Mercurial Fanaticism: Mars Retrograde Opposing Mercury

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology Happy Friday everybody. I hope you guys had a nice holiday and that you got a chance to watch the grabbed episode from yesterday where we did some storytelling from Eclipse Season; those stories were fantastic. If you haven't seen that episode, check it out. Today we are going to take a look at a transit that is starting to perfect coming in over the weekend. And we'll be like hot Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of next week. So I think it's good to get out in front of certain transits, especially ones that are a little bit more intense.

This one is an opposition between Mercury in the sign of Sagittarius and Mars who is retrograde in Mercury's sign of Gemini. So effectively you have Mars Retrograde opposing its host Mercury. And that should be pretty dynamic. Also, Venus coming in not too much further behind Mercury's opposition to Mars. And so that's going to fit into the way that we look at the transit a little bit today. as well.

We've got three things to watch for. I've got an I Ching hexagram that we're going to call on for advice in dealing with this particular transit, which I think will be helpful. And we'll unpack the transit itself on The Real Time Clock and stuff like that.

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Alright, let's get into it. We're gonna Take a look at the real-time clock. And we're going to look at this transit between Mercury and Mars. So, Mercury will be opposite to Mars on November 29. And I'll show you on the screen here. All right, so here it is. This is Tuesday, November 29. But you will be feeling it's like coming in hot over the weekend. Here's Mercury opposing Mars. But I'm going to back this up just a little bit so that you can see, here's Mars Mercury at 17 on Monday, 16th on Sunday, 14th on Saturday, so as soon as you hit the weekend, this transit is coming in very quickly. And the reason it's a big deal is again because Mars is retrograde right now; the God of War, the god of courage and competition, bravery and conflict, that god is retrograde right now. And so there's a lot of changes, and the twist of fate and destiny is really happening in that whole sign house of Gemini and your birth chart right now, for example, wherever it lands in your chart, and as that's happening, Mars's host, while retrograde in Gemini is Mercury. So now it's coming into a polarizing opposition.

Oppositions are naturally polarizing. The work of an opposition is to learn how to hold those to that tension, not how to balance it perfectly, but how to hold the tension of the opposites. So here we have Mercury, the host, opposing its guest in its sign, and that is happening. And then shortly after it, Venus will also go through the opposition with Mars, which we're going to try to include sort of contextually on the periphery of how we approach this today. So as that comes through, you can expect that it's a little bit of an intense transit, it's very quick. So you know, by the end of the week, by Friday, December 2, that transit is over Venus will pass over the opposition by midweek Wednesday, into Thursday, into like December 1, so November 30, December 1, you're going to see Venus then pass through the opposition. That's a little different. We'll visit that as well, next week. But as that comes through, there are some things to watch for and we want to get out ahead of them because these are a little bit more intense. And I feel like especially with intense polarizing transits opposition's I think you know, forewarned is forearmed.

So, it's like, let's get into it. But before we do that today, I want to read you a few things. As you guys know, I am a big fan of James Hillman, the archetypal psychologist who was a student of Carl Jung and who was really hospitable to archetypes in astrology and the crossover with depth psychology in the field that he's sort of responsible for archetypal psychology. So I'm going to read you just a few little things from an essay, and I've actually read this before, so you may have heard me say this before. This comes from an essay that he wrote called hermetic intoxication.

So he says this, let's see Google Internet Archive Wikipedia resurrect the ghost of ancient hermeticism, the vast collection of occult Wisdom literature, pneumonic images, symbols, and magical practices aimed at the mastery of all knowledge. Its followers, from Renaissance Italy to Elizabethan England, attributed the teachings to Hermes himself or to another god of World Knowledge doth of the Egyptians by means of the allegorical, symbolic, and mathematical reductions hermeticism sought to transpose the physical world into mental space. Data becomes message the world is angelic, the cosmos hermetic, that is sealed until disclosed, and the disclosure was also the world's redemption through knowledge. Does this motive still lurk in our contemporary intoxication? Yet, even while Hermes gives this miraculous access, what does he as well take away? Remember, Hermes is a God of both finding and losing, giving and stealing.

Imagine a party a dinner party, a dancing party, a birthday party, dressing and fashion and interior decoration, anticipation before the event and gossip after the event. Imagine the cooking and serving the wine and the flowers, the bodies, and their motions. The flirtations and seductions, the sudden encounter with an old friend or an old enemy, then think to have the subtleties of gesture and language, the tones of voices and peculiarities of speech, regional dialects and little phrases the perfume at the computer an extraordinary array of sophisticated social skills that have taken centuries to elaborate no longer play any role whatsoever.

One of the most hermetic figures of our day, Brian Eno, who has taken part in so many levels of media invention and performance. And thinking about it said, the trouble with the computer is that there isn't enough Africa in it. Body, rhythm, soul, and social ceremony. Civilization depends on its Africa on the social skills that belong with communication, and less communication be merely dots and dashes sent over a Marconi telegraph. Communication is multileveled interaction, a complex impinging of souls, not merely interactive messages. Moreover, communication is ultimately for the sake of knowing and knowing not only the message but also the sender and the receiver who the other is, and what bearing the message has specifically for you. A message is an angel from the Greek Aghalaos message. Through the Latin and theological meanings of a divine message the angels were many; they had particular names, shapes depictions, a true message announces something reveals something, alters something, it brings knowledge of high significance. The voice of the angel was shattering a trumpet blast a world of black wings in the night, what cell phone can transmit an angel? Is there a cure for hermetic intoxication? What can free us have this addiction to instant access and delivery of this delight in the invisible passage of anonymous words through the air, this privilege of a possible connection to everyone anywhere?

Neither his father, Zeus, nor his brother Apollo could truly tame Hermes; he deceived them both. Nor could the Goddess's nymphs and humans with whom he made a change his ways. With these many female figures, he produced offspring, but his copulations did not result in coupling. Only one of the mythic figures appeared of his counterpart Hestia in the Greek world and then the Roman where Mercurius was paired with Vestia. We do uncover an answer, and he goes on it's really interesting. I won't read that part, but I wanted you to hear Hillman describe that way in which we can become intoxicated with knowledge but somehow leave out the sphere of knowing that is social, personal, soulful, sensual, Venusian remember that after Mercury opposes Mars, Venus is going to come through the same opposition. Mercury opposing Mars in Gemini right now has the potential, in other words, to inflate us with hermetic grandiosity.

It can get us pumped up on information, concepts, ideas, messages, data, and mind stuff, but does it have sold stuff? I think that's an important question in the week ahead. We might have a point to make but have we made it in a way that includes Venus, that might be one question. Here's another thing he said from another chapter called a note on Hermes inflation. Despite our postmodern poli semiotic ironic avant-garde deconstructed psycho-analytical sophistication, it is still so damned difficult for us to shed our historical monotheism. I once heard Carl Carinya, who taught me mythology and Zurich almost 50 years ago say it was impossible to return to the Greek style of mind. We cannot escape 2000 years of Christianity and its pervasive monotheistic psychology, which favors an abstracting cohesive, unifying, and centrally organizing viewpoint, or what psychology is baptized as ego. We seem unable to escape obeisance to one-sidedness Jungs definition of neurosis, by the way, which raises one or another perspective above all others. Thus, it is not Hermes, who has caught the psychology of our times. But the preference of monotheism Hermes in his computer is merely the fashionable frontman.

So what he's saying there is that a lot of what we think of as hermetic, relativistic open-minded, clever and diverse thinking, you know, like, like, we're in living in this kind of digital age and what humans are saying there's, in a sense, we've just made the new we've made Mercury, the new monotheistic God, and he's not necessarily against monotheism, as long as it's monotheism, a universe of monotheism exists alongside of and interacts with the universe of polytheism. So he's not; it sounds like he's slamming monotheism or Christianity, but he's actually much more broad-minded than that.

Anyway, he goes on to say that this is no longer the ancient Hermes, the polytheistic Hermes, but a mercurial mask disguising the same old monotheism of our civilization. This Hermes offers neither help for the wayfarer nor guidance of the souls, nor can you link human life to its depths in the underworld and its shades. Instead, this Hermes is a salesman of the usual salvation program and its grandiosity of hope and faith and progress to kingdom come now by means of postmodern deconstruction, electronic universality deregulated free marketing by players in the game, and invisible molecular recombinations. What Neville calls the inflation of Hermes is the conflation of Hermes with the secular and single Are Western ego?

So I bring that up because we're at a crossroads between Mars and Mercury, a kind of confrontation with Mercury. And I think that's really interesting to think about what Mercury looks like in our day and age. And I think that one of the ways in which Mercury shows up is the kind of rigid and fanatical cult of Hermes, whether it's our cell phone usage or the way that we look up information without having any sincere interest in anything we're learning. If it is the feeling that I can do and be anything and clever, open-minded, shifty, changeable, ambivalent ironic humor is like a, it's like a cult that we all belong to unknowingly. All of this kind of stuff. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. It's just that as Hillman points out, in this, we can be inundated into a cult of a God very easily in, especially in a culture that is steeped in 1000s of years of monotheism.

Whereas in many parts of the world, and especially in the ancient world that produced astrology, the gods were many. They were plural, and it was always, there was always a way of understanding or of seeking to understand the multi-valence and presence of the gods in groups. There's a famous saying, and I can't remember who it was attributed to actually think he mentions it here. Let me just see if it's there. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is. Yeah, yeah, here it is.

That mutual entailment of the gods was a genuine Playtonic lesson. He recalls Shiller's verse, and he says something; I believe it's in maybe German. Never, believe me, never do the gods appear alone. One of the goals of astrology truly is to be able to recognize the plurality of gods and archetypes in our day-to-day life, especially because when we start privileging any one god in our consciousness, that's when we tend to get grabbed and seized to the extent that relating stops, and fanaticism begins, and it can happen really unconsciously.

In other words, one way in which we're all sort of fanatical is by means of our mercurial; I like idolatry like we're like, we're in, I'm part of it, right? Like we're, we're sort of in this subconscious collective Mercury cult, right? And the point is to sometimes confront the to have confrontations with the gods; we are dominated by means to differentiate from them. So it's a really, it's an interesting moment where differentiation is possible. By differentiation, I mean looking at the things that have seized your mind that have gripped your perception and have shaped your reality, whether that's Mercury or any other god that's working through Mercury, right? And to Mars, opposite Mercury, to say, I see you, and I'm cutting a cord, it's not that I'm eliminating you like, it would be sort of equally extreme to say, you're gonna have nothing to do with my life whatsoever. It's a god, you know, and they're all a part of this pantheon. But to the extent that one god has taken over with Mars, opposing Mercury, you can say I can see what has been influencing my mind, and I need to cut the cord so that I'm not completely enveloped by just one god, to the extent that I've lost my relating capacity, my ability to relate to the multi valence that that is this beautiful cosmos.

So this is the kind of confrontation of mind that's coming up a split or a schism, a way of two different ways of looking at something, and an opportunity, perhaps, to see where we've been caught or seized by one particular way of looking at something that we may need to confront or have challenged or challenge someone or something in our lives that needs to be challenged. And then to possibly differentiate through that conflict. Now you want to be careful of polarizing, which would mean I'm just going to go from one extreme to an opposite and equal opposite extreme; that would be a temptation right now as well.

All right, well, three themes to watch for along these lines. One would be intellectual or mental combativeness. In the next four or five days, especially that polarizing that wants to happen can take place through reflection and skilled observation of what energies, thoughts, conversations, and power struggles are arising, but you don't necessarily have to go and get bloody over it. Like if you're careful and thoughtful. The transformation that needs to happen right now, especially mentally and intellectually, in the differentiation to cut meaningful cords to say, Okay, I've done enough of this one thing, and now I need to open my mind to something indifferent. That can happen, I think, without, you know, like without shedding any metaphorical blood, maybe it can't. But I think it's at least worth being mindful and careful with this energy.

Number two would be the mental devoid of the sensual. I love when he says, you know, when Brian Eno said there's not enough Africa, not enough soul and rhythm, and sensuality. You know, when we scroll through, I don't know, Instagram, or whatever it is. And we see bodies and physiques and pictures of food and this kind of stuff, it's easy to, and I'm not trying to hate on anyone or anything, I'm really not like, I appreciate a lot of people in my feed that post really sweet things and tasty looking things. And you know, it's fun to see. But you know, how it can deceive us into thinking that we're having a sensual experience when we're we have a sensual experience, in a sense, through the lens of Mercury. So I think that it's important to look in the next week as Venus will also go through this opposition as the tension app, the tension between the sensual and the mental. Are we living embodied life? What ideas do we have to confront? What percent modes of perception are we reconsidering right now, and the need to include the sensual will be a big part of it?

Remember, this dates back to the eclipses where the recent Eclipse was with Venus, and then the lunar Eclipse in Venus's sign was with the cazimi, Mercury. And these two are coming into the evening sky together, Mercury and Venus trying to bring a synthesis about between mind mental matter and sensuality. So there's a confrontation with these themes that's happening right now between mind and body, you could say. So watch for the mental devoid of the sensual or some pairing of those two themes, the tension between those teams themes, and then Mercurial, monotheism, look at the extent to which a Mercury dominant way of looking at things, deconstructive, analytical, you know, ironic ambivalent, changeable, like open-minded, but noncommittal, none of which are bad, right, none of those qualities are sort of are bad. But to whatever extent they can become, those things can take on; they can start wearing the robes of like a high priest of mental stuff.

I remember when I was in graduate school, when I was studying literary theory, I was really turned off by a huge amount of postmodern philosophy. But it took me a while to realize that it wasn't really the ideas that turned me off as much as it was the people espousing them, and I'm talking mostly about like students and professors and people like that, not all of them; I had some great classmates too. But there was this way of thinking that all of these very enlightened, sort of progressive, I will just generally say, postmodern philosophy and literary theory was so enlightened. And the thing that bothered me is that I could just feel the sort of fanatical dogmatic self-righteousness behind it. And I think that's what bothered me, not so much the ideas themselves, which I actually found very interesting and compelling in some cases. But I think that's what you have to be careful of with the Mercurial monotheism. It's like some level at which we have been seduced into the cult of Mercury. Right, that could there could be some confrontation with that in our lives in the next week. I know that might sound vague, but I hope that you'll find meaning in that.

And then, if you have stories, please do share them because I'm not sure I can articulate them any better than that at this moment. But for example, I think one simple example would be someone being like, Okay, I'm turning off my social media or something like that. Anyway, I asked the I-Ching for some advice. I said, What would you recommend? What would be some advice for this particular transit? I got hexagram 31, which is called often translated as attraction, and the second line was changing. The second line read, nervously shaking his leg, shows his irresistible urge to advance misfortune if he does good fortune if he doesn't. One more thing into and then the next hexagram that changes that the hexagram changes into hexagram 32, which is sometimes called durability.

So hexagram 31 attraction, nervously shaking his leg, shows his irresistible urge to advance misfortune if he does good fortune if he doesn't. Hexagram 32 durability. I think something else that could come up right now would be a nervous twitch or urge to do something, to start something, to say something, to challenge something, to get into some kind of conflicted space, and to try to force the issue or force a solution to a problem that presents itself. And to do so out of a state of anxiousness. Mars, opposite Mercury, feels like it could agitate the mind and body, and what this is saying this sequence is very much saying, Hold still, kind of let it look, work through it, work through these tensions. It resists the irresistible urge to advance sort of suddenly or impulsively and be durable.

That's interesting. I thought that was a really interesting Siri sequence of the I-Ching. And some really solid advice, like what more could you ask for, you know, so I think with all of that in mind, we can be ready for what this Eclipse holds. I tried to come at it today in a way that would sort of resemble the transit, like challenging sort of mercurial Marsy and Mercurial thoughts and ideas sort of swimming around. Hopefully, the meditations from Hillman sort of resemble the challenges of Mercury and the need to somehow differentiate from Mercury or Mercury, helping us differentiate from itself because you have Mars in a Mercury ruled sign opposite to Mercury. So the idea of some kind of meaningful differentiation looks like it's present. But then the teaching also says, Be careful of, like, rushing to deal with some kind of anxious impulse. So I think that's interesting as well.

Hopefully, you also got something out of the comparison between the mental and the sensual. And the idea of mercurial monotheism and how we can be seized by that even when Mercury does have so many fantastic things to offer us at the exact same time. Well, that is what I have for today. I hope that you will remember to use the hashtag grabbed if you have a story to share about this transit or any others. Or if you want to email us your story grabbed at nightlightastrology.com, We love hearing from you guys for those storytelling episodes that we do once in a while. By the way, we are on our way to 1608 backers; that is our goal for the year. Can we get there? You can find the link to the Kickstarter in the description of this video or in the comments section. Really appreciate your donation. Choose your reward when you donate to help us reach our goal. We love and appreciate you guys, from my staff, myself, and my family. Thank you for supporting us, and we hope to give you a year more of fantastic content ahead. Alright, take it easy. Have a great weekend, everybody. Bye.