Mercury Sextile Mercury Synastry: When Two Ways of Talking Fit Together

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 sextile Mercury, your Mercury and their Mercury are about 60° apart, a sixth of the way round the zodiac. 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, and neither of you is the one who talks while the other listens.

A sextile usually joins two signs two apart, which are of the same polarity but different element: fire with air, or earth with water. (Polarity is the split of the twelve signs into two sets, fire and air in one, earth and water in the other.) One sign lies between them, so your two Mercuries are near neighbours in the zodiac. (Usually, not always: a sextile that starts near the edge of a sign can reach into another pairing.) That is the geometry. The reading built on it is a fit between differences. You are not in the same place, as in a conjunction, and not in the same kind of place, as in a trine, but in places that suit each other, like two neighbouring dialects of one language.

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.

Because the elements differ, each of you has a way of putting things that the other might not have chosen: a different first example, a different kind of detail, a different sense of what is worth saying. Because the elements share a polarity, those differences may feel like variations on one manner and not like foreign ones. You may find yourself borrowing the other's phrase for something, or noticing that the other's way of describing a problem makes it easier to hold.

Conversation between you can run smoothly, as the reading for this contact describes, with the points broadly agreed and the details a little different. Little needs repeating, because the two ways of talking sit close enough that the sense carries over. What one of you says in a quick, vivid way and what the other says in a considered or concrete way may turn out to be two descriptions of one thing.

A sextile joins signs that differ in element, so it brings less sameness than a trine. The fit is there, and it shows up when there is something to talk about. It gives you a second way into a subject and leaves the choice of subject to you.

A question put to the other can bring an answer in a different form from the one you expected, and that form may turn out to be a useful one. A plan made together can have two sets of details, one of which would have been missed by either alone. A quiet evening may hold stretches of silence and then a remark that the other takes up in their own words. A decision may be settled by one of you describing it and the other restating it in a way that is easier to act on, and the roles can swap the next time. A flat moment may be easier to talk through when the other's wording differs a little from the one you have been repeating to yourself. A disagreement may be easier to hear when it comes in wording unlike your own.

One thing this contact can give is a second way in. Each of you can offer a framing, an example or a word that the other would not have reached alone, and that fits when it is offered. You can also give each other a listener who is not a copy: someone who follows what you mean and still brings something to it.

What each of you may want is for the offer to be taken up. A suggested phrase that is noticed and used, a question that is answered in full, a thought that is built on and not merely acknowledged: these can matter to both of you. Your own manner of speaking being treated as a good way to say things, and not as an oddity to be translated, may matter as well. Each of you can also be a source of new phrasing: a way of saying something that the other starts to use.

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

• Colleagues. Two colleagues write the script for a customer helpline. One draft is crisp, the other warm. Read aloud for the first time, the combined version sounds like neither of them and both.
• Friends. Two friends choose a name for their neighbourhood litter-picking group. One offers a pun and the other a plain name, and the one they keep carries both, a pun with a plain subtitle.
• Siblings. Two siblings draft the invitation for a parent's birthday. One supplies the details, the other the first line, and the card reads as one voice.
• Parent and child. A parent and their child practise Spanish phrases on a long car journey. Each has a few phrases the other keeps mixing up, and each is quicker than the other on a different set.
• Partners. Two partners plan the route for a day out. One reads the map in terms of distances, the other in terms of places worth stopping, and the route they settle on is neither a straight line nor a detour.
• Flatmates. Two flatmates write a sign for the shared bicycle store. One writes the rule, the other adds the reason, and the sign turns out taller than the door.

In each sketch two different ways of putting things are laid side by side and fit.

A sextile joins two elements of the same polarity, so the pair of Mercuries brings two flavours of the same activity. In plain terms, for Mercury: fire is quick and vivid, earth is concrete and exact, air is ideas and comparison, and water is impression and tone.

Fire with air. Quick and vivid meets ideas and comparison. It might look like two colleagues co-presenting at a staff briefing: each takes a turn with the quick, vivid point and a turn with the thread of the argument, and the next point passes back and forth without a pause.

Earth with water. Concrete and exact meets impression and tone. It might look like two siblings choosing words for a get-well message to a cousin: one picks the facts worth mentioning, the other the tone in which to mention them.

A sextile is a fit, and a fit is not a conversation by itself. The ease is there when a subject is on the table; if neither of you raises one, nothing about the contact makes a topic appear.

The fit does not push, so it may take a topic to bring it out: a task, a shared interest or a question gives it something to work on, and the fit may show only then.

And because the match is a match of differences, the version of a thing that one of you finds natural may not be the one the other would write down. Where the two versions sit close together, that can be useful; where they sit slightly apart, it can be pleasant to compare.

The older sources used here say nothing about two Mercuries a sixth of 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 a sextile, so nothing from it is used here. Nothing in the sources used here tells a sextile from a trine.

The distinction this page draws, that a sextile reads as a fit between differences because it usually pairs fire with air or earth with water, rests on the signs differing in element while sharing a polarity. 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 pairings of elements and the sketches, which are illustrations.

• Conversation between you may run easily even when you put things differently.
• You may borrow each other's phrases.
• One of you may supply the example where the other has the point, and the other way round.
• You may find that little needs saying twice.
• A suggestion from one of you may come back from the other with a different example attached.