Mercury Trine Venus

Both planets are interior to the Earth's orbit and both are therefore tethered to the Sun as seen from here. Mercury wanders about twenty eight degrees from it at most, Venus about forty eight. Add the two extremes, with the Sun between them, and seventy six degrees is the ceiling. A hundred and twenty is not merely unlikely at that ceiling, it is nearly half again as far as the pair can reach. Nor can the trine be produced by sign, since even neighbouring trine signs require ninety degrees between their nearest edges.

This makes the Mercury Venus relationship an unusual one to interpret, because it has no hard end and no distant end. Every native alive has these two somewhere between zero and seventy six degrees apart, which is to say in conjunction, in a wide semi sextile, in a quintile, or in a sextile. Taste and articulation are always in speaking distance in every human chart. What varies is only how close, and whether the two fall in the same sign, the same house, and under the same rulership.

Anyone directed here by a printout or a table should look instead at what the pair actually does. If the two sit within eight degrees, read the conjunction. If they sit near sixty, read the sextile, which is the widest and in some respects the most useful arrangement available. If they are somewhere in between, take the sign and house placements seriously and the angle lightly. The absence of a Mercury Venus trine is not a gap in a chart. It is a fact about the sky.