour about money
What It Costs
- ◆opinions offered instead of work
- ◆faculty left comfortably idle
- ◆risk avoided because comfort is available
This is one line of a whole chart. The rest of it — every placement, house and aspect at once — is a birth date away.
Cast Your Birth Chart