Natal Wheel › Guides › Aspects › Sun and Mercury
Sun and Mercury · the self and its voice
Sun in aspect to Mercury
Mercury never travels more than twenty-eight degrees from the Sun, so the only contacts the two can make are the conjunction and the semisextile; a square, trine, sextile or opposition between them is geometrically impossible. What the pair describes is the relation between identity and its expression: the Sun as purpose and vitality, Mercury as perception, language and the way a conclusion gets reached. In practice the useful question is one of distance. A Mercury tight to the Sun thinks in the same key as the self, while a Mercury out near the limit of elongation observes that self with a little more detachment.
What each planet brings
| Sun | identity, vitality, purpose |
|---|---|
| Mercury | thinking, speech, learning |
The soft aspects (trine or sextile)
There is no trine or sextile available between the Sun and Mercury, since the two are never far enough apart for one. The closest thing is the semisextile, formed when Mercury occupies the adjacent sign, and it reads as an easy handover between who someone is and how that person speaks. No further meaning should be read into the absence.
The hard aspects (square or opposition)
A square or opposition between these two cannot appear in any chart; the greatest possible separation falls short of thirty degrees. A chart that shows one has a calculation error or a mislabelled glyph. Real friction between identity and expression is described instead by Mercury's sign and house, and by its aspects to planets other than the Sun.
The conjunction
The conjunction is the ordinary case, present in roughly a third of charts. Thought and identity fuse, so opinions are held as personal rather than provisional, and the mind stays close to the life's direction. A very tight contact, called cazimi in older texts, is read by some traditions as concentrating the mind rather than overwhelming it. Objectivity about one's own reasoning is the skill acquired late.
Reading it in a chart
The orb settles how strongly this shows: a contact within a degree is a defining feature of a chart, one at the edge of the orb is a colouring. The signs the two planets occupy change the manner, the houses change the arena, and a third planet touching either of them can change the reading entirely.