Mercury Sextile Venus: Tact and Taste That Grow With Use

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Mercury sextile Venus means the two planets were between 54° and 66° apart at your birth, the range Astrologist.com uses for a sextile. It's read as an easy working link between the way you think and speak and the things you value and enjoy. Like every sextile, it tends to work best when you use it on purpose: the talent is there, but it needs practice to show.

It is the widest aspect Mercury and Venus can ever make. They never get more than about 74° apart, so there is no natal Mercury square, trine or opposition Venus.

The Sun is always in the middle

This is the unusual part. Mercury stays within about 28° of the Sun and Venus within about 47°. The only way to get them 54° or more apart is to put them on opposite sides of the Sun, one ahead of it in the zodiac and one behind.

We checked every day from 1900 to 2099 with the calculator's own planetary routines. Mercury and Venus were sextile on 8,460 of those days, 11.6% of the total, and on every single one the Sun sat between them. In sky terms, one planet was rising before the Sun as a morning object and the other setting after it as an evening object.

Here's how that looks in an actual chart. At noon in London on 17 February 1987, the Sun was at 28°17' Aquarius, Mercury at 14°22' Pisces and Venus at 13°58' Capricorn. Mercury was about 16° ahead of the Sun, Venus about 44° behind, and the two were 60.4° apart: a sextile less than half a degree from exact.

What it may describe

Diplomacy you can call on. You may be able to say difficult things in a way people can take in, especially once you've had some practice.

A link between ideas and beauty. Writing with a good ear, explaining things through images, choosing words for their sound: these are common outlets.

Pleasant company. Conversation may feel like a natural way to build closeness, and people may enjoy talking with you without quite knowing why.

Taste with reasons behind it. You might be good at saying why something works, whether that's a song, a room or a compromise.

These are tendencies, not guarantees. A sextile is a mild aspect, and a loud square elsewhere in the chart can easily drown it out.

How it differs from the conjunction

In a Mercury-Venus conjunction, thought and taste are fused; it can be hard to tell where one ends. In the sextile, the two stay distinct and cooperate. You might think quite analytically, in a Mercury sign that has nothing soft about it, and still have a reliable sense of how to make an idea welcome.

Because the Sun sits between them, the sextile also means Mercury and Venus are not both crowding the Sun. Each can carry more of its own sign's character.

Signs and elements

A sextile usually joins signs two apart, which pairs fire with air or earth with water. In the February 1987 example, Venus in Capricorn (earth) supports Mercury in Pisces (water): practical values backing an imaginative, intuitive mind. Read each planet through its own sign first, using the Mercury signs and Venus signs guides, and then ask how the two styles help each other.

Retrograde is rare here

Venus was retrograde on only 26 of the 8,460 sextile days in our sample, about 0.3%. That makes sense: Venus is retrograde only around its pass between Earth and the Sun, while the sextile usually needs Venus well out to one side. Mercury retrograde is more common during the sextile, at about 14% of those days (1,206 of 8,460), because Mercury's swings are shorter and quicker.

Making it work

Sextiles reward attention. Some ways people put this one to use:

• writing, editing or translating with an ear for tone
• teaching, coaching or mediating, where the delivery matters as much as the content
• design, music or craft work that needs both a plan and a sense of what's pleasing
• simply being the person in a group who can phrase the awkward thing

If none of that rings true yet, it may just mean the aspect hasn't been asked to work much.

Checking your chart

On the wheel of your free birth chart, a sextile is drawn as a blue dashed line. Look for one running between ☿ and ♀, with ☉ somewhere between the two glyphs. To confirm, read the three degrees from the planet table and add up the gap. Mercury and Venus can drift by up to about 2.8° in a day relative to each other, so a gap near 54° or 66° may depend on the birth time.

Related pages

• Which aspects Sun, Mercury and Venus can make
• Moon sextile Venus, a sextile that links Venus with emotional needs
• The five major aspects
• All aspects

For help reading this sextile next to the rest of your chart, ask in Ask the Astrologist.