By Len Wallick
The Sun, retrograde Mercury and Venus take turns conjoining each other within the span of a single day next Tuesday. That makes it essentially a single event, a triple conjunction. As aspects go, it will be brief. That brevity places a premium on awareness and presence. In your experience, it will be an opportunity to be conscious of the difference between self-awareness and self-involvement.
Conjunctions take place when objects occupy the same place in the same sign. When that happens, their archetypes are merged. That merger further takes on the qualities of its space and time. It is a coming together. As a rule, any combination of planets spend a lot more time apart than together. Therefore, when they conjoin, it symbolizes a beginning. That is especially true for Mercury.
This triple conjunction will find Mercury halfway through its period of retrograde, when it appears to be moving backwards because it is actually passing us by. It will be positioned between the Earth and Sun. That is called an interior, or ‘inferior’ conjunction. It corresponds to the position of the New Moon. Thus it is for all intents and purposes, a ‘new’ Mercury, beginning a new 116-day cycle. The situation is not the same for Venus.
This triple conjunction finds Venus on the other side of the Sun, at its furthest distance from our planet. That is called an exterior, or ‘superior’ conjunction. It is halfway between being in the East before dawn and returning to visibility in the West after sunset and in the middle of its cycle between one horizon and the other. Venus is not ‘new’ in the same sense that Mercury is, rather it is renewed as the eastern and western parts of its journey reach a crossroads. Therefore, if we were positioned directly above the solar system, looking down, we would be able to thread an imaginary straight line from Earth through Mercury first, then through the Sun to Venus on the other side. That sort of thing does not happen very often.