Mercury will oppose retrograde Saturn from Aries to Libra for the last time this weekend. Taking place at the same time as an immensely auspicious Scorpio Full Moon while Mars vents volcanically at the south bending of the lunar nodes, a little old opposition of Mercury and Saturn may not seem like much. A closer look reveals a sleeper, a dark horse, a ringer, a game-changer, essentially a double opposition, symbolizing a unique opportunity to locate your place in the scheme of things as though you were finding your position on a map.
This weekend Earth will be located between Mercury and Saturn. That’s an opposition, seen as objects on opposite sides of a zodiac circle. In a rare concurrence, Mercury and Saturn will be simultaneously contra-parallel, an aspect most charts leave out because of how our solar system is laid out.
All the planets visible to your unaided eye (and a good many other objects) orbit the Sun in approximately the same geometric plane we do. Because of that, the visible planets appear to follow much the same path across the night sky that the Sun’s apparent motion traces during the day. That single fact makes it possible to represent the three-dimensional solar system with the two dimensional zodiac circle diagram you see so often. It’s a form of shorthand, leaving the near-constant of latitude unstated, emphasizing the longitudinal position of other planets relative to Earth. What variation of latitude does exist is usually represented separately as a relation to the surface of the Earth, and measured in degrees of declination above or below the equator.