Aries 25° (April 15)

The twelve signs of the Zodiac are unique combinations of the four elements (fire, earth, air, water) and the qualities (cardinal, fixed, mutable) respectively. As the third sign, Gemini is thus themutable-air sign. Now if we think about what all that implies, air signs being the domain of the mind and social experience, we might say mutable-air translates to thought itself, a swirl of information, what is in the air or ether and consciousness itself. Gemini people are abuzz. The sign’s planetary ruler Mercury, named for the heady, mercurial, eternally youthful god of communication, orbits, like a moth to a flame, closest to the Sun. The planet symbol, with its antennae’d circle “head” on a crossed staff, depicts the winged-capped god himself, but also birds and bees and all kinds of dual angels and insects and the beguiling fairies. The horned Puck is Oberon’s messenger as Mercury is Zeus’s.

Quicksilver Mercury speaks to the speed of thought. Gemini’s sign motto is I Think. Mercury (again that small orbit) is all about immediacy, not only in time but also in space. Mercury and Puck can be here or there in an instant. Mercury is the Psychopomp, “conductor of souls,” the only entity who can travel from heaven (Olympus) to hell (the Hades realm) and back again. He is the dual(istic) god of the crossroads, the dealmaker, forever coming and going, and he rules the characters one finds there—merchants and theives, magicians, , barkers, buskers, and every assortment of savvy streetwise folk. All such characters collectively add up to, if only metaphorically speaking, describing the fast-talking, clever Gemini people, the Zodiac’s truest operators. Mercury’s female counterpart is the likewise winged Eris, goddess of discord, whose main myth bring’s us to the Gemini characters of Castor and Pollux, the mortal and divine Twins (Quadruplets, really) of the sign.

Eris was the only goddess not invited to this one glam party on Olympus. She got even by causing a war which began with chucking in an apple on which she scribbled “for the fairest among you”—Hera , Athena and Aphrodite naturally thought it was for them. Jump-cut to the Judgment of Paris (prince of Troy) who over Hera (who offered power) and Athena (wisdom) as bribes for choosing them, he picked Aphrodite who offered him the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, who, along with her sister, Clytemnestra, were the other two quadruplets to the Gemini Twins. Helen was married, Paris abducted her, and the rest is tragedy. Mercury and Eris are master manipulators; their Disney counterparts being Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, among the modern archetypes of the Gemini people.

But let’s back up. The duality that is expressed by Castor and Pollux is that of mortality and immortality or divinity. In the bible myth, one is expelled from the garden (the fixed-earth Taurus) by biting into yet another apple which results, in what? Concsiousness! Which is characterized as duality and knowledge of opposities, good and evil and, yes, mortality and immortality. In fact, being booted from the garden, one is no longer granted everlasting life, let alone youth. Gemini personifies the duality of the human experience we all share. They vividly express various extremes, all of which come under the heading of that mortal/divine dichotomy. Gemini people seem to most easily occupy either end of the spectrum at once, like Mercury, god of the crossroads, the streets, the gutter, who can nonetheless ascend to the stars. Those crossroads symbolize our thoughts, or more accurately our choices. And Gemini people can more easily hold two opposing thoughts at once. They can be the most failingly human (embodiment of the fall energy) and the most soaringly “divine” in the expression of their soul, whether exhibited through their intellect or talent, the latter always seemingly fueled by the former. And sometimes they seem to express such divine talent as seems to be too much for their body to bear. Especially the women of the sign who push themselves beyond their limits, again, like a moth to a flame.

Whereas Aries is objectiveand Taurus is subjectiveenergy, Gemini combines the two, we have an energetic two-way street, input output, transmission. The energy of Gemini is literally electric and, moving our way down from the  Aries-ruled head and Taurus ruled throat and neck, Gemini rules the lungs, and also the arms (wings) while Mercury rules the nerves which you might say is the electrical system of the body, along with the wiring, those neurons firing into synapes, in the brain. Gemini people are surely nervy and they most easily get pushed to the exhaustion point on that score. Like Mercury, the mind is a trickster and it is literally formed by whatever thoughts are prevailing in our immediate enviroment as we are growing up—the third astrological house of Gemini rules early childhood conditiong as well as our sibling and sibling-like relationships that of our boon companions, such associations forming us the most during these formative years when, if we have the proper rearing, we might have the right choices made for us.

Peter Pan who eschews the word of grown-ups, needing both the company of other lost boys, his mini mob or gang, to reinforce his position as mercurial ring leader and, by the same token, he needs to infiltrate the minds of these other individuals, manipulating and forming their frames of mind to match his own hinged, as it is, on not wanting to grow up, living in a place that won’t recognize the passing of time, the ticking of that clock (inside the croc), forever wrestling with his shadow side which is determined to get away. Perhaps the shadow side of this dual figure is his repressed desire to face aging, death, morality, determined as he consciously is to keep on whistling in the graveyard; perhaps this is the only way he can fly, soar in his ambitions, via the power of positive thought, which can ill afford the entertaining of any limits, even inevitably natural ones. Geminis prefer to live by their wits and can be something of a rogue, a word that combines the good and the bad, into something hopefully benevolently badass. And it can get a little ugly, just as it might hit the heights of beatific experience. The individual who wrote the poetry of Walt Whitman or the person who sang the songs Judy Garland did might possess such divine insights or gifts that are beyond their human ability to bear them.

You’ve know doubt heard of Kubler Ross’s five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance; well, the whole of Gemini’s life is number three: something of a bargain (as it is for all of us but, again, Gemini people personify this point along with other Gemini experiential points) which needs negotiating, both two sides of the bargaining table comprising the Gemini personality. Gemini is forever making deals with themselves—rationalizing, letting the ends justify the means, allowing for a little hell, some guttersniping, so to reach intended heavenly stars. As such, Gemini’s are the most immersed of all people in the happenstance of human existence with it’s endless interpersonal interaction, details, to-do lists, dealmaking and minutae; and embracing this street-level, well, level of life (instead of struggling with, or feeling dogged by it, like many of us do) they actually elevate the experience of so-called quotidien existence to a more exalted state-of-being. Which begs the question: why do we label these certain aspects of life to be that of mere or banal existence? Compared to what? Why aren’t the workaday elements of life viewed as something sublime if not spiritual; for that matter why do we not view the entireties of our lives as spiritual existence. How did we get the idea that the workings of this world are happening on some solely physical plan devoid of the divine? Well, the answer is simple: The messaging stems from the Judeo-Christian story of that fall from grace, that boot from Eden, (and associative myths world-wide) which the sign of Gemini represents as a metaphysical and metaphorical snap-shot.  The point is we only know this life, we cannot be sure that another one awaits us, so why not approach even the most prosaic elements of it from the perspective that it is all part of the divine choreography we are dancing? The classic gods, with their super human characteristics, lied and cheated and raged and fell into depressions just as we do, chief among these being Mercury, a god of petty mischief and pranks, and yet a divine being all the same. Gemini’s apple doesn’t fall very far from that tree.

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

 

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
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