∠ Semi-square
Moon semi-square Mercury
What is felt and what is said pull apart. Read as anxiety, as talking oneself out of a valid instinct, and as the specific frustration of not being able to explain something that is perfectly clear internally.
- Angle
- 45°
- Orb used
- ±2°
- Type
- Hard
- 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-square does
A semi-square is exactly half a square, and the tradition reads it as the same kind of friction at a smaller scale. Where a square describes a conflict that has to be dealt with, a semi-square describes the sort of persistent low-grade annoyance that never quite forces the issue and never quite goes away either.
How it reads
What is felt and what is said pull apart. Read as anxiety, as talking oneself out of a valid instinct, and as the specific frustration of not being able to explain something that is perfectly clear internally.
In practice
Read as irritation rather than demand. Kepler took the minor hard aspects seriously and much of the tradition since has treated them as real but secondary, which is the reading this site uses.
What to watch for
Accumulation. One semi-square is a footnote. Several of them to the same planet is the tradition's picture of somebody worn down by things too small to name.
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-sextile MercuryThirty degrees apart: neighbouring signs, with little in common
- 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.