| Sun in | Cancer |
|---|---|
| Moon in | Cancer |
| Moon phase | New Moon |
| Illumination | 1% |
| Ingresses | Moon enters Cancer Venus enters Cancer |
| Exact aspects | Mercury sextile Saturn |
| Mercury retrograde | Yes |
Venus enters Cancer today and begins a new chapter of its cycle there. Mercury and Saturn stand about sixty degrees apart today, a sextile, traditionally read as an easy, cooperative angle. The Moon is in Cancer, near new and all but invisible beside the Sun. Mercury is retrograde.
A sextile is a sixty degree angle between two bodies, two signs apart, and it reads as an opportunity that has to be picked up rather than one that arrives on its own.
Sixty degrees is a third of the way to an opposition, and it connects signs of compatible elements: fire with air, earth with water. That is why the traditional reading is cooperative rather than tense.
The classical distinction between a sextile and a trine is effort. A trine tends to happen to you; a sextile is available if you do something with it.
That makes the sextile one of the easier aspects to use deliberately, and one of the easiest to sleep through.