What is Depth Astrology? Click here to learn more.
|
 Mercury is never more than 30 degrees away from the Sun. That’s unique among the planets — all the others trek much further astray from the great ball of fire.
And if you know just a tad about Mercury and Sun’s roles in the birth chart, you can begin to appreciate the importance of our smallest, fastest planet.
In a nutshell, the Sun is the core of your identity, an expression of your essential energy. It is self-awareness and will, an urge toward Being Yourself, the drive to create a space for yourself, for your uniqueness, within the sphere of the world.
Mercury is the way you learn, know and communicate. Mercury trolls the environment for useful information that helps you know how to be, move, speak and act in the world. And then, in turn, he helps you communicate back out to the world. Mercury resides in the in-between spaces, the open space between you and me — and it’s what gets tossed back and forth in that space. It’s how I throw the ball to you and how you catch it. It’s how we know what we know, what we do with it, how we transmit it. Mercury helps us exchange and connect with the people around us — or not. But it’s not the relationship itself — that exists elsewhere.
The fact that Mercury is always close in to the Sun means that our ways of learning, knowing and communicating have a direct and real bearing on who we are and how we’re perceived in the world — whether that’s really who we are or not.
Consider a person you greatly admire, or someone who gets on your nerves. What it is that you love or loathe? Chances are, the way that person thinks and — especially — communicates is among the top attractors or detractors. People who speak haltingly, rudely or sloppily give the impression not just of speaking that way but of being that way. On the other hand, people who communicate with charisma, charm, kindness or other such qualities attract us because we believe that is who they are. And, in a way, it is.
In turn — in the true spirit of exchange that characterizes Mercury — the way someone speaks impacts the way we feel about ourselves in their presence. The charming person draws us into her orbit, makes us feel good being around her, makes us feel more important or loved or wanted. The rude person makes us feel unwanted or unloved — and, given enough time, power or both — diminishes our self-esteem.
Most importantly, whether you communicate quickly, lovingly, charmingly, rudely, whatever, that habit informs your own sense of self — your own Sun — whether you’re aware of it or not. (Much Mercury energy happens under the radar, so be careful what you say, and how you say it!). Learning, knowing and speaking are so ubiquitous that they can hardly help informing who we are.
An example: I was telling a friend a small story about my toddler the other day. Part of the story had my little boy banging on the door of our home office yelling, “Daddy! Daddy!” trying to get my husband, Alan, to come out. The office is two doors down the hallway from the room I was in, but in the interest of brevity, I just said, “Alan was in the next room, and the baby kept banging on the door.”
Over the next day or two, I realized that the memory had shifted so that, even in my own mind, my son was banging not on the office door — as he actually had — but on the bedroom door, which in fact is “the next room” in real life. I had spoken a small and presumably harmless lie, and the lie became truth in my mind. Just like that, even though I consciously knew the truth.
What do we become when we speak? Do we speak from what we are? Or do we become who we are through what we speak?
Remember the case of Nature v. Nurture? And how the brilliant psychoneuro- biologists finally resolved it with a burning, complex, insightful answer (“Uh, it’s both, people.”)?
Well, the even-more-esoteric among us have been taking sides for years in a similar debate: Opposites Attract v. Likes Attract. Which is it?
Uh. It’s both.
Because, like Nature and Nurture, if you look deeply enough, Opposites and Likes are so intertwined that, ultimately, they find the seeds of themselves in the other.
Huh?
Look: The astrological chart is comprised of opposites. Because it’s a circle, every point is exactly 180 degrees away from exactly one other point in the chart. Yet at the same time, every point is really the same as its opposite because both are equidistant from the Self — from the center of the circle. No point can exist on the circle without the tension wrought by its polar opposite.
So any given planet, sign or house in the chart is — often unwillingly, often resentfully — beholden for its very existence to the energy of whatever opposes it. The opposite is what anchors it in place, what makes it part of the whole, what ties it to the core, to the Self.
If we ignore the energy pulling on the other end of the rope, it gets stronger and yanks the rope away and runs wild around our lives while we’re standing there without a rope.
Or, conversely, if we pull too hard, get too attached to a particular way of being, the opposing force loses steam and lets go. And we fall on our asses. And if we still insist on holding tight, instead of getting up to offer a sportsman’s handshake, the opposite comes up from behind and kicks us while we’re down.
This opposite stuff is what Carl Jung termed the shadow — the very stuff we’d rather ignore, rather deny in ourselves. If we’re perfectly happy swimming in our Sagittarius soup, why on earth would we try to engage its opposite, Gemini?
Because if we don’t, the world will do it for us. Deny your shadow and the world sends it forth in spades.
And because if we deny that energy, we’re not really living up to the potential of what comes naturally. The blow-me-away insights of Sagittarius mean little unless they’re grounded in the everyday understanding of Gemini. Internal Scorpionic instinct is well-buttressed by the external Taurean senses. Capricorn does better standing on the shoulders of giants than climbing on the backs of the little guys — both possible ways of using the Cancer energy that stands opposite Capricorn.
I’ve been reminded of this lately as I’ve been planning a workshop on Libra. (E-mail me at enantiodromia1@verizon.net for more info about the workshop this September in the Los Angeles Foothills.) At its core, Libra is about balance — in aesthetics, in relationships, in society, in ideas. As I looked for images of balance to share with my students, I saw a lot of healthy meals, scales of justice and perfectly symmetrical flowers. These were nice. They communicate Libra energy well enough.
But the images with the most energy were the ones of gymnasts on balance beams and daredevils on tightropes — the images that incorporated Libra’s opposite, bold and daring Aries, into the mix. Not that it’s easy to eat healthy or achieve justice or grow a perfect flower. But the energy in those images was pretty one-sided. Flat. There was Like, but there was no obvious Opposite to give the true flavor of what was there. I wanted to see the chocolate ice cream alongside the salad, the attorneys’ arguments that led to the just judgment, the seedling’s bold decision to press through the soil and open its face into wild sunlight.
I wanted to see Libra’s true nature — the smooth cool that is energized by raucous Aries, the saint that welcomes the rebel, the astoundingly bold and balanced walk across the nauseatingly-high tightrope. The tension that brings deep meaning to the balance that Libra so delights in.
Jung identified the tension of opposites as a core affliction of the human spirit — one that produces shadow material in each of us, unless we accept and integrate the opposites. If we pretend that Libran balance doesn’t matter, that the only important thing is the crazy guts needed to run across the rope, we fall deep into the chasm below. But if we pretend that we’re entirely balance and peace and light, the Aries daredevil will chase us into Hell and back till we take a deep breath and step out onto that tightrope.
And balance there.
 Lunching with a friend this afternoon, she told me she’d had her chart read once and that it’s amazing how accurate it is. I agreed and then couldn’t help adding, “When it’s done right.” She agreed back. She’d had a good experience, for which I’m always grateful.
But it got me wondering what I meant by that. What’s “right” in astrology? Everyone has their own version. So here’s mine.
I have a decided bias against readings that don’t penetrate the personality deeply. Just skimming the surface (How should I invest my money? Who is my ideal partner? What kind of job should I get?) might provide some useful and true information. But it neglects the roots of issues embedded in the personality, which can be seen all over the chart — if it’s viewed and utilized that way. (Superficial readings also, by the way, place control in the hands of the astrologer, ultimately leaving the client as unempowered as they were upon arrival.)
Take matter, for instance. No, really. Matter generally looks solid to us, unmoving. The book on the shelf is just sitting there; the phone on the desk, the curtains covering the window, the sleeve encasing my arm. All appear stable. But if we look closer — as closely, as deeply, as we can — we know now that each one of these things is made up of molecules that are jiggling, spinning, dancing and swimming around each other fluidly, beautifully, perhaps mercurially.
Similarly, if we look out the window, we see the city or the yard or whatever’s out there beyond the walls, in all its solid and stable glory. We know the earth will hold us up, the same streets will be there predictably day after day, the same buildings, the same trees. But earth is spinning on its axis at about 800 miles per hour in the U.S. (more than 1,000 mph at the Equator) and orbiting the Sun at about 67,000 miles per hour. So, like the things that surround us that appear “inanimate,” the earth itself isn’t exactly unmoving, either.
So the level at which we exist is one that’s able to perceive movement as stillness — for the very practical purpose of negotiating a state of being that we come to know as “reality.” Some people are more comfortable with this practical reality than others. But we should not forget that even the most earthy or stable of personalities — those with fixed squares, for example, or lots of planets in Taurus, or strong Saturn energy — are moving, too. Their emotional lives may (or may not) be less apparent than others’, or what others describe as their stubbornness or laziness may simply be slowness as they work to integrate all those molecules spinning underneath. They may need more time to observe, to test, to taste, to dip their toes in before plunging into the lake that their Sagittarian friend is already halfway across.
Everything is matter in our world. We come into the world through the mother — mater – matter — almost as a fierce reminder or admonishment that that’s what this life is about. We live in a physical 3-D reality, bounded, governed, limited by the laws of matter: Two things cannot exist in the same place at the same time. Matter cannot be created, just converted. And so on.
Yet a whole different reality lies beneath and above the apparent stillness of matter. Penetrating beneath our everyday assumptions, moving out beyond our usual periphery, we see that “fixed” matter is actually in constant motion. It’s going places within itself and far beyond. It’s churning, it’s dancing inside, it’s encompassing entire solar systems beyond our range of vision.
We just have to get close enough, or step back far enough, to see.
 A friend gave birth this morning, and of course my first instinct (after tearing up, staring at the pictures and sending my excited congratulations) was to check out the child’s birth chart.
It is an extraordinary thing to look at the chart of a new person because, like the baby, it is pure potential. It is the clay just now quarried, which could eventually become brick, pipe, pot or sculpture — nobody yet knows. Stories are not yet inscribed on this chart, just lines, colors and shapes that hold the unsullied energy of the newborn.
It is a profound exercise in imagination to look at a new chart, a new child, and feel the unfathomable hope of total potential open your own heart to the possibilities of the world.
Welcome, sweet girl.
|
What People Say “Truly gifted astrologers are a rarity. Kathy Crabb is one such person. She is a brilliant, original thinker, an intuitive and empathic counselor and a superb workshop facilitator.”
Pam Tyler, Dip. API (1981), Dip. FAS (1979),
AFA Teacher Cert. (1978); Astrologer since 1977;
Co-founder of Astrological Psychology Institute (UK);
Author of Mercury: Anatomy of a Planet
Get Our Blog Updates Your Way!
contact lenses - Lens.com offers a huge online inventory of brand name contact lenses with reasonably priced prices. Services include online order and shipping straight to you.
|
Mercury is never more than 30 degrees away from the Sun. That’s unique among the planets — all the others trek much further astray from the great ball of fire.
Recent Comments