Mercury Opposition Mercury Synastry: When You Each Describe the Same Subject from the Other Side

Every birth chart has a Mercury: how you think, talk and trade words, from how quickly you pick up a point to how you phrase it. In Mercury opposition Mercury, your Mercury and their Mercury are about 180° apart, half the way round the zodiac, so that each sits where the other looks straight across. Each of you has a Mercury, so the contact is the same from either side: your Mercury and their Mercury, their Mercury and your Mercury. This page therefore writes to you two. Neither of you is the one who talks while the other answers.

An opposition usually joins two opposite signs, six apart, which share an axis: every sign has exactly one sign opposite it. Opposite signs also belong to the same mode (cardinal, fixed or mutable), and this page draws no conclusion from that. Usually, not always: when a Mercury sits near the edge of a sign, the two can fall in signs that are not exact opposites. That is the geometry. The reading built on the angle is polarity: not the same place, as in a conjunction, and not an angle that joins nearby places, but two positions that face each other.

It can turn up between friends, siblings, colleagues, flatmates, or a parent and their child as well as between partners, and it is only one of many contacts in any two charts.

When two Mercuries face each other, the same subject can reach each of you from a different position. You may talk about one subject and find that you word it differently or take it at a different pace. A point you made may come back to you in another form: as a question where you made a statement, or as an example where you made a general remark.

This matches the reading for the contact: a thing may sometimes need explaining or saying twice, because the wording and pace that are natural from where you stand may not be natural from where the other stands.

An axis has two sides, and in this contact each of you is on both. Your Mercury looks across at theirs, and theirs looks across at yours, so each of you is the one who is answered from across and the one who answers from across. The contact rests on the angle and nothing else, so it says nothing about who is faster, louder or more careful. Either of you may be any of those on a given day, and on a different day the other may be.

The reading for this contact speaks of differences in pace or style. The angle gives no way to say which difference, so this page does not assign one to either of you: on a given day it may be a matter of vocabulary, of how much is said before the point, or of how a question is put.

One thing this contact can give is a reply that comes from across. When you say something, the answer you get may not be an echo, and that can make a remark easier to hear in full. Another thing you can each give is a second wording of something you both know, offered in your own pace and your own terms.

What each of you may want is to have your own wording heard in full before the other's begins, and to have the difference between the two taken as two ways of saying one thing and not as a dispute over which is correct. Being asked what you meant, in place of being told, may matter to both of you.

Each of you can also give the other a question put in unfamiliar words, which may make an old subject sound new.

These are sketches, not reports: illustrations of how the contact might show up across different kinds of pairs.

• Colleagues. Two colleagues sit in on the same interview. Afterwards each reports one answer. The facts match, and the two reports use different words, so they read like different people's.
• Friends. Two friends name the same song as their favourite and describe it in different words. Each finds the other's description unfamiliar.
• Parent and child. A parent and their child watch the same documentary. At dinner each retells one scene, and the two retellings use different words and sound like two different programmes.
• Cousins. Two cousins empty a grandparent's garage and talk about the same Christmas. Both start with the board game, and they word it differently.
• Flatmates. Two flatmates write the advert for their old drum kit. Both begin with its colour and then describe it in different terms, so the advert, for now, has two descriptions.
• Classmates. Two classmates present one project in two halves. The topic is the same in both halves, and the wording of the second sounds like a different voice from the first.
• Neighbours. Two neighbours each phone the council about the same noise. One calls it a rattle and the other a hum, and the officer asks whether it is one noise or two.
• Teammates. Two teammates tell their coach about the same sore ankle, one as "a twinge" and the other as "a bit tender". The coach asks which it is.
• Partners. Two partners explain the same kitchen job to an electrician. Both say "by the window", in different words, and the electrician has heard two slightly different jobs.

In each sketch both people speak about the same thing, and the wording and the pace do not quite coincide.

Because the contact is about position and not about topic, it can show in the way a conversation is arranged.

Across a table. Sitting opposite each other over a meal, you may find a topic taken up in the other's wording and then handed back in yours.

In turns. In a back-and-forth, each reply may be worded a little differently from the remark it answers, so a topic can come back to you in a new form.

To a third person. If you tell the same story to a visitor, the visitor may hear two tellings in different wording, each complete in itself.

In writing. In a message thread, the same news may be written up twice in different words, and each version may be complete.

Naming things. When you each give a name to something new, such as a pet, a plan or a shared joke, two names may be offered, and both may be partly right.

In an ordinary week a remark of yours may meet a reply formed from the position you are not in, and a remark of theirs may meet the same from you. A third person listening to both of you may hear two accounts of one subject.

Nothing about the angle says whether the two accounts are close or far apart on a given day. It says only that they are made from places that face each other.

The older sources used here say nothing about two Mercuries half the circle apart. The only passage among them that speaks of the same planet in two charts is James Wilson's (*A Complete Dictionary of Astrology*, 1819, p. 381, under "Sympathy"). It is about the same place, which is a conjunction, and not about an opposition, so nothing from it is used here. Nothing in the sources used here tells an opposition from a square.

The distinction this page draws, that an opposition reads as polarity because it joins two positions that face each other across the zodiac, rests on the angle of about 180° and on the signs facing each other. It is an editorial reading, not something the older books say about Mercury and Mercury. The same goes for everything else on this page: how the two of you talk, what each gives and may want, the everyday settings and the sketches, which are illustrations.

• You may describe the same event in different words.
• A remark of yours may come back to you as a question from the other side.
• You may notice that you take your turns at different speeds.
• A thing may need telling twice, and the second telling is not quite a repeat.
• A third person listening to both of you may hear two tellings of one thing.