Mercury Square Uranus and the First Quarter Moon in Taurus

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Happy Friday, everybody. Today, we are going to take a look at Mercury square to Uranus; in a week of very busy transit activity, we have yet another one to talk about, so Mercury square Uranus today, and we're also going to take a look at just preview the upcoming Jupiter-Uranus conjunction which lands in the last 10 degrees of Taurus, and so does today's First Quarter Moon in Taurus.

So we're going to take a look at the last Decan of Taurus as a way of talking about today's first quarter moon and what it might be saying, but also previewing what the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction might be saying on the level of the decan meeting, which is by the way if you don't know what decans are, I'll explain it a little bit, but it's an ancient form of zodiacal division that astrologers used, and according to these divisions, they would help to deepen our understanding of planetary significations, just like bounds or triplicities or domicile rulerships or exultations. Decans were one of the traditional dignity categories, you might say, and they actually pre-date Hellenistic astrology. So anyway, we'll talk about that and look at the last Decan of Taurus today and also Mercury square to Uranus.

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You can find a transcript of today's talk or any of our talks on the website at nightlightastrology.com. We had our first webinar last night, and it was awesome. Thank you all for attending. If you want to attend next month's webinar, which continues the series, or if you want to purchase last night's talk, we'll have it for sale in the Nightlight Shop, which is a new page I'll be telling you about next week, and we'll have that available soon.

So next month is Neptune in Love and then Uranus in Love in April, so the series continues, and you can get the replay if you missed it. As I said, it will be available in the Shop, and I'll be telling you about our new shop page soon, which will include a lot of different cool recordings that you can pick up, talks, and other cool stuff.

So anyway, if you have any questions, by the way, about anything you find on our website, email info@nightlightastrology.com, which is the way to get in touch with us. So I'm getting over a cold. This is the cold that never ends. This is my second week of having a cold, and it's not bad enough to where I feel like I need to go and get an antibiotic like the heavy-duty artillery. I hate taking those things, but you know, once in a while, I guess you have to, and Ashley has been feeding me all sorts of witchy stuff that I love. But I still sound like a frog on and off.

I was good for three days, and all of a sudden, I started sounding like a frog again, and yeah, it's just a yucky, gross, cold. It's not bad enough to hold me back from doing stuff. But it's bad enough to just not go away. So, like, alright, you gotta; hopefully, it will be gone soon.

All right, well, on that note, let's put the real-time clock up and take a look. You might be saying hey, look, why aren't you talking about Venus-Pluto? Aha. But we already have two days' worth of Venus-Pluto content. If you missed it, go back and listen to what we did yesterday. There was a good talk on Venus-Pluto, and the day before, a good talk on Venus, Pluto; if you missed it last night, there was a webinar that included a lot of Venus, Pluto and then earlier in the week, we looked at Mars-Pluto, it has been a week of Plutonian action, hasn't it? We'd love to hear your stories.

By the way, if you ever want to share a story you got a good one from one of the transits, use the hashtag #grabbed in the comment section, name the transit, and tell us your story.

Or email it to us at grabbed@nightlightastrology calm. It's always a good way to share. I'm waiting for a low in all of these transits because there's been so many back-to-back to get in another storytelling episode. I've got one ready to go. I'm just waiting for a time they make good filler, really, when it's like okay, there's no major transits for like three days. Yeah.

So anyway. All right. Well, the reason we aren't talking about Venus and Pluto today is because we did it for the past two days, and today we also have Mercury and Uranus. Voila, and look at, I mean, if you just track this out, I mean, so many transits this week, my God. But anyway, if you look at this, this is Friday, February 16. Today, march forward a day, and you've got the by tomorrow morning, Mercury will have passed through the square. So Mercury is square to Uranus today, February 16.

Now, you could have been feeling this coming. Since yesterday about three degrees off starting February 15. We take it forward and give it about three degrees and maybe take it through till Monday, February 19.

I think it's interesting that we have a Uranus dynamic in the sky with Mercury for the Super Bowl this weekend. I'm kind of wondering if there'll be some kind of technological snafu like they're very well could be. So anyway. We're looking at Mercury Uranus today from Aquarius to Taurus. The Aquarius-Taurus access is lighting up back and forth like a pinball machine this month, and, you know, there are some patterns we've already spent a lot of time talking about. We're going to continue talking about some of those today, and then I want to shift over to the fact that the other thing to notice is here on Friday, February 16. We have the First Quarter Moon in Taurus; you can see it circled right there with Uranus.

So that first quarter moon and Taurus I wouldn't usually spend a lot of time talking about a first-quarter moon, but this one is impactful because it's the first-quarter moon exalted in the sign of Taurus, where Jupiter and Uranus are coming together. It is in Venus's sign while Venus is going through the conjunction to Pluto. If you don't think that means anything? You're wrong. It does, especially given that we have a repeat of the Aquarius Taurus access through Mercury square to Uranus.

So we're going to look at that first quarter moon and Taurus, and I'm going to be looking at it from the standpoint of the first quarter moon being in the last decan, and the fact that Jupiter-Uranus will also conjoin in the last decan is significant here. So, something that can bring some of these things together. So that's how we're going to be looking at it today. Now you've seen the real-time clock. So, let's go ahead and start off by talking about Mercury Uranus. What can you expect?

People frequently think about Mercury as the rational mind and communication and speech and intelligence, and so if we take those significations, which are real Mercury significations, seriously, then when you put it with Uranus, the God of revolution, emancipation, originality, out of the box thinking sudden dramatic, unexpected changes, especially with an emphasis on freedom and a breaking of habits or limits or boredom.

Then, you have a combination that yields things like original thinking, sudden flashes of insight, or ideas that liberate or break up the monotony or shift the momentum. You have communication that is unexpected. You have foot and mouth syndrome, where you suddenly say something you don't mean to say. You have the electricity of Uranus and the inventiveness of Uranus alongside of Hermes, who was literally called the inventor by some ancient astrologers, especially when Mercury was in the first or second house.

Did you know that it was a sign of any Mercury placements or even planets and Mercury signs in the first and second house are sometimes associated with originality because they were associated with the native and what the native was in possession of. Well, if you're in possession of something mercurial in the first or second house, you might be original or inventive. Isn't that interesting? You could also be articulate or thoughtful, skillful, or crafty in some way.

So when Mercury pairs with Uranus, you also have people who suddenly develop new skills, talents, and abilities, whose articulation of an instrument is particularly brilliant, or whose skill as an athlete is remarkable. Both Mars Uranus and Mercury Uranus have a correlation with breaking records in sports, and that's because Mercury was associated with sports; you might go, well, why? Because Mercury went back and forth, up and down courts, like basketball or hockey or tennis, the back and forth, back and forth. That was associated with Mercury. So it's something like chess, right?

So you know, brilliant maneuvers, brilliant displays of craft that break previous limitations, or what we think is impossible is suddenly now possible because someone does it. These are Mercury Uranus significations; when they get into a square, there's also the idea of something that stuck around the mind or intellect that needs to be freed up, and so breakthroughs in thinking breakthroughs, and stubborn systems of thought, breakthroughs around technology or a kind of a quality of inventiveness that's in the air, brilliant, brilliant Mercury Uranus qualities that we can look for.

There's also the tendency to get excited, and nervous mental stimulation for some people is not welcome. Let's be real. You know, some of us are like, no, no, no, no thanks. I'll, you know, don't give me a cup of cosmic coffee in addition to my normal coffee because I can't handle it. Or maybe you can't even handle a normal cup of coffee; I think you'll take a sip.

Watch for overstimulation; it is possible to feel like you're getting plugged into an electrical outlet when Mercury and Uranus get together. Biting off more than you can chew, over-promising and under-delivering.

The bigness and the grandiosity of the Promethean impulse toward freedom and toward the ideas in the mind of God. Mercury-Uranus just loves this. But some of that doesn't translate so easily into the world might be stubborn in accepting the imprint of the new idea. I don't know. Like trying to take a cookie cutter and impressing onto the hard frozen ground, the shape of the cookie, you're gonna break that plastic, you know.

The Earth is sometimes resistant to the changes that we want to impress upon it, and that's especially relevant since we have Mercury, an air sign, and Taurus, Uranus, and Taurus, an earth sign. So the idea here might be to change; a very earthy, tangible, sensual something or other could be about changes we are trying to make in love, and relationships could be about changes that we're trying to make with respect to things like pleasure, wealth, beauty, stability, peace, enjoyment.

The realm of Taurus is the realm of trying to sometimes it's about enjoyment and pleasure and wealth, and there's like a dark Minotaur there's this, you know, the, the sort of shadow of greed and possessiveness, and there's also this attempt to try to get back to something natural and beautiful and simple and peaceful and again, the word natural comes to mind.

Aquarius's ideas about what our natural hmm, sometimes they are sometimes it's like Aquarius is the choice you make a Mercury in Aquarius is the choice you make in the library to pick up a book about Native people and learn more about indigenous customs all over the Earth. Beautiful. I mean, why not? Why not educate yourself and learn about something outside of, you know, a colonial tradition or whatever? You know, it's important to do those kinds of things, and Mercury in Aquarius keeps us accountable to broadening our minds.

On the other hand, you know, Mercury in Aquarius is someone who thinks that nature is all beautiful and peaceful. You might have a naive kind of pie-in-the-sky abstract, you know, romanticized ideal about what nature is, and it's like, well, just watch BBC is planet Earth, as you've heard me say on this channel too many times before I watched it with my kids. The other day I told you guys about that was like, by this point, I think was like a year ago. But anyway, we watched it, and I was like, Oh, God, I know, gazelle. The poor gazelle.

So, not everything is as pristine as Aquarius; his view of the world is beautiful, no doubt, but it doesn't mean that the Earth is so receptive to that image. That doesn't conform so easily to that ideal, and so we might be looking at a transit that presents us with the ideal way in which the earthy realm of Venus should or could be, but that does not mean that it actually is that way. These are important little nuances to keep in mind as these two planets are getting together.

But I like the idea, the image of a blueprint being drawn out across a beautiful table, and you're looking at it, and here's the design, what is it? I've used these examples in the past month a few times in a garden. It's a bonfire pit, it's a playground, it's something that you're building for the sake of pleasure and enjoyment here on Earth, but you're in the stage of the design, you know, the design is in the mind. It's a potential that's trying to come down from some celestial airy space and bring about a revolution in the shape of the sensual space.

Okay, so Mercury-Uranus, very much in the sky today, be aware of the fact that this energy will at the very least try to stimulate different ways of seeing or thinking about things, different ideas, forms of communication that are sudden, that disrupt the norms, these are good, the good shake up mentally, and intellectually are on the level of forms in our mind, that might need to consider something new or to open our minds in some way. This is a good part of the transit.

Alright, so enough said there now, let's go back to the real-time clock and remind ourselves of the fact that we also have a first-quarter moon and Taurus.

Now, if we step this up just a little bit, let's go forward to April 20. Now, those of you guys who track transits know that April 20 is the day that Jupiter and Uranus get together. Now the sun will be just entering Taurus and Jupiter and Uranus will be at the 21st degree of Taurus, which falls into the final decan the last 10 degrees of Taurus, and we also know that this moon that we're talking about; here we go. The first Quarter Moon also falls into the last 10 degrees of Taurus.

So I think we're getting a little bit of a preview of foreshadowing of the Jupiter-Uranus dynamic with respect to its last deck and significations, so that's what I want to look at. Sometimes you pick up on the first quarter moon. Sometimes, you don't remember that this cycle got started with the new moon in Aquarius squaring Uranus. This kind of moment of breakthrough is like a-ha clarity.

So, regarding the Aquarius-Taurus connection, here's one image that comes to mind. I want to reiterate this before we go into the last decan of Taurus Aquarius; I think about it like this is one way of understanding Aquarius, and there are many, but think of Aquarius as the Olympics, the highest potential athletically speaking for humankind, you know, I mean, this is what it is ideally, right and the gold standard is the highest of that group of people.

So that gold, the top-tier of the little trophy stand, what do they call those, the winner's circle, you get a person at the lowest has bronze, the next step up is silver, the next step up is gold, gold medal. So the highest of the high and the people who make it to the Olympics are already elite, right? But then you have the highest of those elite, and the final, the one that gets the gold medal, is, of course, the gold standard.

Aquarius is like the gold standard. It holds forth for us. No matter who you are, you could be someone who has gold standard ideals that are completely different from your neighbors. But that sense of there being this gold standard ideal in the mind of the universe. On the archetypal level, that's very Aquarian, especially in how distant it can make us feel from it. Oh, geez, I've got DadBod. I'm not an Olympian, you know. I've been working on it. So, you know, Oh, I'm so far from that, you know, I'm so far from that standard, or it can inspire you, I'm gonna reach for that standard. I mean, the Olympics is probably not the greatest example in terms of how a gold standard inspires us normal people because very few of us get inspired to go become an Olympian, I think, but you get the idea.

So now Taurus, by comparison, right? Think about Taurus, and you think about the sense that this Earth could and should be stable, beautiful, simple, peaceful, enjoyable, and luxurious. That's it. Think about how dark and twisted things can get when we try to realize greed, possessiveness, lust, and jealousy.

The Minotaur is the shadow of that idea, that picture: this is a heavenly paradise here on Earth, and it's meant to be enjoyed. It's meant to be secure and stable and peaceful and simple and beautiful and luxurious and sometimes will go to the extreme of killing people to receive or realize that right, so Taurus can be very dark. Don't forget Adolf Hitler was born with the Sun and Taurus.

When you put those two things together, wow, do you have some powerful idealism about what our experience of joy and pleasure here on Earth can and should look like? That's an intoxicating, powerful image of what our lives could look like. Now, some of us could use that image because we might be way too stressed out. We might be working too much. We might be pushing ourselves too hard, chasing things that are unrealistic, and so, you know, this is the kind of image that could be about, like, here's an archetype by means of which you can simplify and create more ease. Beautiful.

Aquarius-Taurus gives us a blueprint that allows for a gentler, more fluid, stable, and simple life, getting back to nature like that. On the other hand, the archetypal combination can give us a kind of gold fever for the most beautiful, the highest, and most luxurious right, and it starts to get kind of privileged, elitist, and materialistic. You have to be careful of these things.

So remember that, okay? That is the combination that is underlying Uranus and Jupiter getting together in Taurus in April. Why? It is coming off from aspect after aspect after aspect between the Taurus and Aquarius square, especially with Pluto entering Aquarius.

Now, with that in mind, right now, as the sun is in late Aquarius, we have a first quarter moon in late Taurus, and then again, we'll get Jupiter and Uranus conjoining in the last decan of Taurus as well.

So I want given all of that background, I want to remind us of what the third and final Decan of Taurus is all about, and I'm going to show you these are the main cards that T. Susan Chang associates with the last Deccan of Taurus in her book is the Seven of Pentacles and notice the reflective quality looking over the Earth, pausing to look at your work, pausing and reflecting the work is not finished pausing and reflecting, is it enough? Or should I work for more? Pausing and reflecting on something tangible that is in a process? Deep card, really all right, we're gonna hear what she says about this last decan.

So the planet associated with the last Decan of Taurus is Saturn, and the card is The Seven of Pentacles. For the first time since our zodiacal year began, we confront the mysteries of Saturn's Father Time. Now she's talking about the year of the Zodiac from the standpoint of the Deccan of Saturn, I believe so. Anyway, we confront the mysteries of Saturn, Father Time, The Great Malefic, and the holder of the sickle.

Saturn's reputation is twofold: God of agriculture and fertility. On the one hand, people always forget that. God of endings and destruction on the other. Indeed, Saturn was thought to have two consorts, ops wealth, and dissolution site bearing Saturn is cathodic, an earth god. It is part of his nature that what is planted grows, but also what dies is buried; we begin an end on Earth.

It's no coincidence that so many Seven of Pentacles cards are agricultural. It's what we expect to see in the suit of Earth. As we suggested in sacred doubt, the Five of Pentacles Taurus deck and number one, the five and seven, are inverses of each other in the fire of the lord of worry; we anticipate and try to forestall disaster in the seven, the lord of failure. We assess and try to remediate what has gone wrong, and for one brief moment in the Six of Pentacles, we see the miracle that takes place when we get it exactly right. Life takes root and thrives.

When I first started reading Tarot, I found the Seven of Pentacles cryptic, the farmer's affectless expression. I'm going to hold this up while I read. The farmer's affectless expression gave no clue as to whether the card spin was negative or positive. What does his resting posture convey? Laziness, fatigue, distraction, contentment, discouragement.

In the early days, I would just say that he was waiting for something, though I had no idea what. Years later, when my dad was living with us, I would see him pause in the middle of clearing snow off the driveway, leaning on the shovel. He would look before him and behind, trying to calculate how much was left because he had Alzheimer's; his concept of time was poor, so he would stop more and more often; his posture was exactly that OF The Seven of Pentacles; sometimes I would find myself doing the same thing in the garden in the middle of a big cultivating job or weeding.

The feeling was that the time to do this was now, but the job was so daunting. How can I ever finish it? How will I ever succeed if I don't? On the Tree of Life, sevens find a home in the Sephora netzack, which can mean victory or glory, but another translation is eternity. I've always felt this had something to do with the continuity of life. It's persistence.

Though an individual's life may end in death, though its vessel may decay or transmute in form and appearance, life writ large always prevails. Therefore I read in the Seven of Pentacles is sort of timelessness. Well, the six may depend on the Kairos, the exact right moment; the Seven of Pentacles stands outside of it. This may mean that the Seven of Pentacles fails from the perspective of linear, mundane time to achieve what we want it to do.

But in another sense, it has all the time in the world, and that moment of waiting experienced by my father, time seemed to pass quickly. How can I possibly do this before sunset? slowly, this is taking forever; it cannot have objectively done both. Time itself is infinite. Only our perception of it is finite in this, too, is one of the Seven of Pentacles lessons.

The major arcana of Saturn is the world. I'm going to hold this up so you can see it just talking about the World card. It seems like a strangely buoyant card for the greater malefic Saturn, and it forces us to deepen our understanding of both the planet and the card. The key, I think, lies in the worlds reef, a shape that is sometimes illustrated as a vessel as a Vesica Piscis or an aura boris.

That rough ovoid has a dual role to confine and protect Saturn, the outermost visible planet, which delimits space and time like our skin, which it rules. Saturn separates outer space from inner space like our bones, which it also rules. Saturn offers internal rules for support and strength. Lord of time, Saturn sets a terminus on our lives cutting the long thread of life but also release from the body when it can no longer serve.

Life without those limits is unprotected. Consider this: a cancer cell is a cell whose telomeres, the genetic code determining cell lifespan, have grown abnormally long. Without the corrupting influence of Saturn, cells proliferate out of control, wreaking havoc on the body. So the World card shows a dancing figure who is protected within the safe confines of a human life whose freedom depends on its limits. When you look at the card of Saturn ruled decan, consider the nature of boundaries. In what way does the card say this far and no further?

I'm going to read you this last part because I think it's pretty interesting. The Seven of Pentacles expresses Saturn's rulership of the final Decan of Taurus. Here, inertia overcomes the great bull. Production is ground to a halt under the lord of failure. Pamela Coleman Smith drew the Seven of Pentacles in 1909. According to Marcus Katz and Telegoodwin, her illustration alludes to the potato famine of the 1840s when late blight infested the fields and caused mass starvation. The blight fungus caused tuber cell walls to collapse, leading to rot, a Saturn pathology if there ever was one.

In the arc of this decan at 26 Taurus voles, the formidable fixed dark output Algol, also known as the head of the demon. This eye of Medusa has an evil reputation; indeed, it is often considered the worst star in the sky. The Gorgon was best known for two things: her mane, petrifying gaze, a surely Saturnian fate, and her decapitation by Perseus that's got put Elgol correlates to misfortune and decapitation. When the pika tricks describe the second as a face of misery, it is hard not to think of algal.

Its baleful influence, however, is only half the story, as when Perseus used his mirror to slay Medusa and when he then used her head to defeat his own enemies. KaputAlgo can serve as a potent protective talisman when it turns violence furiously against the aggressor. Its rage is particularly feminine and character from reduces monstrous origin was a punishment for the crime of rape.

This decan image is handed down to us by observers who are as curious as ever. Many describe an elephant or a man as an elephant with its great size and slowness. Its thickened skin and pronounced tusks. The elephant is a profoundly Saturnian animal, its gift his patients memory and the ability to withstand hardship experience leads to stamina. By facing tasks that seem insurmountable, we come to know and correctly gauge the weight of toil.

My friend and podcast co-host Mel Melanie has a long history of disliking the Seven of Pentacles on her version and tabula Mundi; she depicts a kabel, a Kabbalistic version of the fall from Eden, a fall which was the price of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That's another way of understanding this card's hard-won knowledge hero who is sadder but wiser for his ordeals.

She concludes with this little thing. When I've drawn the Seven of Pentacles, I've had traffic slowdowns and made dumb mistakes that were time-consuming to fix. Quite often, the thing that needs fixing is the result of having not done it right the first time. Other times much, needed repairs have finally come through and imbalances have been rectified, like the five of pentacles the Seven of Pentacles brings timing issues, but more having to do with personal negligence. Some breakdowns in communication.

One thing I've learned about working with the Seven of Pentacles is that patience and a good plan B is essential. More constructive manifestations include all agricultural chores like weeding, gardening, and planting bulbs for the next season. She goes on that when you draw the Seven of Pentacles, take your time and scrutinize whatever you're working on intently for flaws.

Remember Murphy's Law whatever can go wrong will draw on past lessons learned to remedy accidents due to oversight or negligence. Be skeptical of fate and make use of your contingency plans should everything go sideways; call it a learning experience. Take a leaf from Samuel Beckett's book, and next time, feel better.

I love that passage from her, and I love this card in particular; for the last Decan of Taurus and this first quarter moon that we're experiencing today, as well as the upcoming Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, you can take whatever you want from that passage, there's a lot of things that she says that I think are relevant and interesting and I won't try to restate all of them.

But I will say this. This Seven of Pentacles card strikes me as in the last Decan of Taurus, a time to reflect on what we have built, what we desire, what we intend to build, and to say, is it really worth it? Or is it time to change course or directions? Should I keep building and developing, or what is what I have enough?

I suspect that this Seven of Pentacles cards with Jupiter coming into a conjunction with Uranus will prove to us as it will prove to be a time where we are reflecting on something that needs or requires change. Probably because we're looking over and realizing that things aren't quite where we need them to be, and that might feel like a failure. But Jupiter-Uranus coming together in this last deck can also provide us with a breakthrough that can allow us to continue the work.

The Seven of Pentacles, in one sense, can be looked at as a card of reflection upon the work you've already done and the direction you want to go. Taking things forward can also be looked at as a card that says hmm, gosh, is there an easier, simpler way of doing this? Or have I gotten something wrong? And do I need to adjust? In order to do so, we have to be okay with failure redirecting. We have to be patient; we have to sort of be willing to pause and redirect a process that if we do Jupiter-Uranus coming together in this decan, suggest, you know, major positive revisions, a breakthrough in a process that has a lot of work already put into it and maybe there's some adjusting that needs to be done. Or maybe we're at the point where, you know, something we've been working on it, you know, it catches a wave of momentum and is ready to carry us forward.

But watch what's happening in the sky today. Right with his First Quarter Moon in Taurus. See if you can pick up on any of those. That's kind of sort of the image of the Seven of Pentacles and reflecting upon revising, reconsidering, looking at, you know, how far you've come with the process and whether you want to keep going with it.

Facing some level of fatigue or exhaustion with a process that requires a lot of work and knowing that, hey, if I keep going with this Jupiter-Uranus in April might help me create a little bit of a breakthrough with respect to that process that I'm I'm in the midst of a lot of different ways of looking at that card and it's influenced, but I wanted to bring it up today share T. Susan Chang's meditations, give them to you to consider and see if we can also notice that we have a little microcosm of the same deck and present today that will be present when Jupiter and Uranus get together.

So that's that's what I've got for today. I hope you will enjoy Mercury-Uranus. It will be stimulating and not too overstimulating. Yeah, we'll see you guys again next week. Have a great weekend, everybody. Bye.