Mercury in Cancer Connects with Uranus in Taurus: The Magic of Secrets

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today we're going to talk about Mercury making a sextile to Uranus. Now Mercury is in the sign of Cancer Uranus is in the sign of Taurus. I don't usually spend a lot of time talking about sextiles, but the reason for this one is that Mercury is in the process of emerging as the Evening Star right now, and as Mercury is making its appearance from the invisible space behind the sun, and it hits Uranus, it's a really interesting signature that can sometimes coincide with secrets being revealed and why?

Because water signs, if you didn't know this, were associated with secretiveness. They were called mute the water signs, in general, were called mute, and they were associated with quietness or secretiveness, and so we're going to talk about why that is, what this Mercury-Uranus connection might have to do with secrets being revealed, and in general, five things that secrets do for the soul so that we can maybe sort of rewrite some of the narratives surrounding the water signs and their secretiveness. I think it gets misunderstood, and there's a psychological and archetypal way of understanding the secretiveness of water signs that could actually be helpful for all of us. So that's what we're going to do today; kind of an interesting take on a simple transit, but I think you guys will enjoy it.

Before we get into it, as always, don't forget to like and subscribe. It helps the channel to grow a great deal, as you guys know. I always really appreciate it when you guys do that and share your comments in the comment section. The other thing is that if you go over to the website, which is nightlightastrology.com, you can find a transcript of today's talk if you care to read it. When you're there, you can check out my readings and classes, and if you have any questions about any of my offerings, feel free to email info@nightlightastrology.com.

This week, you guys know I am also helping to promote some friends of mine over at Astrology Hub. It's a one-week promotion that I am helping them with, and I want to take you over to their website right now to show you what they've got going on. First of all, it's a joy for me to promote some places that I find where there are kindred spirits; there are people who I think are approaching the work from a heart-centered space that I think you might enjoy.

Not all of the astrologers will teach or talk about astrology in the same style or coming from the same background that I do. But I think you'll find that there's a lot of really good stuff at astrologyhub.com. So let me take you over there right now. In general, you can find lots of classes; their podcast is really good. If you go to the membership page, you can join their Inner Circle, which is kind of like a monthly Moon circle with the different astrologers as teachers every month.

In the description of this video, along with the comments section, you can find a promo code for that membership if you want to get a little discount. I have taught in that program before, so I can highly recommend it, and then, if you go to the readings tab in particular, I want to tell you guys about Astrologer Connect; I have about maybe like a dozen emails or so per week, every week, from people saying, Hey, I'd love to book a reading with you but you're booked a year out I don't want to wait that long. Could you recommend someone else?

We're in the process of building a donation-based reading clinic that will launch next year. So in the meantime, I thought this would be a great service to point people to, and one of the reasons if you go over the reading page and go to Astrologer Connect on Astrology Hub is that it can there's a quiz you can take that will match you with one of the astrologers on their staff.

Now, many of the astrologers on staff are my friends or colleagues or people who have literally come through my programs or that have taught here before in my program. So really a bunch of great astrologers on their staff. You can read and learn more about all of the astrologers if you want a reading from any of them and or you can take a quiz and get matched with the astrologer based on your specific interests and what you're looking for, which is really cool. I took the quiz myself; I thought it matched out really well with Gemini Brett, who's actually a friend of mine.

So yeah, so if you want to get a reading with them, they're extending a little promo promotion to our audience. A promo code is AC10Adam; if you use it, you get 15% off. I don't get anything from this. If you guys have asked me, and I'm like, No, I don't. There's nothing that I get as a kickback from doing any of this. I'm just trying to help friends and give you guys some good stuff that I believe in because until we get that donation-based service running with our own staff of astrologers, I feel bad when people are like I want a reading, but who would you refer me to if I don't want to wait a year for you and it's a fair question.

So not only do I think you'd like their reading service to get a lot of good astrologers on staff, but I think you'd like just about everything else they're doing. You know, some of it, you'll have to wade through it. There are a ton of astrologers and a ton of courses that they offer. So you might find something of benefit there.

At any rate, check them out and use that promo code for a discount; check out the promo code for the Inner Circle monthly Moon gathering that they have if you want to join, there's a promo code in the description of this video with a comment section as well.

Okay, so I want to talk today about this kind of interesting angle that I decided that we would take on today's transit. So we are looking at Thursday, July 6, as the day that Mercury is getting together with Uranus through a sextile. Now, sextiles are quick, and sometimes they're not the most noticeable of transits. They are Venusian; they are of the nature of Venus, which means that they provide harmonizations between the planets and their archetypes, and you can see the two of them are connecting here from July 6 into July 7 Friday, where you'll really feel their connection.

Now, what's interesting about this is that Mercury is in the process at seven degrees apart from the sun in Cancer of emerging as the morning star. So that happens when Mercury gets about 15 degrees away. For example, when we see next week, July 13, take it forward even a little bit more, and you've got about 15 degrees of separation by about the middle of July.

So we're basically getting to the place of Mercury appearing as the Evening Star coming out of the underworld, and when it's doing so, coming out through the watery domain of Cancer at the moment, one of the things that Mercury under the beams of the sun and a water sign was sometimes associated with was secretiveness because the water signs as a whole were considered to be quiet or secretive, and a word that was sort of used to describe all the water signs, in general, was mute, which wasn't; it was just a way of saying like, like quiet or secretive, and it was an adjective that could be used to describe something of the qualities of the element of water and the signs of Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces.

So I find this really interesting because this is something the other thing that frequently happens when Mercury hits Uranus; in any kind of aspect, one of the things that sometimes happen is, is the sudden communication of something that has not been seen or that is constituting something of a breakthrough like when Uranus and Mercury get together, it is as though, you know, an email that you weren't expecting a rush.

So there's kind of an unexpected quality of something just showing up and appearing, and when you combine that with Mercury being invisible behind the beams of the sun, and a mute water sign but connecting with Uranus, one of the basic ways of interpreting that archetypal combination could be to say that Mercury will reveal something that is hidden through its sudden contact with Uranus while invisible in a mute water sign. Does that make sense? Okay, good.

So, basically, like before we go into what I really want to talk about today is how we can understand the secretiveness of water signs, and maybe add something to that understanding, I think there's a pretty negative connotation that people have with secrets, secrets, secrets are no fun, secret secrets hurt someone, and that's true often.

But I have today five things that I think that secrets do for the soul. Why does the soul like secrets? And this is something that I've talked about at different times over the years because it's something that I've had the occasion to think about a lot myself as a native with Mercury in a water sign and what is it about hidden, secretive things that I've liked, whether it's esoteric, ancient texts on astrology that were said to be encrypted with the, you know, hidden teachings, and I've spent a lot of time very interested in that kind of thing, or whether it's been the kind of study or exploration of the unconscious, which is kind of like a shadowy, secretive domain of the human psyche, you could say. So whatever the case, I've had a lot of time to think about it and think a lot about why secrets might be a positive thing.

Then, at one point, I was reading a James Hillman essay; who is an archetypal psychologist and was also very interested in astrology and studied with Carl Jung, and one of the things that he said, and I don't remember, it might have been in the Souls Code. I don't remember which book it was in or which essay, but he basically said that the soul needs secrets, and when he said that, he talked about how the soul not only needs to have secrets but to bear them to someone else, like to let me tell you my secret and this is something that the soul needs, wants, enjoys for some interesting reasons other than just being skipped, you know, something scandalous.

So we're going to talk about that today. But before we do just Mercury-Uranus when they harmonize the sudden illuminating insight, the solution to a difficult problem. Kind of outspoken, fun, bubbly conversation and stimulating your nervous system in ways that are pleasant and harmonious. Like a nice buzz when you drink coffee and have a good conversation with a friend, you kind of get that little buzz going.

So it's a very perky transit, and it has the effect of awakening the mind, awakening speech and communication, liberating thoughts and ideas, kind of unexpected, quirky moments of insight or saying something that jumps out of your mouth; you can't believe you said it, but somehow it turns out, okay, or it's even funny or charming somehow, these are Mercury sextile, Uranus kinds of themes and it's very brief, you know, it's, I think sextiles tend to be a little bit more subtle. So you might not even notice it.

But the thing that makes this one a little bit more powerful is the kind of secretive connotation of Mercury, Mercury's under the beams of the sun and a mute secretive water sign, and gradually moving toward emergence and interestingly, when Mercury does move into its Eveningstar phase, this is what I want to go back and show you.

So let's just push this forward a little bit. Here's Mercury and, you know, Mercury's sort of well into, right about here, we have 17 degrees of separation, we got about 16 here. So it's about the middle of July. But as soon as Mercury is in the sign of Leo, one of the cool things that happens is as soon as it makes its presence felt, it's in an application to Jupiter, and then shortly after Uranus.

So it's interesting to me that Mercury hits the sextile in this kind of invisible place and then gets really boisterous and loud around the middle of July. So it's like something that's a little bit quieter, subtler, maybe more secretive, is sort of popping or bubbling over, and it's going to make a much bigger appearance by the middle of the month. So I don't know, I think that's an interesting sequence of events to track out.

Again, what I really want to talk about is, so that's the archetype. That's what to watch for; we'll come back to Mercury-Jupiter, Mercury-Uranus. You know, later in July, we'll revisit that. But in the meantime, what can we say about the secret of quality of water signs? Is there something some way of understanding that secretiveness that's not just like, well, water signs are super emotional and secretive? You know, like, well, what is it about secrets that the soul needs or wants? How can we understand them constructively, and what are the shadows as well? So five things secrets do for the soul. That is our quirky topic for the day, fitting a quirky day like Mercury-Uranus.

Number one is that they give quiet Yin power. So I was it was interesting. I was watching. My wife really loves this show called Outlander. I don't know if you guys have heard of Outlander. But I've been watching the show with her and well, one of the reasons she likes it is because the protagonist is an herbalist. Oh, she has like she's like a nurse who has like herbal medicine, and she time travels, and it's really fun. Like, I really liked the show. It's definitely a fun show.

Although, holy cow, the sex scenes are really crazy, and there seem to be lots of them, but you'll see if you'd watch the show, you'll see what I mean. It's a romance. It's definitely like a romance, I would say, but it's kind of more than that, too. It's like an epic, historical adventure. It's hard to describe, I don't know, but I'm liking it.

Anyway, in this show, there are a group of women, and I won't say too much, but there they are drinking something. It's like a liquor that they make, and it's all their own, and they say it's our secret from the men, and I just was reflecting on that for a second, and it reminded me of something else I had heard an evolutionary biologist say; someone was saying, like, Where does this, you know, kind of evolutionary biological point of view?

Why do women get the bad rep of being associated with, like, serpents and cunning, and you know, there's kind of that, like, unfortunate stereotype that you've heard throughout history with women sort of being like temptresses and serpent-like, and all this stuff and like, that's a huge conversation, first of all, but one thing that I remember that this guy said that was interesting is he said, Well, you know, if you think about, you know, women being around sort of, like barbaric, you know, what's the word I'm looking for?

Sort of like barbaric, physically powerful men, and their first option isn't to, you know, when a power struggle through physical force, then, you know, it's it's likely that women would have developed ways of taking care of themselves and defending themselves and even overcoming or surviving or even winning in power struggles through something that was more intelligent and subtle, and so it was really interesting.

Because there's this whole thread through Outlander, where there are women who have knowledge of medicine and poison, and there's this kind of, I would call it, like a quiet or secretive Yin power, and my point is to ennoble this idea that the Yin, when we say secretive, that there's such a negative connotation that to be secretive means to be like backstabbing, right or to be two-faced or to be a liar, or to be a cheater, or, you know, like secretive has all these negative connotations.

But one of the things that's very powerful about Yin, you could say, just Yin energy, forget the stereotypes about men and women; I don't even know if that's the constructive way of talking about this. But it's just that the Yin has a way of being powerful, like the way that water can wear down jagged rocks drip by drip over 1000s of years.

The power of Yin throughout, say, for example, the Tao Te Ching, or the I-Ching, is often described as subtle, pervasive, and persistent. It's quiet, but it's very, very powerful, and the thing is, is that I think that the soul needs secrets in our lives because they carry with them a kind of powerful force.

I'll just give you an example, and this is, as a native Mercury in Cancer, I feel like I can, like, speak to this. For me, a huge amount of what I experienced in Ayahuasca ceremonies are my own little secrets, and not only are they my own little secrets, but they are secrets that I have to keep even from myself at times.

I just remember when I was writing my book about ayahuasca, there were many times where I had, like, you know, insights from ceremonies that I thought, well, this would be a great thing to write about, and then there would be something inside of me would say, Nope, keep that one, put it in a drawer somewhere in your psyche, where not even you knows where the key is.

Because if you do, it will contribute to you having this kind of quiet base of support within you. A quiet confidence, a sense of knowing. So there's something about secrets that give us this power, and it doesn't have to be a power over someone or something. It might be just the power to persist. It might be the power to let go. It could be the power to love or to forgive.

But it's like, where does that come from and I think part of it is that when we hold and gather and collect things internally, and we keep them, and we don't share all that, or if we do, it's with very, very few people, only a few people know our secrets, that kind of thing. That it gives us this kind of quiet Yin power, and so when I think of water signs, and that sort of secretiveness, and usually you hear people right away get like afraid or they again, they think very stereotypically of it being some kind of backstabbing, I'm not telling the truth, or I don't want to let people know what I'm thinking, or it's passive-aggressive, or it's manipulative. It's just funny how all of those stereotypes tend to be like, what I would call like, like really unfortunate stereotypes that often get put, like, on the feminine.

I just think that there's something more to it when we talk about secretiveness and the way that power flows and works through the Yin through water; I think we need to have more of an imagination about it. That's all I'm saying. So does that make sense? I hope so, and I hope I did not offend anyone in anything that I just said, but if I did, keep it as a secret.

Anyway, number two, secret surprise. This one actually kind of goes along with the Mercury-Uranus thing. Here is what, here's what I can say about like, for example, one of the characteristics of the secrets that I have within me from those Ayahuasca ceremonies, the ones that I can't even remember anymore, that I just remember saying, I'm not gonna say anything about that one. That was amazing, and I hope even I forget it, you know, because then it just will become a part of me somehow; it comes woven so tightly into me that I can't access it consciously, and that's a good thing.

That a lot of those kinds of experiences, the ones that I kept in my little like, you know, like in The Little Mermaid how Ariel has like a treasure trove full of all of the things she collects under the ocean. It's like that.
One of the characteristics of how I gathered all of those things is that those were the things that surprised me, the little thing that glimmered and went, Oh, wow, what is that and there's that when something constant, when something is a secret, it somehow grabs you and shines, and then you take it in you like a crab, you put it in your little collection of things.

So the way that they come in, the way that the secrets come in, is they often surprise us, and when we share a secret with someone else, it has the alchemical power of the same kind of surprise that we experienced, that moves something within us when we share our secret because not all secrets are just bad things that we did.

Secrets can be little pieces of insight or information about a person that, at the right moment revealed, can completely, you know, bring us joy or excitement, or it can open our hearts in a different way or teach us something. So when I think about secrets like that, I think, you know, what's cool is when you find secrets that surprise you, and then you keep those little things, they have the power to give the same gift when you share them, and you share them with a select few people. Right, but isn't that cool?

But the other thing is that secrets can shock us, and then, when we do something that is uncharacteristic, we feel shame. Oh, I can't believe I did that. It's like shock and surprise, and then we hide it, and then we need to share it so that it can be let go, and the person who plays the role of hearing and witnessing is someone who says; I see how that could be shocking. Now we let it go. That's really the role of, you know, ideally, that's like the role of someone sitting in a confessional somewhere. I hear that; I see that. That must have been shocking. Now we let it go.

I mean, because if you can imagine if your therapist went like, Oh, you did what? You know. Oh my god, I can't believe you did that. Like thanks, therapist, you know. But no, the therapist, the best therapist, I share something that's like, oh, I can't believe I did that and feeling so ashamed or embarrassed. The therapist holds space, and then it can flow outward.

So there's this interesting quality of shock and surprise, and I think the best side of things is when we're surprised by something, and we keep it as a secret because it's so surprising and novel that when we give it to someone else, it carries the same alchemical charge and it can do some really special things, and I think that's why the soul loves to give little secrets to people. Only a few.

All right, secrets are sold possessions. I mean, this one to me is the this is I actually I kind of ruined this one because I went there already. The little treasure cave in Little Mermaid, I just took my girls to go see that at the movie theater not long ago. The new one is the live-action Disney one. I don't know whether I like those live-action. What do you guys think? It's like there's part of me like this is so cool, and there's another part of me that's like; they're just I feel like they're gonna get they're gonna keep finding ways of doing the same core canonical Disney films, I can tell everyone blows up or something.

So anyway, she has that little treasure cove under the sea, she has like her little room where she's got gadgets and gizmos a plenty. Well, that's the soul, like that is the unconscious in a way. The unconscious can be filled with monsters and fears and repressed stuff and demons and like that, but you know, it's, it's also a space of treasures that we have collected, and this is very Cancerian, I think; that our secrets, our the little things they, are the totems of soul that somehow affirm and reflect who we are or who we've become, or where we were and we collect secrets, and we put them on a shelf.

Even the hard ones, even the things that are shameful in time, can become beautiful relics, especially when they've taught us we've kept those secrets, and those secrets have aged well, and they turn into beautiful things. They go from shameful and ugly and embarrassing to beautiful when we keep them long enough, and we keep growing, and in fondness, we look back somehow we've forgiven them, and then the items on our shelf in the unconscious like they change.

So I think secrets are soul possessions. They're complicated; what we collect, what we hold on to, maybe some of it we need to let go of. But that's what I think secrets are, and I don't think it's as simple as saying that secrets are things that aren't yet conscious or secrets are things that you're not sharing because you're afraid to hurt someone. It's all just so linear.

You know, we need to have more of an imagination, and we think about it like there's a whole ecology of secrets, so we need to diversify our understanding. So that we can get to know this thing called the secret, in fact, the etymology of the word secret. That which is hidden from human understanding, secrecy, mystery, a thing hidden. It also means solitude; it also means something that is set apart or concealed, and it also means something that is divided.

Isn't that interesting that when secrets come into our life, they represent inner divisions? You know, I think of all the things in the ayahuasca ceremonies that I keep secrets; some of them I share very openly. Some of them I keep secrets because the divisions that they present within myself are painful. But they're also fascinating to me, and it's sort of hard to admit that I find certain kinds of inner divisions fascinating; I'm sure you're the same way.

But when you sit with those inner divisions long enough, again, it's like, wow, there's a reason that you keep secrets because they're contemplative devices that help you understand divinity, and yourself and others, and if you don't keep them, you're losing, your different meditative devices that are there for you and your secrets, and sharing all of them constantly. Like confessional culture, let me just get it all off my chest. I'm just going to not live with the shame and guilt of this anymore.

It's like, yeah, you could live with maybe a little bit more shame and guilt. That sounded so shitty. But well, you know what I mean? What I mean is, how can you take some of those things, the shameful, guilty things, and allow for them to be something more than just shameful and guilty? They can be bad, and they can be something else. They can be beautiful and interesting.

See, my thing is that I think we're extremists. At least I see this in myself. Where, oh, that thing that secret? That's a shameful one, you know, that's a really bad one. But then, if I sit with it, I'm like, and it also represents two different aspects of being it rep. You know, there are some secrets that need to be shared. There are some secrets that harm, there are some secrets that need to be purged, like, how many times that I barf out some of my unconscious repressed stuff that really shouldn't be held on to into a bucket in those same ceremonies, right?

But what I'm trying to say is that we shouldn't be so afraid to hold on to complicated things and take little walking meditations around them in our private inner sphere. Okay, anyway, I think you guys get the point.

Secrets are so possessions secrets are things that need quiet and low light to grow, and that could mean that there's some fungus or rot or mold or gross growing stuff that is going to grow if you keep a secret too long. So you have to be careful because some secrets in low light and quiet will grow into something malicious, toxic, and create disease, but is that all a secret is? I don't think so. Is that all that water does is turn things into mold or cancer, you know what I mean?

So some things in us, the best things that we're trying to develop, need a sphere in which to develop without even our own minds obsessing over them too much. They need to be kept in quiet, low light, and then they can grow into something beautiful secrets are a part of that process. A secretive way of relating to even our own growth potential.

Number five, secrets draw us in. I want to read you something that close that comes from the Pulitzer Prize nominated book by James Hillman called Revisioning Psychology. He talks about this as the process of seeing through, and this is the process of the soul itself.

Let's now condense the process of psychological discovery that would mean for him, psychological means soul. So psychological discovery and soul discovery into a series of steps. First, there is the psychological moment, a moment of reflection, wonder puzzlement; see the puzzlement that mystery initiated by the soul which intervenes and counter veils what we're in the midst of doing, hearing, reading, watching with slow suspicion see the secretive quality. You can't quite see it, but it's there. Or sudden insight, we move through the apparent to the less apparent, the less apparent being the secret. We use metaphors of light, a little flicker of slow dawning a lightning flash as things become clarified.

See, we like secrets because they draw us so deeply into a process of discovery, and then boom, just like Mercury-Uranus, something is discovered, something is seen, something is understood. We use metaphors of light, a little flicker, a slow dawning, a lightning flash. As things become clarified when the clarity has itself become obvious and transparent, there seems to grow within it a new darkness, a new question or doubt, requiring a new insight, an act of insight penetrating again toward the less apparent.

The movement becomes an infinite regress, which does not stop at coherent or elegant answers; the process of psychologizing cannot be brought to a halt at any of the resting places of science or philosophy; that is, psychologizing is not satisfied when necessary and sufficient conditions have been met or when testability has been established, it is satisfied only by its own movement, of seeing through.

So you see, the thing is, is that we like secrets because secrets draw us into the soul to discover something, to learn something, to see something, and then boom, something is clear, something hidden is clarified, and a secret is revealed. This is why I think so many people like secretive alchemical packaging around all the New Age stuff. Same thing because the soul needs that. It needs therapy to penetrate into the less apparent and obvious it needs the language of astrology to help us, you know, penetrate into the less apparent and less obvious, and then boom, an insight comes. Very Mercury-Uranus.

But that insight, we don't stop at that and then conclude something, and then now I'm above water, and I just have to stay above the water. No, we, as soon as that clarity has been reached, it starts to fade, and then a new call into a new deeper layer or level of something less apparent, something hidden, something secretive, appears, and we start to feel it calling us. It draws us back into the life of the soul, and we need that.

So for these reasons, I stand for water and for its mute secretiveness. I hope that you have enjoyed today's talk and that it has given you food for thought. I thought this would be an interesting way, like I said, of approaching a very everyday Mercury-Uranus transit. So if nothing else, I hope it's taught you something new about astrology, and we'd love to hear your comments and reflections as always; you can find the transcript of today's talk on the website nightlightastrology.com. I hope you have a great day. Bye, everyone.