Sense Making
…On Mercury with the Outer Planets
Language and the planet Mercury have more in common than their links around communication. Too often, they are both overlooked. We know they are important, but get lazy when watching them carefully.
Unless Mercury is retrograde, most of us will lose track of his movements from morning to evening sky; and with language, unless it becomes offensive — or extreme — we can miss the magic that is taking place. The two also correspond to one another, astrologically. Mercury (greek: Hermes) is honored for bringing language to humanity, and it is this language which offers a world-building technology for us to explore. Words have power; some may even say that our entire world is made from them. Words create worlds.
The astrologer plays a hermetic role for us when we consider time, our karma, and what wyrd forces are constellating in our psyches. So, it’s essential for them to have a good handle on language — allowing it to evolve, change shape, and be edited depending on the circumstances. To be quicksilver, only a few ingredients are required: an open mind, constant curiosity, and a poetic tongue. This is the way of Hermes and — at times — a good astrologer.
With language barriers in place, it can be hard to fully transfer one image into the mind of another — even if it’s the same language, it can differ greatly from place to place, person to person. Languages are complex, multi-tiered, culturally inflected tools; they don’t always make sense. It’s like that quote, “If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers” (Doug Larson?). We do our best to understand it — to grok it — but often it doesn’t translate or the images aren’t powerful enough to embed into our imaginations. Mercury helps with this.
When we begin to pay attention to the quickest of all planets, we soon realize the communications taking place. In the outer world, it’s easy to spot in the news; in our inner life, it’s slightly more challenging because we often forget to look there. Take the Mercury/Uranus conjunction that happened last Sunday (20º Taurus): within a 24 period around it, we saw talk of UFOs by NASA — attempting to distract us, Apple unveiling the Vision Pro (distraction as well?), and the SEC going after the biggest crypto exchanges in the world — definite distraction! How are they related, if at all?
If Mercury translates the Promethean messages from Uranus, which are almost always forward-looking, we open a line of sight for understanding. We can see how they are disruptive, yet also how they grant access to new channels as well. They are news stories (images) that can then be used to describe the Mercury/Uranus complex. Quick examples: alien devices created to subvert the status quo or unidentified flying objects only seen through our own reality tunnel or too weird for words to do justice; it’s an invitation to be creative within it. And then, we have our own experiences. Those stories are just as important to gather. All of them help to enhance our language of astrology, assisting us to convey the unseen successfully.
Mercury will make two other aspects to Outers this week: a sextile to Neptune (27º Taurus/Pisces; 9th) and a trine to Pluto once it retrogrades back into Capricorn on Sunday (11th).
The goal is to not overlook them. Pluto moving back into Capricorn is interesting, but what is Mercury attempting to say via the trine? Just as Neptune in the final degrees of Pisces is interesting, but what about the sextile? What manifests as structural support when the two are elementally compatible? There will always be images to be captured, stories to be gathered, and words to be strung together. This is the Mercury work. Some may even call it grail speech — or, at times kosmognosis. No matter what you call it, in essence, it is sense-making.
* If you’d like to do some sense-making with Mercury cycles, I’d love to be your guide.
Eudaimonia,
Adam
