Combustion

Combustion is one of three conditions that describe a planet's nearness to the Sun, and the most difficult of them. A planet is combust when it sits within about eight and a half degrees of the Sun, close enough that its light is lost in the glare and it cannot be seen in the sky. A combust planet is treated as overwhelmed, as if the Sun has burned away its ability to act on its own terms. The matters it governs can be obscured, tangled up with ego or willfulness, or hard for a person to see clearly in themselves. A combust Mercury, for instance, can bind thinking so tightly to identity that a person struggles to tell their own ideas apart from their sense of self. The planet's nature is not destroyed, but it labors to express itself freely while overshadowed, and the effect grows stronger the closer it sits to the Sun. The work of a combust planet is to bring its hidden energy into conscious awareness, owning a part of the self that tends to operate unseen.