Crossings
Mercury–Venus crossing
Words with charm, on lines that run side by side. Where a Mercury line crosses a Venus line on your map, both planets were on angles at the moment you were born, and the latitude through that point is a Mercury–Venus paran.
On this page
What the Mercury–Venus crossing means
Mercury never gets more than about 28° from the Sun and Venus never more than about 47°, so the two are never more than about 76° apart in the sky and usually much nearer. That shapes this pair on the map more than anything else. Their two MC lines tend to sit a few degrees of longitude apart, their rising lines follow each other down the globe, and the places where one is on the meridian while the other rises or sets mostly fall far north or far south. Measured over thirty years of birth dates, most Mercury–Venus parans lie beyond 60° of latitude, around Helsinki and Anchorage or nearer the pole.
So for most people the pair works as two lines in company. Where the Mercury MC and Venus MC run close, the strip between them reads as a place for work that sells on taste: copywriting, design, the arts pages, diplomacy, a shop with a good window. Between the two rising lines the textbook gives you a pleasant way of talking and an easy time being liked in a new town, and between the setting lines a partner you never run out of things to say to.
Nobody here wants to say the hard thing. Mercury takes on the colour of whatever it touches, and with Venus it turns agreeable: compliments come easily, criticism gets softened until it means nothing, and a contract drafted between friends leaves out the awkward clauses. Check whether a Saturn or Mars line runs near enough to give the talk some edge.
Where they meet on your map
Your Mercury MC and IC lines run from pole to pole, and so do your Venus ones, so those four never meet. Each of them crosses the other planet's rising and setting curve once, which makes up to four crossings of a meridian line with a horizon line, and the rising and setting curves of the two can cross each other as well. Where they fall depends on the moment you were born: every chart has them, though some land in the middle of an ocean or too near a pole to be drawn.
At a crossing both planets were on angles in the same place at the same moment. Move east or west along that latitude and the same two still reach their angles together, only at another time of day, so astrocartography reads the whole latitude as a Mercury–Venus paran. Zenith Map draws it as a band 1° (about 110 km) either side, and its weight in a place's score fades with distance from the latitude.
Birth time
A wrong birth time moves every line, and the crossings with them: an hour's error puts each crossing 15° of longitude east or west, more than 1,600 km at the equator. The paran latitude hardly moves, because it depends on where the two planets were in the sky rather than on the time of day; in the engine's test charts an hour shifts it by about a tenth of a degree or less nine times out of ten. With an uncertain birth time, trust the paran before the crossing. What a doubtful birth time does to a map.
Questions
Why do my Mercury and Venus lines run so close together?
Both planets stay near the Sun, so they're never more than about 76° apart in the sky and most of the time much closer. Each line marks where its planet was overhead, underfoot, rising or setting, so two planets close in the sky give lines close on the map. If Mercury and Venus were conjunct when you were born, their lines of the same angle can sit almost on top of each other.
Is the Mercury–Venus crossing good for writers?
For writing that has to please, yes: copy, criticism, lyrics, letters, books about art, food or fashion. The pair is lighter on the stamina a long manuscript needs, which astrocartography gives to Saturn. Since this pair's crossings often fall at high latitudes, a city within orb of both MC lines or both rising lines is usually the practical choice.
Where do Mercury–Venus parans fall on the map?
For most birth dates, a long way from the equator. At the equator a planet takes six hours to climb from the horizon to the meridian, and two planets this close in the sky can only be on those two angles at once where that climb is much shorter or longer, which means far north or far south. Most Mercury–Venus parans lie beyond 60° north or south, so the pair usually matters more as two neighbouring lines than as a latitude.
Mercury lines and the paran bands are drawn with Pro; the free map shows the Sun, Moon, Venus and Jupiter.