Mercury Sextile Jupiter Synastry: When How One of You Talks Meets What Widens the Other's World, from Two Different Places

Every birth chart has a Mercury and a Jupiter. Mercury is how you talk and think: the questions you ask, how you take in information and pass it on, the everyday exchange of remarks, messages and explanations. Jupiter is what widens your world: curiosity about the bigger picture, encouragement, generosity, an appetite for learning, for a good idea and for more of whatever interests you.

In a sextile, one person's Mercury is about 60° from the other person's Jupiter, a sixth of the way round the zodiac. A sextile usually joins signs of two different elements, fire with air or earth with water (usually, not always: near the edge of a sign, the pattern can shift).

That is the geometry. The reading built on it is a fit between differences, which this page reads as elements that get on: the way one of you puts things and the way the other's world widens do not come from the same temperament, and this page reads them as fitting, like two tools that do one job.

This contact can appear between friends, siblings, classmates, colleagues, flatmates, or a parent and their child as readily as between partners.

In this contact one of you brings the Mercury and the other brings the Jupiter, linked as above. Call them the Mercury person and the Jupiter person.

If the link also runs the other way, from the Jupiter person's Mercury to the Mercury person's Jupiter, each of you is both.

One thing this contact can give is a conversation with two kinds of input. Either of you may supply a point and either may supply the encouragement to follow it. The two signs differ in element, so what comes back may not be a copy of what was said.

Either of you may want an idea answered with a question, or an enthusiasm answered with a detail.

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

• Flatmates. Two flatmates draft a letter about a damp wall. Each adds a line to the other's, and the second paragraph comes out in both their words.
• Colleagues. Two colleagues sketch plans for a one-day book swap. Sentences go back and forth, and the plan gains a reason for existing.
• Siblings. Two siblings find a box of old negatives. They take turns holding them to the window and guessing where each was taken.
• Friends. Two friends rehearse a sales pitch for a market tray of jams, taking turns to improve it until it has a last line.
• Parent and child. A parent and their child invent rules for a dice game, each adding one rule in turn.

Each sketch shows two people adding in turn.

The two signs differ in element.

The contact can show up in small exchanges as readily as large ones.

The older sources used here have no stored passage that bears on a Mercury and a Jupiter in any aspect. One of them, Vivian Robson's *A Students' Text-Book of Astrology* (1922), has a list of kinds of tie between planets on p. 141 that names the pair. That line is not among the passages checked for this page, and nothing from it is used.

Nothing in the older sources used here tells a trine from a sextile, so the distinction this page makes, that a sextile reads as a fit between differences, rests on the kinds of sign it usually joins (fire with air, or earth with water). It is an editorial reading, not something the older books say about Mercury and Jupiter. The same goes for everything else on this page, including the sketches, which are illustrations.

• Either of you may supply a point, and either may make it bigger.
• The answer you get may differ a little from the one you expected.
• You may each notice something the other would not have mentioned.