⚺ Semi-sextile
Moon semi-sextile Mercury
Feelings articulate easily. Associated with good listeners, with people who explain difficult things kindly, and with an instinctive rather than trained understanding of others.
- Angle
- 30°
- Orb used
- ±2°
- Type
- Soft
- Bodies
- ☽ ☿
What these two are about together
Feeling and thinking. Whether what you feel can be put into words, and whether what you say matches what is going on underneath.
What a semi-sextile does
A semi-sextile puts two planets in adjacent signs, which share no element, no quality and no polarity. The tradition treats it as the mildest contact in the table and disagrees with itself about whether it is helpful at all: some read it as a small supportive link, others as a low-level irritation between two things that simply do not speak the same language. Both readings agree it is quiet.
How it reads
Feelings articulate easily. Associated with good listeners, with people who explain difficult things kindly, and with an instinctive rather than trained understanding of others.
In practice
Read as a minor note rather than a theme. A semi-sextile is worth mentioning when almost nothing else is in orb, and worth leaving out of a summary when anything major is.
What to watch for
Overreading it. Adjacent signs are genuinely awkward together, but at this strength the tradition does not expect the awkwardness to be conspicuous.
The two planets
Moon: Need, instinct and what settles you
Mercury: Mind, language and how you process
Moon and Mercury at other angles
- Moon conjunction MercuryTwo bodies at the same degree, acting as one
- Moon semi-square MercuryForty-five degrees apart: half a square, and read as half its weight
- Moon sextile MercurySixty degrees apart: cooperation that has to be taken up
- Moon quintile MercurySeventy-two degrees apart: a fifth of the circle, and the odd one out
- Moon square MercuryNinety degrees apart: two things that will not sit still together
- Moon trine MercuryA hundred and twenty degrees apart: the same element, working together
- Moon sesquiquadrate MercuryA hundred and thirty-five degrees: a square and a half
- Moon quincunx MercuryA hundred and fifty degrees apart: two things that cannot be compared
- Moon opposition MercuryDirectly across the chart: two ends of one axis
Find this in your own chart
A reading like this only tells you what the pairing is associated with. Whether Moon and Mercury actually make this angle in your chart depends on your birth date, time and place.