Mercury Conjunct Pluto and Hermetic Intoxication

Transcript:

Hi everyone this is Acyuta-bhava from Nightlight Astrology and today we are going to take a look at Mercury's conjunction with Pluto, which is happening for the third time due to Mercury's retrograde. So Mercury went over a conjunction with Pluto by direct motion backward over it through its retrograde station very close to a conjunction with Pluto and is now through its direct motion moving back through the conjunction with Pluto one last time. So we're going to refresh on all of the dates and important times that we've already seen this conjunction so that you can do some comparing on your own if you want to. And we're also going to talk one more time about some of the archetypal combinations of Mercury and Pluto and try to get yet a new fresh understanding of this archetypal combination.

So before I dive into that, I want to remind all of you that my mentors Loka and Vidarbha in the bhakti yoga tradition. Loka and Vidarbha have been teachers and mentors, their communities meant a lot to me over the years. They live back in Maryland, they also have a home in India. So they are in India right now. And they will be teaching a 12 week immersion class on the Bhagavad Gita. So you can go to Bhakti wise.com and click on the study with us tab. And when you scroll down, you will find from March 15 to May 31. On Tuesday nights from eight to 9:30pm. The 12 Week Intro to the Bhagavad Gita, you can learn about all of the classes that are offered. There's also optional Montreux meditation classes you can take for free, it is by donation. So you just go to the bottom of the screen, you'll see the payment options, you just donate what you can pitch in and support the class and show up and enjoy it. It's a great programme. We did this last year and loads of people tried it out and loved it. So hopefully you guys will too. The classes are recorded if you can't make it live. So check it out of bhakti wise.com.

Alright, so let's put up the real time clock and refresh ourselves on the total process of this transit as well as the dates of the upcoming conjunction. So here are Mercury and Pluto. We go forward just one day, tomorrow to February 11. Friday, February 11. There they are. Mercury's moving through the conjunction, give it a few more days after that. If we go forward to say about February 15, then you've got Mercury ingressing back into Aquarius. So you could say between now and Tuesday of next week, you're going to see Mercury going through the conjunction with Pluto and finishing up this long process that it has been through. Let's go backward in time and just sort of revisit this dynamic in its entirety. So if we go forward, the first conjunction between these two planets happened right as Venus was retrograding over Pluto. So you'll see the Venus retrograde point has been the Venus retrograde point in its conjunction with Pluto is being activated by Mercury again. And this is late December. This is right around December 29 and 30th. So Pluto Mercury goes over Pluto at the very end of December.

It's then going to get up to about 10 degrees of Aquarius by mid January station and turn retrograde it comes back into the conjunction with Pluto and it does so about January 29. So the very end of January it comes back a month later. Now it turns direct Mercury of course turned direct the end of last week. And then it is now moving forward over Pluto one more time. So that's what we're getting tomorrow. So you can go back in the cycle of this recent Mercury Retrograde over Pluto back over Pluto back again now over Pluto and look at what was happening look at the kinds of things that you learned you actually can go back into the archives and check out the previous videos that I did on Mercury and Pluto to get the full story of how we've unpacked it so far which as I was reflecting on my notes and looking back at all the things we've said about mercury and Pluto we've actually we actually did a lot on Mercury and Pluto right around those times late December again late January so yeah don't miss that if you if you miss or if you miss those already don't miss going back and checking it out.

So what are some of the things that we can expect? Well I'm never surprised by the fact that Pluto Mercury can joins with Pluto and you get unexpected news that A piece of news or information, a letter or a piece of communication can come up. And it has this cathartic quality behind it, something is said or spoken or shared, that comes up from a place that feels almost like it's volcanic. There's a feeling of energy being released in a powerful way. And it's usually communicated in an email, a message that you get a piece of information a changing plan. Mercury will often also when it combines with Pluto, point us to what is on our mind that we didn't know was on our mind. So the kinds of things that we're obsessing about somewhat unconsciously, that we're fixated on. Anything that we get possessed by mentally intellectually. You can see Mercury and Pluto as a good sign of those things that suddenly, we come to understand, oh, this has me in its grip, I've been possessed by a particular thought or pattern of thought, I've been possessed by anxiety. So watch for what is coming across the mind, watch for what is being communicated to you, watch for the messages coming up around this time. Oftentimes, they'll have a subterranean quality, they'll resemble something being released with kind of pent up force that is suddenly released with sometimes a destructive, but also regenerative quality. In the same way that for example, I mean, this is gross, but like, let's say you have to throw up. There's this weird way in which it just, it feels awful, there's a it's gross, there's a sense, but there's a sense of relief, and then instant, oftentimes an instant feeling of oh, that thing that was in me that changed my whole mind and body and now it's gone. Now it's been purged. So the idea of things being purged, especially in mind communications, speech, and anything that we're processing intellectually.

Also watch for what we're being obsessed with, or what we're fixated on. And the way in which those those obsessions or fixations may be really kind of controlling us on a subtle level, I don't find that it's best to try and grab control back from a Mercury Pluto dynamic as much as it is to start with just becoming aware, and with awareness to start by, you know, offering a prayer, just saying, you know, I'm feeling overwhelmed, or I'm feeling somewhat possessed by this dynamic, and I don't like it, you know, I'm not I'm uncomfortable with it. And if it's possible for this to be alleviated, please give me the insight for what to do, or how to move off from a particular pattern. I find that in being humble and asking for help, in a psychic way, you know, repeatedly through prayer, whatever, meditation, journaling, just having that moment of doing that repeatedly that it's amazing how things will shift on their own, not because you're trying to control or get into a power struggle with patterns or forces in the psyche or what have you, but they shift because there's, it's almost like telling yourself, you know, if you forget the lyrics to a song you're trying to remember and you say, Okay, I'll think of it later. And you just let your brain start thinking about it. 20 minutes later, boom, Oh, yeah. And then all of a sudden, you remember the song or you remember what you were trying to think about? You recall.

So I would suggest that if you're noticing things that are possessing or inhabiting your mind in a really strong way, that one of the things to do is to ask for help repeatedly, in a humble way, not in a hysterical way. But in a humble and patient manner to ask for help, to ask for insight, to express what you're feeling about being taken over by a pattern that you don't love, you know, and letting things move on their own. And then just keep coming back to that to that prayer. And then watching in the next couple of days, maybe even a week, how things will naturally shift and oftentimes give you the insight, here's how to navigate this. Here's how to move around here's how to manage something a little bit better. So because it rarely works with Mercury Pluto to try to control which often ends up being somehow resembling a form of repression and then that the repressed thing grows. And so I would, I would just be careful about getting into a wrestling match with anything that is coming up for you that you don't like right now.

Also, the idea of there being revelations, an understanding of things that have been hidden or unseen things coming to the surface to see and recognise, also like to say that there's, you know, this idea of reasonable limits. This is a Mercury Pluto, especially in a Saturn ruled sign like Capricorn can suddenly give us an insight as to, these are some reasonable limits, I need to set on something or someone or some area of my life. But also this transit has to do with the limits of reason, reasonable limits or the limits of reason. There are some forces in our lives that we can't control or contain, not through technology, not through organisational strategies, not through the best ideas. We can't put everything into a box that can explain and categorise and, and, and contain things. As much as we want the cosmos to be one simple, reasonable place, there is also a place for the irrational, there is a place for the impulsive and the chaotic. And Mercury Pluto also says, you know, there might be a space in your life where you're trying to hold everything by reason and there's a primordial Dionysian force that needs to dismember, dismantle, take things apart. It's chaotic, but not without purpose. It is potentially destructive or dismembering, but not without its own code, not without its own mysterious rhythm. So just remember that that there's reasonable limits, and then there's the limits of reason.

I want to read you guys something today. That comes from one of my favourite essays by James Hillman called hermetic intoxication. And this is it's an essay about Hermes, and the way in which, if we get obsessed with Hermes, we will become intoxicated by the cult of Hermes. What kinds of trouble can we get into? I think this is a brilliant essay, so I'm just going to read you part of it.

"A great question haunts me, if my mythological diagnosis is correct, and Hermes, is the God in the disease and he's talking about things that are troubling us in our modern era. Then could Hermes be playing a computer video game with the whole world? Is the future necessarily electronic the New Age and Information Age of media emails spin infotainment, virtual reality cyberspace? Or could we be caught in a Hermes game? I do not mean the games the computer plays, but is Hermes by means of the silicone chip, playing games with our human civilization? These suspicions come to mind that they come to mind is further indication of the presence of Hermes Mercurius for deceit is as much as business as his business. We are suspicious not because we are Luddites and against technology. We are suspicious, because part of hermetic awareness is to be awake to deception. To catch Hermes, is to catch a thief and not only to catch a quick flash of inspiration, because Hermes interactive devices facilitate the mating game of Aphrodite, the tactics of war, the calculation and construction and agriculture, connections among family the solitude of Saturn, providing even Jovian enjoyments no other principles impede Hermes dominion.

"With the whole wide world available to you individually, personally by yourself alone. Intoxication follows one click and I'm turned on the epicentre of a worldwide web, Google Internet Archive Wikipedia resurrect the ghost of ancient hermeticism the vast collection of occult Wisdom literature, mnemonic images, symbols and magical practices aimed at the mastery of all knowledge. Its followers from Renaissance Italy to Elizabethan England attribute the teachings to Hermes himself were to another god of World Knowledge Thoth of the Egyptians. By means of 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. This this motive still lurking Our contemporary intoxication with Hermes. It even while Hermes gives this miraculous access, what does he as well take away remember, Hermes is the god of both finding and losing, of giving and stealing.

"Imagine a party, a dinner 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 a 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, 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, 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 aggelos 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."

Very good. So I'm going to read the conclusion of this essay, where he says this, "It is time to conclude time still urges and pushes and presses we are still in this millennium time would move us quickly along force us out of here away from this place, so that we may go to another place a bar, a cafe, a bed, or maybe Hestia is calling us home. So I shall conclude by saying once again millennial thinking about the future is an archetypal fantasy. This fantasy seduces us from confronting two fundamental facts of all human existence, of all cosmic existence. First, any actual moment occupies an actual place. And second life depends on a deep faith in existential continuity. futurism escapes from the first always leaving here for elsewhere and Futurism denies the second by evacuating the certitude of the actual with speculations about a vague and vast unknown. But the great catastrophe that the future brings is not the future as such, but the effect of futurism on present life. How it turns attention from what is to what is not drawing focus from the daily bread and salt and water of the actual to the unknown and conjectural thereby negating Hestia that is the Virgin goddess of the home and hearth and making us all homeless.

"I have been doing my utmost to restore the centrality of Hestia, who can locate us wherever we may be in concrete, physical life, the hearth is wherever you are actually focused, as hers was also in the midst of the city, or common City Hall, for whatever the century on the calendar and the time on the clock, this time always takes place somewhere in a bed, at a table, in an office on a street. We are all homeless when living only in space and time and no one is homeless when Hestia is present. She gives each environmental situation a sense of being here, dasein. The certitude of the actual that is because it is here and given an eternality that cannot go away and is not subject to time is similar to what George Santayana, the old Spanish philosopher who lived his last days in the Eternal City calls animal faith. It is that feeling in our bones that the earth is beneath my feet, that the sun sets this evening, that the world whether fearful, tragic, unjust or senseless, nonetheless, does not go away. This animal faith is like the consciousness of animals themselves who have no futurology. Instead, their possibilities of existence are always grounded, that the air is there for the birds wings, the water there for the fishes pleasure, this ground is always here, not virtual but utterly here, allowing us the possibility to live at all. Allowing us to sleep at night knowing the sunrise will find us in the same place, allowing us to tidy up with faithful gestures of animal certitude after disaster to bury the dead, and serve the mourners a warm and friendly meal."

I love that passage so much because it speaks exactly to some of what especially tougher today given that it speaks to what mercury and Pluto can signify. They can signify the limits of reason. And by that we mean the virtual digital you know, Avatar space that a lot of us live in now daily. I love what Brian Eno said about, you know, the the cradle of civilization, of course, being Africa, right. So that's what he's alluding to, is that there's not enough of the primordial in the way that we move about now. It's also mental, where's the soulful depths of our being? Where are all of the vast nuances of social experience, or even of mental and intellectual experience when they're not placed? And when they're not relational? When we try to abstract truth from people when we try to abstract epiphanies and realisations and spiritual growth from place, right? We lose something, we lose something really important because it's always the genie of a place that's contributing to the realisation. It's always the souls around us that are contributing to our growth.

And in this way, what Hillman's really trying to say and I think Mercury, Pluto says, as well if we listen, is that there are there are limits to what reason can do. There are limits to what reason can be because reason is only a servant of beings that are in relationship with one another. That is the kind of primordial realisation that can come up during a Mercury Pluto conjunction where it just says, look, here's the soulfulness that's missing from the mental qualities of life. Pluto being soulfulness, the deep subterranean forces of life that remind us that there's a deep dark black soil beneath the house I sit in, that there's wood on this desk, you know, there's blood and marrow and bone. You know, this, this kind of thing. It sounds really simple. But, you know, it's easy to be floating around in the ethers. And I love the last part that he said as well, which is that. Remember, Mercury refers to the idea of a kind of unsold universe or Cosmos filled with angelic messengers. And I'm not saying that it can't come through, you know, the ethers of the internet or emails or whatever else, it can come through anywhere. But there's often something missing. If we're if we're in hermetic intoxication, there's a, there's a purging and a barfing of abstractions and digital space and the alienation that comes from it that needs to happen. So how does that happen?

Well, I think when Mercury goes through Pluto, through a conjunction with Pluto, especially in a nice earthy, feminine sign like Capricorn, you can just feel where am I being called back to something deep? Where is the rhythm in my life and how, how are instincts speaking to me, there's a thing called Emotional intelligence that goes along with normal, rational intelligence. The world is not just a computer programme to be solved, right? It's a relationship to be had. And when that relationship has had, you know, hormones change, heartbeats raise, it's, there's time signatures and there's, rhythm and their soul in it. And so I hope that, you know, for me, I've been reflecting on that a lot. Especially as I've been in, you know, for example, for me for the past, you know, 50 days or so, I've been in the process of churning out all the different rewards for my Kickstarter that creates for me, in addition to my daily practice, what ends up feeling at times like an assembly line for like, 60 days in my life. If I'm not really careful, I can I can legitimately like lose the feeling of soulfulness. I can lose the feeling of time and place and relationship because you just get into a habit with things and I think everyone deals with this in some way in your life. You probably deal with this. Your work You go home, you do this thing, you go to bed, you go back to work, and we can lose soulfulness. And it's stripped from us even more when everything lives in, you know, digital streaming and scrolling and algorithms and so forth.

I'm saying things of course that lots of people say these days so I don't pretend that this is anything new. But I think Hillman puts it some of what he has to say, you know, I read and reread those those passages because they really they touch something really deep in me. And hopefully they touch something deep in you to something a collective drumbeat that lives inside all of us in a primordial way. So I would love to hear your stories about Mercury Pluto, what comes up for you? What are you learning? What are you seeing and experiencing? Use the hashtag grabbed put your comments into the comment section with that hashtag. If you don't feel like sharing it in the comment section. You can email us grab that nightlight astrology.com. We sharing some stories from a lot of different transits probably next week. So that is what I've got for today. I hope that you enjoyed this and I hope that you have a great experience with mercury Pluto tomorrow today and tomorrow. And look forward to connecting again tomorrow before the weekend. Alright, take it easy, everyone. Bye.