☿ Mercury ☌ Conjunction ♆ Neptune

0° · major aspect · neutral · default orb ±8°

Where Mercury signifies definition, number, and the named thing, Neptune in the modern literature signifies dissolution, image, and the unnamed, so their conjunction is read as intellect submerged in imagination. Practitioners since the planet's 1846 discovery tie the pair to poets and lyricists, to photography and film narrative, to inspired or unreliable speech, and to commerce touched by illusion, from advertising to outright fraud. The exact faculty and the oceanic one are held to interpenetrate, giving language that evokes more than it states and reasoning that arrives by atmosphere rather than by steps.

Traditional reading

Attribution must stay modern, since the classical planetary roster predates Neptune entirely. Mercury applies, as it does to every body but the Moon, meeting Neptune yearly while the outer planet drifts about two degrees per annum; whole birth-year cohorts therefore share the sign-level contact. Modern rulership schemes give Neptune the sign Pisces, one of Mercury's two signs of detriment and also its sign of fall, and practitioners fond of reception note that this places Mercury at its weakest exactly where Neptune is now said to be strongest.

Classical reading

Ptolemy treats conjunction as bodies sharing the same degree. Nature depends on the joined planets - benefic with Jupiter, malefic with Mars or Saturn.