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Mercury, quick, intense, lively and highly mobile, races its way around the Sun faster than any of the other known planets. The only element in a horoscope that moves faster is the Moon -- which changes signs every two and a half days.
The Moon represents your emotions and moods -- which can change in a heartbeat. Mercury represents your mind -- which can also change fast ... but not always. Mercury also represents your mental and communications skills -- the intellectual components of your personality.
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Mercury is the Inner Self that deals with physical movement, informational exchange, discrimination, learning and analysis. As the metaphor for communication skills and brain power ... it represents a dimension that makes humans unusual, even unique, among other life forms.
Your intellect and how you use it tells a great deal about your personality, the construction of your values, your outlook on the world and your ability to have your ideas and knowledge make an impact on that world. When you can communicate clearly, you have influence. Even if they don't agree with you, other people are more likely to listen -- and they know where you stand.
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Mercury energy by itself is considered neutral, somewhat sterile, and even impersonal. Those words also describe the qualities of analysis, reason and logic. Uncorrupted, these are all devoid of both ego and emotion. In fact, there's something cold and robotic about people who live too much in their Mercury energy.
Mercury represents:
- Your conscious, rational mind
- Your intellectual self
- Your creative mental abilities
- Your capacity to learn, analyze and study information
- Your interests and the way you seek knowledge
- Your capacity to think and form ideas and opinions
- Your capacity to communicate thoughts to others
- The way you deal with facts and process data
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When it is comfortable and positive, Mercury energy is logical, reasonable, analytical, mentally brilliant, clever, focused, communicative, innovative, curious, ingenious, imaginative, highly verbal, inventive, versatile and quick witted. At its best, it is efficient, exacting, meticulous, methodical, objective, practical, studious, and precise.
It is able to process data in large quantities and on very diverse subjects. It stores a myriad of facts and makes connections between disparate topics, thereby creating conclusions and associations that extend the range of available knowledge. It is the process of mind that helps humankind evolve into more powerful intellectual beings.
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When it is uncomfortable and stressed, Mercury energy is nervous, scattered, closed-minded, opinionated, inattentive, argumentative, intellectually snobbish and intolerant, gossipy, high-strung, inconsistent and dishonest. It is also fussy, impatient, hypercritical, impractical, indecisive, unable to concentrate, intellectually obsessive, and consumed by petty details and hair-splitting arguments.
Corrupted Mercury energy is not mentally ill in the sense that Neptune energy under stress will represent depression, delusion, obsessions, psychosis and actual insanity.
But unbalanced Mercury energy can hold with strange ideas, fixate on peculiar applications of logic, jump to strange conclusions, and be horrifyingly rigid and dictatorial in the information it holds to be The Truth.
All these conditions show, obviously, an inability to grasp ideas properly or communicate effectively.
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The house in your Natal Chart which contains Mercury shows the area of life experience where you have the greatest intellectual investment. It's where you spend a lot of time thinking and learning.
These are the issues you read, write and talk about. It's the subjects around which your ideas cluster -- and the concerns that color your viewpoints. Mercury's house placement shows the matters on which you concentrate your opinions, and where you want to claim intellectual authority and show off what you know.
This is also the area of practical life that fuels your intellect and your verbal skills, the environment, efforts, activities and context from which you draw your ideas and on which you concentrate your everyday education and learning.
It is the general area where you collect knowledge ... and therefore you tend to know a lot about these topics. It is the area where you use your mind and your language skills to engage life. It is the home of your intellectual self.
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Mercury is always positioned close to the Sun, either in the same sign or one sign away. That metaphor alone shows how important your intellect is in the proper support of your ego.
Except in a special arrangement called "combust" where Mercury is so conjunct to the Sun (closer than two degrees) that ego and intellect are fused -- and the native has no boundaries between his ego concerns and his mind, making all opinions and communicative skills one big ego trip -- Mercury cannot be stressed with regard to the Sun (and the Sun's interests.)
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Natal Mercury is always on board with you. Only transiting Mercury can upset or undermine your basic agenda. Sure, that happens. But it's temporary and part of the universal learning process. Seeing things from a different -- even an uncomfortable -- perspective is how you grow.
When Mercury is in the same sign as the Sun (and so very likely in the same house, too), it clearly shows that wherever the interests and abilities of your essential self are found, you spend mental energy and thought to support them.
Your personal identity and your thoughts and opinions are fairly inseparable and usually congruent. Your mind candidly shows off who you are.
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When Mercury is in the sign ahead of the Sun, it shows that intellectually you are more communicative, more outwardly directed, more concerned with applying your Sun self's personal values out into the world through your interests and conversation.
In that sense, your thoughts and opinions are more dependent on, influenced by and in touch with those of other people -- than they are by you alone.
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When Mercury is in the sign behind the Sun, you are more inwardly directed, more observant than communicative, more concerned with study, research, and reflection.
Your conscious mind is more closely aligned with the intuitive wisdom of your subconscious than it is in either of the other positions. It is more subject to creative insights and inspiration which are then channeled into the Sun-self's personality.
Your thoughts are also more privately held and are more a product of your own mind's devising than of your exchanges with other people. In that sense, they are indeed more your own.
If you've always known there was more to Astrology than Sun Sign material and the three line daily horoscope in the newspaper, climb aboard and follow this blog. You'll find a world of wisdom detailing how you were designed to work with life ... and why you are the way you are -- all in quick-to-read, easy-to-digest-and-remember, written-in-plain-English essays that offer plenty of food for thought.
Little by little, I'm doing a set of articles that talks about all the elements in your horoscope and what they have to say about you. If you "know something" about Astrology -- or know something about your chart placements, that will help you get more from this material.
If you don't ... well, this is one place you can learn. We all have to start somewhere ... because we aren't born knowing this stuff. Meanwhile, if you've never seen your horoscope ... and don't have a clue how to work with it, maybe it's time to find out. There are lots of "chart services" on the internet -- some of whom produce decent, readable charts "for free" and some are so awful and confusing that even I can't read them easily -- and I've worked with charts for decades.
One extremely user-friendly chart site is here: AstroLabe. I recommend them if you want a simple, easy-to-read chart. I think they even give a reasonable little interpretive reading of your horoscope as part of the package. You'll need to know your birth information -- day, month, year, time and geographical place. Without all that your chart will have limited accuracy.
Or, if you want to get serious and really talk about this, upvote this post and start a conversation in the comments section sometime in the next six days from the time of publication. We'll go from there depending on what you want to know.
Questions about any of this? -- Upvote this post and talk to me in comments. It's a terrific way to build value for yourself and the community ... and it will give me ideas of what to write about in future posts. Believe me there is lots to say about the way The Sun, The Moon -- and all the other elements in a horoscope, all the other components of Astrology -- work together to interpret you and your story -- and what it all means to the person you've become.
Although sometimes the background pictures in our visual essays support the topic and text, they don't always. Sometimes the connection is clear. Sometimes it's symbolic and subtle. Sometimes, there's no connection at all.
The scenes depict landscapes and natural features, buildings and wildlife. They were chosen because they show something lovely or interesting ... or simply because the photo appealed to me.
Our spectacular and remarkable planet is changing at astonishing speed. Rarely are these changes for the better. Few people seem to know ... or care ... or have the will and power to do anything about this. It may not be long before the world humans have known and lived in for centuries is forever lost. We certainly won't be able to make repairs as fast as we destroyed it.
So a few years ago I began collecting pictures of the way things were ... and still are for now, a record of the beauty we have while it is still ours to love and honor.
The photos here are part of that collection, with sincere thanks to the artists who saw these moments ... and with their cameras ... preserved them. All of us at Enchanted Spirit are profoundly grateful to them for their generosity and skill ... and for the added grace, depth and dimension their art brings to ours.
Original images used under this Creative Commons license or this Creative Commons license and modified by added text.
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