Aspect

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Mercury Square Neptune

Mercury square Neptune sets clarity against suggestion, producing confusion about plain facts, unusual gifts of expression, and a long education in checking what one believes one heard.

The trouble begins with the ordinary business of getting things straight. Directions are misremembered, names transposed, a message taken and delivered with a crucial detail altered. The native is not careless; they are receiving on two frequencies and cannot always tell which is which. Early schooling suffers, particularly in arithmetic, and the child is thought vague when they are in fact overloaded. Reading, drawing and music usually go better, being places where the second frequency is an asset rather than an obstacle.

Deception is the recurring theme, in both directions. The native is taken in by a plausible person at least twice, generally in matters of money or romance, and afterwards tells a version of it that spares the worst part. They also mislead without intending to, by omission, by softening, by allowing an impression to stand. In argument they lose their footing when pressed for specifics and retreat into feeling, which is read as dishonesty and is closer to genuine disorientation.

What this square eventually builds is a hard-won discipline of verification laid over a real gift. The native learns to write things down, repeat the instruction back, and ask for the figure twice. Around that scaffolding the imagination works freely and safely, and the results are often extraordinary: this is a standard contact among poets, film-makers and photographers. The cost is a permanent low-level doubt about one's own account of events, which is inconvenient and, on the whole, well founded.

What It Gives

  • ◆imagination of unusual reach
  • ◆sensitivity to atmosphere and image
  • ◆compassion for the deceived
  • ◆hard-earned habits of verification

What It Costs

  • ◆plain details reliably garbled
  • ◆vulnerable to plausible strangers
  • ◆retreat into feeling under questioning

This is one line of a whole chart. The rest of it — every placement, house and aspect at once — is a birth date away.

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Mercury Sextile Venus

Sixty degrees is nearly the widest these two ever manage, and the sextile offers the native a workable alliance between clear thinking and good taste that has to be picked up to be worth anything.

Mercury Square Venus

No birth chart has ever contained this square: Mercury stays within twenty eight degrees of the Sun and Venus within forty eight, so the two can never stand ninety degrees apart.

Mercury Trine Venus

A trine wants a hundred and twenty degrees of separation, and Mercury and Venus never exceed about seventy six, which places this configuration well outside anything the solar system permits.

Sun Square Moon

A first or last quarter birth divides intent from instinct, so the native's wants argue with their needs, and the argument, though tiring, does most of the work of building a character.

Sun Square Mercury

Ninety degrees cannot open between the Sun and Mercury; the planet's greatest elongation is about twenty-eight degrees, so the square belongs to aspect tables and software errors rather than to any nativity.