Embodying Mercury

bringing astrology back to our bodies

“Mercury,” Jean-Baptiste Corneille

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

• Jorge Luis Borges

This newsletter is part of a series on the magical-creative properties of the planets, as well as how to begin embodying them yourself.

So much of astrological study nowadays is confined to book learning but my understanding of the planets improved dramatically when I began engaging them directly. By doing this, I could conjure feelings, deeply-impressed images and great meaning behind the words I used.

This newsletter offers you a portal to have your own connection to the Sun. It’s one thing to say the Mercury is about communication or the intellect but it’s another to be in the midst of a study session or at a crossroads and think “Mercury would like this too”.

If you want help connecting to your unique Mercury, and the rest of yourself through the stars, my books are currently open! My readings are meant to lift you up, to secure you against difficulty and remind you that there is always space, creativity, play. Book now to remember your place in the cosmos.

**And if you book between now and Friday 3/3, take 15% off with the code “fishy”.**

This writing is intentionally not technical and meant to be understood even by those who have not studied astrology but want to connect more deeply to their world and themselves. Remember: these planets all describe fundamental parts of us. Whether you try to or not, you embody Mercury everyday. By learning what functions and activities with which Mercury corresponds, you learn more about yourself and your life, with nothing added but attention.

By reaching this felt understanding of Mercury (and the other planets), I believe we are also able to be better magicians and artists— two categories whose differences are slowly shrinking in my eyes. Do we not need the same centeredness and momentum to create a piece of art as we do to create a spell or gaze into the future? Aren’t we vessels for something beyond our small self in both? This essay also delves into where in your creative-spiritual practice a dose of Mercury could serve you well.

To read Part I, on the Moon, click here and Part I on the Sun, click here.

---

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”

― Jorge Luis Borges

How do you pin down what is always changing? How do you keep track of all of the thoughts you have in a day, or the words you say or the opinions you claim? Where do hold all the past versions of yourself and how do you remember who they were? Can you record all the ways the outside world touches and alters you, helps you change your mind or consider another perspective?

Somehow, Mercury holds onto these points of contact and flux. As the messenger god, Mercury, or Hermes, as he is known to the Greeks, is meant to deliver information to beings all across heaven and earth. He is one of the only beings who can safely traverse both the heavens and the underworld, not truly belonging to any particular place.

In astrology, your Mercury placement describes your intellect and communication style. But, I will point out, other planets like Jupiter, Saturn and the Sun all have a role in our minds as well. What facet of knowledge does Mercury rule and what are the underlying qualities of Mercury that allow us to understand and embody it in its myriad forms?

According to Abu Ma’shar, “Mercury is of changing nature” and “[aligns'] and [mixes] with the planets and signs it is found and adapts accordingly”.¹ Mercury is fluid and highly malleage, especially to other planets and influences around them. It is the only planet that is not part of the day or night sect but can be either depending on the individual chart. While the other planets are definitively hot or cold; dry or wet; Mercury can be any combination, once again, depending on its location in the chart.

Intellectually, Mercury “signifies rational intellect, facility with words, convincing speech, eloquence, news, reports…appreciation of difference, measurement, counting, calculation, philosophy, wisdom and the love of learning”.² This is a planet concerned with the fine details of wisdom; data points, as well as the ability to take big thoughts and ideas and distill them into precise language.

Erik Desmazières, “La Bibliothèque de Babel”

The God in the Details

“A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

• Jorge Luis Borges

I have learned a lot about how Mercury works by spending time with my Mercury in Virgo friends.³ One of the things that strikes me about these Mercurial people, especially against my own Mercury, is how much they write things down. Whereas my Jupiterian self wants to remember the gist of something or trust my future self to recall a detail, Mercury knows the human mind and its limits. It knows that facts arise from meticulously recorded data points with indexes and table of contents. As we will get to in next week’s newsletter, Mercury rules technology or anything to which we outsource our own labor. Mercury knows the power of a well-organized notebook.

Originally, the god associated with Mercury was not a messenger but a scribe. In Babylon, Mercury was syncretized with Nabu, god of writing and wisdom. Writing was invented in Mesopotamia by the Sumerians “most likely developed due to trade, and the need to send messages over long distances”.⁴ We see modern-day scribes in roles like stenographers, bookkeepers, secretaries and transcribers— those who record exactitudes for later use. While the uses of language can be fantastical, paradoxical, magical, which we will get to later, it is also used to precisely transfer information. In religion, Mercury govern sectarianism and the various sects splintering from each tradition.⁵ He deals in details and finer points.

No wonder that Mercury is one of the only planets that gets along with Saturn, the greater malefic. Originally, Mercury, along with Saturn, was syncretized with the agricultural and writing god Ninurta, before eventually being associated with Nabu.⁶ In astrology, you seem a similar connection to Saturn and Mercury. For one, Saturn, planet of isolation, wisdom, and ancient lore, "joys" in the 12th house, which is also associated with Gemini, Mercury's other domicile, through the Thema Mundi.⁷ The 12th house is a place of solitude and self-undoing. Having a connection with the two dry, intellectual planets through this house bring to mind the lonely scholar, toiling away on their manuscript or exploring the lone recesses of their mind to extract the facts from the teeming void. Part of the reason Mercury likes being with Saturn is that it slightly prefers dryness, which Saturn has in spades. This dryness is the ability to differentiate and divide, one of Mercury's primary intellectual powers.

For the artist, this aspect of Mercury helps us do what the Borges quote describes above: gathering all the details of our live dispassionately so that they may become inspiration later. The dryness Mercury prefers allows one to see the value of beauty, boredom, pain, horrors— or at least hold off judgment as we keep track of the raw material. Mercury reminds us that we can be sedulous researchers of our own lives and that, by writing down what we see or experience, we help make it real.

---

activity: Procure a journal, the more basic and unprecious, the better. Use the notes app on your phone or a word document if you wish. Any time you come across a piece of important information, interesting tidbit, snatch of poetry, funny quote—the more “random” or disjointed the better— write it down. After a few weeks, look back at what you have written and all the different facets of yourself represented in these notes. Do any beg further investigation or follow-up? Are there threads to follow or new projects embedded in these noticings? Bonus points if you index your notes.

---