Question Everything
In a mere five days, on May 20, the Sun moves into Gemini ushering in Gemini season 2024.
This means for the next 30 days Mercury is the planet being highlighted by the rays of the Sun.
The connecting planet that allows us to make sense of and understand our worldly experiences, Mercury governs our perceptions about our lives.
Mercury often gets short shrift in chart interpretation, and it’s sad because without Mercury we have no way of making sense of our experience. It is no wonder that Mercury is the guardian of thresholds; when we change our mind we change our life. We move from one space to another crossing into new experiences.
Ah, that’s the crux of it all, isn’t it? It’s not really that easy to shift the way we perceive the world around us. Most of us, no matter how much we might argue to the contrary, are fairly attached to our perceptions about well, everything. Our inner cosmos, colored by our interpretation of our experience, both remembered and those in our subconscious, essentially dictates every choice we make, every reaction, or response to the universe around us.
We are in an ongoing conversation with life that we most often don’t even realize we are having.
Furthermore, it’s our ideas about our lives that determine what we make of those lives.
In Greek myth most associated with Gemini, the twins Castor and Pollux, also known as the Dioscuri, are forever immortalized when the mortal twin is killed in battle and the immortal twin goes to his father, Zeus/Jupiter, because he feels he cannot live without him and they strike as bargain; that from that moment forward they alternated each day, one twin brother being in the world of the living, the other in the underworld and then vice-versa the next day.
This beautifully reflects the “twining” dance between our inner and outer worlds. They are inextricably intertwined.
One of Mercury’s many roles is that of psychopomp, guiding souls between worlds.
According to Carl Jung, the figure of the Psychopomp acts not only as a bridge between Life and Death, It is also an intermediary between the conscious and the unconscious, our inner and outer worlds. Mercury is our archetypal guide to the hidden corners within ourselves. He brings us messages from our dreams, but also from our subconscious, our own personal underworld, where our shadow is kept. The parts of ourselves that we have rejected ironically out of fear of ourselves. It’s worth remembering the symbolism of the caduceus carried by Hermes/Mercury both heals as well as provokes slumber.
Gemini season quintessentially is a time to wake up and inquire within. To look at an area in your life where you seem to be dancing to the same music over and over again and question, i.e. go on a quest, for the perception in your inner cosmos that is being mirrored in the outer world.
Gemini is the querent rather than the oracle. It both asks and listens, potentially learning through this process how to reconcile seeming opposites…things that are the mirror image of the other.
It doesn’t need to know the answer, that’s Sagittarius. There is an openness to a healthy use of Gemini energy; a willingness to not know the answer but rather to be accessible to new possibilities beyond your current awareness.
As Thich Nhat Hanh said, “For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.”
There was a famous experiment involving four leaf clovers and a football field. Same football field each time. Three groups of people. In the first group, they were told to find four leaf clovers. They found very few. The second group was told that the field had a high percentage of four-leaf clovers in it. They found a lot more. The third group was told that the field had been specially planted for four-leaf clovers. That group found masses of them.
When we allow our Mercury to stretch its wings, we are no longer confined to the prison of our own dogma. Our consciousness shifts and we suddenly perceive the new path that was there all along but previously invisible to our lens-colored eyes.
