Mercury Opposite Saturn: Playing by Ear

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today we are going to take a look at Mercury's opposition to Saturn, which is perfecting today into tomorrow. You have already been experiencing this transit if you've been paying attention the last couple of days, maybe even about the past week, depending on how broad of a range we give Mercury's approach to Saturn.

Mercury's in the sign of Virgo, Saturn's in the sign of Pisces. So the opposition is forming ever since Mercury entered Virgo. We're going to take a look at that today, and I'm going to tell you three things that I have learned as a Mercury, Saturn native now I was born with Mercury in a square to Saturn but the same archetypal combination in a difficult aspect or a more tense and dynamic one. They're very similar Mercury opposite Saturn, Mercury square Saturn has a lot in common. I'm going to talk to you guys about three things that I've learned and share a little bit of my personal experience with this transit. But I'd also love to hear your stories, as well as always, so I hope that you guys were sharing your comments on this one.

This is a big enough transit that we are taking one day in between August's overview and horoscopes for August because I really want to make sure that we take a look at this one as it's perfecting. So we will get to horoscopes; just stay tuned. Anyway, don't forget to like and subscribe.

Before we get started today, share your comments in the comment section, especially if you were born with this transit in your natal chart or you have a strong experience of this transit this week. You can find a transcript of today's talk on the website nightlightastrology.com. If you go over there to the website, be sure to check out all of my readings and courses.

We have new courses starting in the fall. We're going to be having a one-week sale in the month of August on all of our programs. So stay tuned for more information about that and the weeks to come. You can email us if you have any questions about what you find on our website, including all the readings and courses info@nightlight astrology.com is the email address.

Okay, well, today, we are looking at Mercury's opposition to Saturn, this perfects August 1, but you will be feeling it through the rest of this week. And you have been feeling it for several days prior to its perfection today.

Let's take a look at the real-time clock, and we'll, just as always kind of highlight the transit before unpacking it on an archetypal level. So here you can see Mercury in Virgo and Saturn in Pisces and see the opposition forming between the two of them. So that is today, Tuesday, August 1.

But what I want you to pay attention to is we advanced this just a couple of days; I want you to notice that the transit remains in effect within three degrees, really through Friday of this week. So that three-degree range called the engagement range was very important for ancient astrologers; they said that it was during those three approaching degrees and three separating degrees that typically the events promised by the transit as an omen speaking to the unfolding of events would actually occur.

So we do want to watch for the signature of Mercury Saturn all week. That being said, we are also going to be looking at some other transits this week that, you know, should definitely have us excited, like, for example, the Sun is moving into a square with Jupiter over the weekend and early into next week, and that's that kind of softens things it's always important to look at the context right, so you have Mercury opposing Saturn, which is a little bit rough, but the Sun squaring Jupiter, which gives us a little bit of lift.

Those kinds of juxtapositions are important because you're never just experiencing one transit. So we're going to pay attention to this. We're also going to be juxtaposing the Sun-Jupiter square as the week goes on. Anyway, so our agenda for today is to look at Mercury's opposition to Saturn. Now I was born with Mercury in Cancer square Saturn in Libra, and so someone I'm very familiar with Mercury-Saturn; of course, I also have Mercury in a close square with Jupiter. So it's a little different in my chart; it's not because I was born with the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in 81 in early Libra.

So I do have both Mercury, Jupiter, and Mercury Saturn, but I can tell you as a Capricorn moon that I'm very familiar with Mercury, Saturn, and all of its vices, and the challenging things, and I think the virtues and blessings of that placement are also really cool.

So I want to tell you about my experience with this transit in my lived experience, and I would love to hear from you guys as well add to this list that I've made. These are three things that I've learned that stood out when I sat down. I always like a tiny little number like three or five, you know, and so I was like, what are three things I learned and these stood out to me right away.

So, first of all, let's talk about Mercury and Saturn. If you think about Mercury as a philosopher and as a curious thinker, as the inventor of the lyre, the first musical instrument, Mercury is curious Mercury was the ruler of inventions and inventors of things like alchemy and astrology, the study of omens, and the interpretation of riddles and dreams.

Mercury is not just the brain or the head or the intellect in some dry rational sense, though it can be it is also indicative of all of that, that kind of curious riddling; I mean, we call people who are changeable, adaptable, fluid, open receptive on a mental level; we call them mercurial.

Mercury is very interesting in that Mercury can represent people who have, who are good at the sciences or who have, who are good at writing, or even playing an instrument or speaking or talking or thinking and articulating, but also people who might have really, you know, fantastic, you know, rational capacities. But then, when you blend it with Saturn, the Lord of discipline, maturity, gravitas, and seriousness, this kind of distant and deep melancholic Saturn.

It's a very interesting combination Mercury-Saturn can, in fact, be indicative of things like melancholy of a sort of serious mind, of disciplined mental qualities of the mature, serious, austere type of mental features that certain people have. They can be about people who are, you know, structured and maybe even dogmatic or rigid in their thinking, but also, people who are wordsmiths, or people who like to learn structures inside and out and weave their way through them quite eloquently in the way that you know, really good musicians learn scales and then learn to move about them fluidly.

So Mercury-Saturn is really interesting in that it can show both the tendency toward rigid thinking as well as the tendency to work fluidly within well-defined structures. So you know, and I've certainly experienced both in the course of my lifetime, sort of the virtues and the vices.

Anyway, these are the three things that I've learned working with Mercury-Saturn; remember, again, I kind of have Jupiter in the mix of my Mercury square to Saturn as well. But at any rate, went as far as the Mercury-Saturn piece goes, three things I've learned.

One, trust and faith are more important than certainty. Now you can replace the word faith with trust or even surrender. But I would say that the vice of Mercury-Saturn, for me, has been this feeling that I can't, you know, that like a nagging, almost chronic sense of doubting things or being sort of cynical and distrusting, like habitual distrust is how the dictionary defines cynicism, I believe.

So habitual distrust, skepticism, feeling like I, you know, which is maybe a tendency toward critical thinking, being judgmental and critical of myself and others. I have a pretty harsh inner voice. I think a lot of people probably do, especially if you have a Mercury Saturn contact in your chart; you can have a very kind of authoritarian, rigid, mental, like a little commander.

It's kind of like, If you guys ever see the movie, Whiplash, it was about a drummer and his, his music teacher, and the music teacher was just severely abusive, but like, brought out his excellence, and I think that's sort of Mercury, Saturn's philosophy, like, you know, if we just, if we get rigid and intense and demand perfection, then you know, that'll bring out the best in you even if it leaves you sort of bloodied and battered and feeling like traumatized by your own inner critic.

That's Mercury-Saturn at its best and worst; in a way, it is a taskmaster that that demands mental and intellectual excellence, and it takes everything very seriously. But I've learned over time that trust and faith and a kind of surrender, as well as, you know, having disciplines and habits in my life, reading, for example, reading and study habits that I keep up prayer and meditation that I keep up, but over the years, what I found is that time and time and time again, the call has been to keep my practices while softening the inner voice, you know, softening the way that they're done.

Softening the voices that tell me why I'm praying or meditating every morning. I don't need to become perfect. It's not about getting better. I was looking back, you know, it's funny Ashley, and I have been cleaning out a big storage. We moved to Minnesota, and a lot of stuff got put into storage, and we never went through it and, like, you know, got rid of stuff and looked at what we wanted to keep and didn't.

So we've been doing that, and I was going through some old journals, and I was looking back, and I was like, Jeez man, I was like 187 days without sugar. You know, that's like, you know, 98 days with, you know, meditating every single day and, like, holy shit, man, I was, like, coming out of, I don't know, like, I'd say, you know, coming out of my 20s and coming out of having some pretty serious problems and then, you know, really finding psychedelics and starting on a path of healing, sobriety, recovery, health, wellness.

Some of the same intensity that drove me to seek, you know, self-medicate with substances was really present in the way that I tried to address my healing. It was very rigid and, and I'm sure that many of you can relate, it's like when you begin a healing process, the same rigidity and extremes within yourself that lead you into something dysfunctional, or sort of present and trying to control or steer the ship when you're beginning your healing journey, you know, and that's just looking back, and I was like, Oh, buddy, I was like, that's okay.

You know, and even still, today, I sound like, I'm so much better now or anything, you know, like, I can still be that way, I can still get pretty rigid. In fact, leaving the religious tradition that I was a part of last year happened as Jupiter in Aries was hitting the Mercury-Saturn square in my chart, helping me loosen up and realize that I can have a spiritual path in my life without having the volume turned up so loud on like, the discipline and the structure of that path.

For me, that was the realization that, like, I couldn't, in order to really do that, I needed some distance from like a formal religious commitment, you know, it was a pretty serious one that I had made. All of that is not to say that you should or shouldn't do anything; I just wanted to share my story of Mercury, Saturn and knowing that over time, it's been about keeping practices, reading, or playing my guitar, or, you know, going for walks, or going to the gym, or my diet or my sleep or anything. It's about, but it's about having trust and faith that just keeping up the healthy practices are enough; it doesn't matter where they're taking me, it doesn't matter if I did them perfectly or not, it doesn't matter if they make me better or not.

So, you know, kind of like learning to have these, these structured practices of mind, or learning that that's a part of who I am, you know, I have that kind of structured, serious mental quality, but like, how do I utilize that part of myself with softness and tenderness and trust and faith rather than having to be certain about things. That's been one of the biggest lessons for me, and I suspect that that could be a lesson that's in the air for all of us this week.

Number two, curiosity and playfulness is more important than discipline. I want to share with you something that happened to me recently as Uranus was squaring my natal Venus, which I think is fairly compatible with this same idea. So as Uranus is squaring my natal Venus, I got really, really into the Grateful Dead thanks to my wife, and so I've kind of told the story a little bit before on my channel, so I won't repeat it all, but it's funny like I listened to an interview that John Mayer did with I don't remember what his name was, but he was on like a podcast, and he was talking about how he was like, you know, I couldn't get into the Grateful Dead when I was in high school, because all I really knew about them was that the people who listened to them were, you know, like tie-dye wearing, pot smoking, grungy looking hippies and I just knew that I wasn't one of them. So I just sort of assumed that the music wasn't for me.

I laughed when he said that because I was like, Oh, dude, that's like, I didn't have anything against hippies in my school. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't like walking around judging them, but I was just like, yeah, it's not really my, my scene, you know, so my wife, on the other hand, like that was that kind of was her scene like she's going around after high school she went around a van in the country, like a VW all over America following the Dead, you know, tie-dye skirts, the whole thing. That wasn't like how I identified with him anyway.

He was saying in the interview that until you have an experience of the Grateful Dead because they're not a great studio band, a better live band is what he was saying, and he was saying, you know, you have to have an experience of hearing their live music in a way that makes it really, really personal and once you have that personal experience of the Grateful Dead, it's sort of like a skeleton key that opens up the entire treasure trove of their music and like if you'd have told me all of that before, I had this very personal experience of my birthday weekend of going to see two Dead & Co show in San Francisco on their final weekend with my wife, and I just would have thought that that was such a weird, like, I would just have been like, just seems like such a, I don't know, I just wouldn't have connected with that idea.

But that's what happened. I had this profoundly personal connection, you know, of a very deep and intense musical high as what I would describe as a psychedelic experience, to put it mildly, and now it's like, there's no song that I listened to by the Grateful Dead, that I'm not like, wow, I really like this, you know, and I couldn't, it's like, I couldn't hear it that way beforehand. Anyway, that's exactly what John Mayer was saying in this in this interview.

Now, I have played my guitar for a long time. But it's been a very long time since I have played with a kind of spirit of exploration and curiosity, as opposed to playing songs, songs that I've learned, songs that I like, and songs that I then play.

It's been a very long time for me as an adult since I've sat down with my guitar and sort of just explored and not been attached to something that I learn and then know, and then play if that makes sense and the reason for that, as I was I've been reading Jerry Garcia's biography, and they were talking about how one of the features of how he practiced was that he would sit down for very long periods of time and in addition to learning forms, and songs and scales, and theory and different styles of music, he was just he, he loved to sit down for very long periods of time and simply explore without any structure, and he was sort of anti-authority and anti-theory and anti-form in a way.

So it's very Venus-Uranus if you guys can track what I'm saying; I'm going through that in my natal chart right now. Anyway, I would equate every important creative turn in my life, whether that was in writing my book or in art school, or, you know, my turn to going and creating YouTube content, to some of the most important turns that I've had, in the development of my practice as an astrologer, as always, containing basically the exact same lesson.

Which is that once there's, there are times where it's like you learn scales, you, you learn all sorts of form. But then there comes a time when you have to set all of that aside and just be curious and playful, and when you do that, what you find is not that you have somehow gone into the country of chaos, the land of darkness, from which you will not return that makes no sense that has nothing to offer that isn't safe.

But instead, you find out that there are all sorts of treasures when you're curious, and you are playful when you lighten the mood mentally and go off script, that you bring back a lot of treasures, and you learn a lot, and you become wiser, and in a sense, it doesn't take anything away from the gravitas, the seriousness, the sort of depth and maturity and sort of profundity that like Saturn requires of us.

Now Saturn wants things to be deep and serious. You know, almost like you're listening to, you know, Moonlight Sonata or something. It's very Saturnian. So what I've found as a Mercury-Saturn native, which has been a lesson sort of, echoed by Uranus, transiting Venus in my natal chart, is that anytime that we can go off script and be curious and playful, our life becomes less of a studio band and more of a live experience, so to speak and I'm using Grateful Dead analogies here because this has been really live and lucid in my life lately.

So weird, like you would ever have told me I was like my wife, such a hippie, like the Grateful Dead, you know, like I, I can't get into them or whatever. She's converted me. Anyway. So curiosity and playfulness is a hallmark of someone who has taken Mercury-Saturn, and I think integrated it really well because Mercury is, by nature, very clear, very curious, and very playful, and when you can do that, with no sense of losing yourself with no sense of being lost, or adrift, all the fears that Saturn will project onto Mercury as a way of trying to control it and instead, you can say, let's explore and be playful and let's be curious and what I find is that there is no less substance or safety or structure or form in that playfulness. It's not just pure chaos.

There are a lot of very interesting shapes that you can find in that world that Saturn will be totally comfortable with but can't appreciate unless he loosens his control from the get go, right? Do you have to lean into curiosity and playfulness to get something different out of Saturn? Okay, well, anyway.

Number three is that rules can become artful tools. Now I have learned this as an astrologer over the years, especially through the craft of horror area astrology; in horary, students always start off in the same place as I did, and as I still fall into quite regularly, it's really hard not to, which is that you'll learn like, okay, which with an approach to questions about pregnancy and a horary charter with approach to, you know, with the approach to questions about jobs, or relationships, or whatever it might be, you have this set of procedures and rules that you follow that are 1000s of years old, you know, or at least 1500-1600 years old.

They come from at least the medieval period, we know. So they're really old, and you there's this, like, Okay, I do this, and I do this, and I do this, and then I check my work and like that. Similarly, I'll use the interview that I was listening to with John Mayer about playing with Grateful Dead, and he said, you know, as a blues player, you know, I'm used to playing in like boxes in the, like, pentatonic Blues scales, and I'm not any kind of musical, you know, master, I'm very much a noodler.

But anyway, he was saying, there's, like, you know, there are boxes, and he said, he was talking about Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead and how conversational and exploratory their music is, and again, I feel like I've heard people say that, and until I actually saw them live, I just didn't connect to that and then I saw them live and I was like, Oh, my God, okay, this is, really special.

So yeah, they're their music has this very exploratory sense to it, where you can tell that they're very aware of the rules, but they hold on to them very loosely at times, and what I found in Horary is that sometimes a chart pops up where the answer is almost riffing off from a rule, it's like, sometimes charts pop up, and it's like this interesting little twist or a play on a rule, and you're like, the charts, bending the rules, you know, and then you get into your head about it.

What I found over and over again is that astrology, if I'm to be a good reader, and remember, this was called The Art and Science of Hermes, Mercury, astrology was, if I'm going to be like, a good reader if I'm going to have a decent hermeneutic, then I need to have like a musical ear, I have to be, in a sense, life is meant to be played by ear and we have to understand rules, structures, forms, etc. but only insofar as we can use them to, to maintain a living connection within each moment.

You know, the rules, the tools, the structures are in service of heart to heart connections between living beings and presences Gods, daimons, souls, and spirits, and in a horary charter, in most astrology charts, you'll learn all of these rules, and the student will get just really frustrated because it seems like the rules don't always work and that's because the rules are more like the means by which to understand a kind of music, a kind of language that's being spoken or sung and the rules are meant to teach you how to hear, how to listen and how to speak, and how to speak sincerely, beautifully, truly, deeply soulfully.

That secondary part is the artfulness. It's really the artfulness of Hermes that comes through when we utilize elements of structure, but we don't become subordinate to them. Right? They're in service to a living vibrational connection that is at the heart of what makes life worth living, you know. So Mercury-Saturn is when your rules can become artful tools that's, to me, a sign that Mercury Saturn is in contact somehow with the soul.

So anyway, my thoughts as someone who has stumbled along the path of life trying my best to work with Mercury-Saturn in my own natal chart, thankfully, Jupiter's there giving a little bounce, a little lift, you know, but I have struggled with Mercury-Saturn a lot. I look back, and I'm like 70,000 days without sugar. It's like, I was looking back like some of my post-Ayahuasca years where I was single, and I was like, 380 days celibate. I'm like, Jesus Christ, dude. I was like, brother, like, I want to give myself a hug.

It's all good because I think we all go through, we all go through things like that. Ashley was really funny, we were going through a box, and she found a list, like a laminated piece of paper, a list of rules that she had given herself to live by when she was studying yoga, and they were so like, but it was so diligent, you know, and like, we go through these phases in life where we need those rules, we need to entrain ourselves to structures, and we do that as a way of trying to get the cast of characters onto the same page, like okay, you, you, you, you and you, the wild one over there that likes to pee in the corner when no one's looking get over here, you know, like, let's bring it all in crazies and let's, let's try to get together we eat at this time we try to eat healthy, blah, blah, blah.

So we need Mercury-Saturn, kind of get our shit together, get our ducks in a row. You also don't want that to go too far so that there's repression or suppression, ostracization, or alienation happening among the cast of characters in our psyche, which can happen if Saturn-Mercury gets too extreme.

Okay, well, I hope that this has been useful for you. As always, please add some of your stories. How have you worked with this energy in your life? It's common to everybody; we all have dealt with it. This is an archetypal combination that pervades the human experience whether you have it in your chart or not. So share your story. I'd love to hear it, and I look forward to seeing you again tomorrow. Bye, everyone.