Mercury Squaring Jupiter: Galaxy Brain in the Garden

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Today, we are going to take a look at Mercury square to Jupiter. Mercury is in the sign of Aquarius. It's squaring Jupiter in the sign of Taurus, which will be happening this weekend after the new Moon comes through. Tomorrow, we'll be taking a look at the new Moon. So, if you're interested in that, be sure to check out tomorrow's episode.

Today, we're going to look at this square, and I got a really interesting question from someone recently being like, could you, at some point, take us through some of the process of how you write your talks for the day and I thought Oh, that's interesting, I feel like that would be boring. But then I thought, well, actually, if I show you the way in which I write my talks but also use that process as the actual presentation of the material, you might find it interesting.

So, hopefully, you'll enjoy this. I'm sort of like it's sort of like we're; I'm taking you backstage today to show you my process a little bit and to unpack for you my process in relation to Mercury and Jupiter. So anyway, that'll be, hopefully, it's fun, and you'll learn something new about Mercury and Jupiter combinations and the specifics of this Mercury Jupiter given the air and earth connection that keeps repeating itself will be a really rich part of the month of February overall, including the new moon cycle, which we'll talk about tomorrow.

Anyway, before we get into it, don't forget to like and subscribe, smash press, hit, tap, love the like button; and when you do so, and you're listening to today's talk, feel free to share comments, it really does help the channel to grow. It's always interesting to see what you guys have to say.

You can find a transcript of any of my daily talks, including today's, on the website, nightlightastrology.com, and when you go over there, don't forget coming up on February 15, I have a special webinar and go to the Live Events tab on the homepage. Or if you go up to the events menu and click on live events, you'll be taken over to a new page that I have.

I'll be doing once monthly webinars that are designed for students of all levels, so they are very beginner-friendly, but also topics that might be very interesting and specific so that more advanced or intermediate students might also enjoy them.

Anyway, the first of these talks that we'll be doing will be on February 15, from seven to 9pm. Eastern time, it's a live webinar. It's called The Outer Planets in Our Relationships: Part One Pluto In Love. In this talk, I'm going to be looking at the way in which Pluto helps us to grow, heal, and change the kind of symbolism that Pluto tends to bring into the realm of love and relationships in general, whether that's through the natal chart placements, or through transits to the natal chart.

We'll be looking at this from a variety of different angles, and it's packed with chart examples as well from my client practice over the years so that you guys can recognize the archetypes of Pluto and Venus-Pluto in the Moon-Pluto in the seventh house, Pluto, the seventh house ruler, all different all the different ways in which Pluto tends to show up in love and relationships.

So anyway, and then in March, I will be doing Neptune in love, and in April, I will be doing Uranus in love. So we're looking at the outer planets in the way that they specifically interact to create change, transformation, growth, healing, and all the different symbolism that they bring into the realm of love and relationships you want; you can register for that on that page. It's $20, and if you cannot attend the live webinar, once you sign up, you also will receive a download link afterward; you can download the talk and watch it on one of your devices on your own time. So anyway, that's it for announcements. Now, let's get into our talk for the day.

Okay, so here we can see that on Saturday, February 10, we have Mercury in Aquarius, at the eighth degree, coming through in a square to Jupiter in Taurus at the eighth degree. That means that right now, we're on Thursday today, the eighth, and you should be able to feel this now. You might have been feeling it the past couple of days. Mercury moves pretty quickly, and I feel like, you know, Mercury's like the Moon and that sometimes the application ranges a little bit further out because of how quickly it moves. But you will for sure be experiencing this maybe most vividly on Saturday, Friday, or Saturday, the ninth and the 10th of February extended to the 11th or 12th as it goes through the separation range of three degrees. So maybe extended all the way till, say, the 12th on Monday. But yeah, this is a weekend transit that's coming right after the new Moon.

So I'm just going to show you what I think we should watch for, five themes to watch for, as I always do. But now I'm going to also take you into my process, like, how do I arrive at whatever I'm going to talk about for the day because some of you have been asking, I guess at some point, it'd be really cool to see how you prepare.

Maybe there's something you could take away for your own work with astrology or the way in which you look at things and try to discern meaning on your own as students or even content creators out there. So, I don't think that I have like some magical process; it just works for me. I'm going to show you how I gathered the information that I will then synthesize at the end.

So, the number one thing that I noticed about this, and this is something that has been a big part of my practice for going on about a year, although I've only started including it in my YouTube analyses in the past couple of months, really. But one of the things that I've always done is to look at dignities, right, and this is something that all traditional astrologers do.

But, you know, for me, the dignities that I started looking at were mostly domicile and exultation rulers, and then slowly, I've started to include things like bound rulers and deccans, and so forth. But one of the things that I like to do is I like to gather what's standing out about the dignities, and to me, one of the things that stands out with this Mercury and Jupiter square is that Mercury's in the bound of Venus, and the domicile of Saturn.

Okay, and then Jupiter happens to be in the bound of Mercury and the domicile of Venus. So we're starting to create a little web here. In the meantime, we can see that Venus is just, it's just barely inside her bound. Let me double-check that I might be moving into the next round. I should have looked at that in advance. So Venus has just left Barone bound and is now in the bound of Saturn in the sign of Saturn.

In the meantime, Saturn is in the bound and exultation of Venus. So, we have a really interesting set of patterns connecting the planets right now. So I'm going to write these down, and this is what I do like on a little piece of paper, and it looks sort of like this. I sort of, and I'm not counting them, like, they have some kind of weight, you know, like, I'm not like weighing them or anything, I'm just noticing patterns. So like, with Venus, we have Venus equals Saturn, Saturn because Venus is in the domicile of Saturn and the bounds of Saturn.

Meanwhile, Saturn is in the exultation of Venus and the bound of Venus. Now, I could look at the rulership of, you know, Saturn being in Jupiter's rulership as well, but I'm just gonna, I'm counting up sort of what planet it has the most influence over what planet so you can see that Venus and Saturn have this amazing cooperative dimension to them right now. That's the point. When I look at Mercury, I can see that Mercury is in the bounds of Venus and Saturn, see, so you see, start to see the pattern, and then Jupiter, who Mercury is squaring, is in the bound of Venus and Mercury is in the bounds of Mercury in the domicile of Venus.

So when I look at this list, I think, okay, like this is, this is pretty profound, and then in the meantime, notice something else, right? Well, sorry, before I keep going, and this is why I've never really taken you guys behind the curtain before to explain the way that I started seeing and collecting my data. So, I apologize if it's a little clunky explaining it.

Basically, when you look at this, what stands out to me is Saturn and Venus. Okay, Saturn and Venus have this really strong power in terms of the dignities in the sky right now that are actually subtly informing the way we ought to read Mercury and Jupiter square.

Now, I think it's remarkable that on this day, Moon will be in bound of Venus conjoining Saturn, right, and in the exultation of Venus, so even the Moon, which is like a daily barometer, is in the exultation and bound of Venus and moving into a conjunction with Saturn and the Moon is like a mirror. It really shows us what's going on.

So now we have a Mercury-Jupiter square that is being informed on a very deep level. by multiple connections in the sky between Venus and Saturn; okay, so that's the first thing that I do, and so what I do is I say to myself, Okay, what I'm really getting is that this Mercury Jupiter square is brought to you on behalf of Venus and Saturn. That's a little different.

Venus and Saturn are the domicile rulers of Jupiter in Taurus and Mercury in Aquarius. So, on a certain level, you can see where, in the past, when I didn't use the bound rulers, I might get it right. Like a significant number of times, the domicile rulers are enough. But when you look at how much Venus Saturn is being re-emphasized in other ways in the sky right now, you sort of go, oh, okay, it's a lot stronger than I might have thought. So, for me, including the bound rulers has been a really cool exercise as of late.

So I started going okay; this is a Mercury Jupiter square brought to you on behalf of strong Venus Saturn emphasis. So after I look at the bounds, I'm led to this emphasis. The next thing that I will often do after I take note of this, in addition to starting to think about and often write down reflections on what Mercury Jupiter squares look like when they have strong considerations of Venus Saturn in their exchange, and that's like a creative exercise that I'll just start free writing about, you know, and then I'll go on to the next point here, which is, I will often pull cards.

Now, I know that some of you have, in my mind, a really bizarre prejudice against cards, and I don't mean to call anyone out. But, like, every time that I draw cards, there are at least three or four, in my opinion, highly ignorant people who seem to think that astrology is better than Tarot, and I will just tell you that if that's you, just change the channel. But I feel really adamant about that because astrological elitism is, in my mind, it's a kind of form of divinity prejudice, and I think it's really ugly. Now, you don't have to be a practitioner of Tarot. It doesn't have to be your preference. But to say that it is somehow less than or that there is no meaningful overlap between an entire historical system of divination and another system is just closed-minded.

Systems of divination can speak in so many different interesting ways and correlations, and practitioners of one form of divination are rarely practitioners of only one form of divination historically; by the way, so that being said, and sorry for my soapbox, this was my morning Tarot spread, and I don't care what you think.

So it's really important that you understand the way in which this is framed; I am not going to say give me a direct correlation. I'm saying, How do I think I have now established that Mercury and Jupiter are squaring one another and that there's a strong underlying emphasis on Venus and Saturn? I've done some free writing about what I think that means. I'm going to ask the cards to now speak to the archetypes and help me creatively move my mind around; it's like I'm circling, ambulating the shrine of this archetype in the sky, and I'm just pulling beads and meditating.

In these images, I'm asking the Oracle of the Tarot to help fill out my understanding and participate in meditation on the symbols in the sky, and they can do so by juxtaposition, by contrast, by direct correlation by a kind of one-to-one correspondence. So you have to open your mind to many different ways in which the cards may be speaking, and this exercise is really good for designers, in general, to do as long as you don't try to make too direct kind of a one-to-one correlation with anything when you like if you're, I'm going to show you I use the I-Ching as well. But don't try to get to literally one-to-one-on-one with things, but use it correctly to creatively stimulate.

Alright, so I pulled three cards, and I pulled them in no order, just three cards, and I let the three kind of speak. So the first one that comes up is the Queen of Wands, and I see this as a kind of Empress motif that fits pretty nicely with Mercury squaring Jupiter. Mercury squaring Jupiter in a feminine sign feels like the intelligence of the Queen. Why? Because Jupiter in Venus's sign is associated with feminine leadership. So Jupiter is in a Venus-ruled sign. With so much emphasis on Venus, Saturn looks to me like the kind of power and authority maybe of an elder or veteran or wise woman because Venus Saturn is associated with, say, the crone energy or the wisdom of the feminine and its power to structure and shape things, as well as the kind of veteran, mature, wise qualities of the feminine.

That's a Venus-Saturn combination that's in the sky, and it also speaks to the intelligence of the Queen as a Mercury-Jupiter combination when Jupiter is in a feminine domicile, the domicile of Venus, and the exultation of the Moon in Taurus.

So I start, first of all, I just start kind of go, Okay, so we've got a queen speaking, and that feels right for the amount of sort of authority structure, power intelligence being placed on the feminine. This is how my mind works. I'm not saying that's the only way to look at it, and I would love to hear what you guys think about it, too. Again, I'm just taking you backstage and showing you what I do.

The next card that I drew is the eight of wands, and when I paired these two together, I got the really interesting signification of swiftness and unprohibited movement and action; I started thinking about the Queen as executing things and her intelligence and what she wants to get done with like, a smoothness and a swiftness and also kind of the power of momentum. You know, it's like when you have momentum on your side, things can really move, and so I get this feeling of like Jupiter, Mercury, gosh, when those two planets come together, big ideas can be implemented successfully and often very swiftly.

Now, with the Queen, this would suggest to me a kind of incorporation of will, intelligence, and femininity, the Yin speaking acting swiftly intelligently, and it's a kind of veteran mature feminine quality of mind and action, and I start thinking, yeah, that's Venus Saturn, so emphasized in the sky right now. That's Jupiter in a feminine sign, and then Mercury in Aquarius, squaring Jupiter, kind of the, like the big picture and the executive thinking that you get from Mercury and Jupiter, but for the kind of like unprohibited swift action and results is a very powerful signature, right?

But I still get the feeling that this is coming from a feminine space, a space that probably privileges things that the Yin is interested in, relationships and relating and movement of between opposites, for example, which the Yin is very good at doing and also things that move on behalf of sensuality, embodiment, worldliness, relationship, diversity, plurality, these are kind of feminine archetypes. So anyway, again, I'm just kind of taking you into my imagination here.

Now, then, I draw one last card here, and the last card that I drew was the High Priestess. I love this card because this card, to me, paired with the Queen, now we get these two juxtaposing images, and this is where I think the whole thing really comes together.

So now to me, I look at these three cards, and I go, okay, well, we have an image, a juxtaposed Queen image of the High Priestess. Remember, one of the things that Jupiter in Taurus can represent would also be a priestess, a queen, and an Empress or a priestess, which would all be good Jupiter in Taurus archetypes depending on what else is in the sky.

Remember, we have the Venus-Saturn connection, which is very strong right now. Both are in feminine signs in Capricorn and Pisces. We have the Mercury Jupiter connection between Aquarius and Taurus, and so what I'm getting here is we're talking about the executive power of the feminine quality to do things to move things on behalf of the values of Jupiter in Taurus, right like a sensual, embodied feminine pluralistic, relational dimension of life that is seeking to move and act and a take us somewhere.

The High Priestess to me comes in and says, make sure that there's emotional intelligence; make sure that you're using your intuition. The Queen and the Eight, the Queen of Wands and the Eight of Wands together, are both fiery, and they could suggest that although the feminine is leading, it's not dialed in enough to its emotional feeling body, its intuition, and the more emotional dimension of the feminine. So, you know, the feminine has many different dimensions.

Yin has many different ways of expressing itself, and right now, you could say that there's, you know, maybe the combination of the kind of, let's call it, a more fiery feminine being contrasted with a more watery feminine and the two are having to work together somehow in executing plans and trying to pursue desires and the High Priestess says make sure that the body sensitivity, emotionality, compassion, empathy, maybe a more slow developing and sensitive process is being enacted alongside the very strong executive willful, feminine Queen on the other side, you see what I mean?

So, I look at these as interesting contrasting images, and there are many ways you could look at them right. When I see that, I start thinking about Mercury Jupiter and what kinds of things Mercury Jupiter is trying to bring together; you have Mercury in Aquarius is a very mental rational galaxy brain kind of image.

You have Jupiter in Taurus as the Queen in her garden, looking at how she wants to organize the kingdom and what she wants to do based on what she finds to be valuable and desirable and what her ambitions are. So when I think about that, I think, okay, like, there's, again, so much emphasis on Taurus. Right now, we know that Jupiter and Uranus are coming together in Taurus, trying to enact significant changes and breakthroughs in how we experience pleasure in the body, and so I started to see that this is a kind of mind-body connection that's trying to be established right now and it's also about making sure that the changes we're making on behalf of the Venusian realm aren't happening so quickly, and so impulsively, that we haven't taken time to really feel into what we're trying to build or create and what it's doing for us emotionally and this to me is where Venus Saturn comes in.

Venus Saturn is, like, a really mature; it's gonna remember from Capricorn to Pisces, we're talking about a much more mature long-term vision that has a kind of emotional depth and an emotional wisdom and maturity like the kind that you would get in, in the, in the realm of the grandmother, the grandmother who's lived a long time, who's seen many things come and go and who's has something to say to the young woman who is eager and ambitious right now about something.

That's kind of what I'm getting. But it's all within to me; I'm kind of placing it all within the realm of a very strongly emphasized Yin; it's sort of like, let's imagine, for example, and I'm just making this up off the top of my head. Let's imagine, for example, that you've just had a child; it's your first child, a woman sitting down, she's, and she's starting to plan out, or maybe she's pregnant, and she's starting to plan out what her life will look like. The grandmother comes along and sits down and listens intently, like, wow, this is a really great plan you've got, and she just sort of puts her hand on the young woman's knee and says, sweetheart, I want you to just remember that when the baby actually arrives, these plans may not be the ones that you stick with.

The presence of this child in your life could change your heart could change your body could change your mind, could change your intentions could, change your vision for life in ways that you can't yet anticipate. So I want you to at least stay open to that, you know, how hard is that? You know, when you're, I mean, I think that these are, you know, this is universal; it doesn't really matter what gender it is, right? But what, how hard is it to stop and pause when you're trying to create the most beautiful life, when you're trying to create the most beautiful setup, when you're trying to create the most stable, peaceful, gentle, easy, controlled, luxurious, abundant setup, and you're sort of galaxy braining it, and you're trying to create a garden, a beautiful garden that you can enjoy and feel happy in. This is kind of what's trying to get created through the mercury Jupiter connection from Aquarius to Taurus.

But there's kind of a wise grandmotherly presence that says, Don't go so quickly. That what you're creating is a little dissociated from the messy, emotional complexities and chaos of life. Don't go so quickly that you're not including some deeper and more sensitive and thoughtful considerations for how your feelings might change or for how what you're building may affect others, or how, over the long run, it may limit you in certain ways, or you see what I mean.

So what I'm getting is that there are a few women in the war room, you know, and there are blueprints laid out on the table and everything that's getting created. There's so much of an emphasis on the sort of Jupiter-Uranus conjunction that's coming up, like, well, What is beautiful? What makes me feel good? What stable? How do I enjoy life? How can I shift how I enjoy and remodel so that there's more ease, peace, balance, flow, enjoyment, stability control. Then there's Venus Saturn in the mix, which is a wise kind of elder, more mature, and long-term visionary feminine voice saying like, just be careful.

Now, the next thing that I do in my process, and I'm just again, I'm just kind of free-flowing this morning to show you a little bit of how I work from this, I would usually derive a series of what to watch for points, and you wouldn't be seeing this park. Right. So I've been including it a little bit more lately with the balance and stuff. But yeah, so my morning I-Ching reading comes next.

So in the I-Ching, I cast the I-Ching, and I asked the same question, how can I understand through the hexagrams of the teachings, another ancient divinatory system, this combination of planetary events, and today, I'm going to show you what this looks like because I think it's kind of cool. So, I'm going to show you what the hexagram actually looks like.

So here we have in the top trigram, which is the top three lines, we have broken lines, which are all Yin, they're dual, which is, remember, the one in the many. So the Yin is the many, and one of the ways that the many get signified is not by one continuous, unified line but by broken lines that have the nature of being many diverse, particularly different, and related; that's Yin, broadly speaking.

Now, Yang, on the bottom, is going to be three solid lines, and that trigram is called Heaven. So, in this hexagram, which is number 11. In order, it is sometimes called Peace, and it's called peace because you have Earth over Heaven, and so when the low if you think about Heaven, you think about the power of the stars and the gods. In astrology, that's kind of the equivalent; usually, that would be above, and Earth would be below. But then you have the idea of the high ruling over the low. But when it's flipped, and you have Earth above and Heaven below, then it is as though Heaven has come to the surface of the Earth. It's a very, very beautiful image.

If you think, for example, about in a traditional, like courtship sense, and if that doesn't, you know, if that offends your sensibilities, my apologies, but like, think about it like this. What's really nice is to see the masculine sort of in chivalry, sort of subordinating itself to the feminine, like worshipping it.

So here you have kind of the image of the subordination of Heaven to Earth, that Heaven is the orchestrator of all things, the creative essence, that the Yang and Earth are the feminine, the embodied world and, but rather than Heaven being above Earth, Heaven is below Earth, which means it's in the position of serving, and of pouring out its resources in support of the Earth.

So imagine the most beautiful garden you could possibly make, that that garden is a reflection of something in the Platonic world, like an idea in the mind of God. You set out the blueprints on a table, and you're going to build that garden, and it is so beautiful, and then it actually comes to be. It actually comes into shape and form. The only way it could do so is if that blueprint actually somehow comes down to occupy the earthly position, such that the earthly position gets elevated to looking like Heaven. Do you see what I mean?

So, in peace, we have this beautiful image of something worldly becoming almost looking like something heavenly, and one of the lines, the fifth line in particular, of this hexagram right here, which is called the ruling line, and it corresponds with the second line below. This as the ruling line would be Yin, or what is lowly in the position of the king or the Queen, whereas the correspondent is the Yang line in the second position, so this line refers to the marriage that the Emperor grants, allows for a commoner, just an average person, not anyone of royalty to marry the princess.

Now, again, you don't have to like any of that gendered language. But the idea behind it is really important. That is that, these two lines corresponding suggest that something of every day worth like, Have you guys ever seen the movie Aladdin? Right? It's like Aladdin, a street rat that you know, but somehow he becomes prince, the genie grants his wish, and his status, you know, caste, class, socioeconomic status, race, gender, creed, whatever does not matter. His worth comes from within, and so the marriage of these two lines in this hexagram speaks to something of earthly value that's just a regular, common kind of thing being granted the status of Heaven. That's at the core of what this hexagram means.

So now, in this hexagram, interestingly, the fifth and sixth lines were changing. One of the things that that means you have to pay attention to is the sixth line meaning as well. Now, when you get up that high in the hexagram, the hexagram is tending to fall apart and transform into a different hexagram with different archetypal meanings.

The meaning of that sixth line has to do with over-defending, over-fortifying, trying to hold on or clutch to something perfect and beautiful, and too tight with too much concern for downfall or loss. It's like, if you were to have that garden, and all the way that you related to it was purely in terms of trying to fortify it so that nothing could ever take away the beautiful garden, that it could last forever, that no one could harm it, that it could be yours, right?

So when you start operating with a beautiful garden like that, and somehow Heaven is imbued with this higher quality, and you start looking at it from the standpoint of possessiveness, scarcity, fear, or lack. It's the seed of the undoing of the beautiful thing. Because on Earth, it will come to be, and it will pass away. That's part of the nature of Earth; it can only temporarily reflect the highest beauty before it falls apart. So you can't hold and possess forever. It's a beautiful teaching here that, as I'm writing this report, helps me to understand. Okay, so we've got Mercury and Aquarius, Jupiter, and Taurus trying to galaxy-brain the garden.

That's it, right? And we have this sort of warning about the intelligence with which we build the garden, being very sensitive and having a mature, not too hasty, compassionate, sensitive, long-term vision; Venus and Saturn have to take their time and be really wise with what they're building right now. There has to be maturity and intelligence.

Venus Saturn's shadow. Right? Venus, Saturn's shadow, is the fear of loss. It is something like the fear of loss, or the fear of loneliness, or the fear of isolation, or the fear of ruin. Or it's that kind of classical sense of wealth and beauty that is exclusive and elitist. It has the sense of being miserly in its possession of beauty, right? It's like this is mine, it makes me special, and nobody else has Venus Saturn can be like the, the sort of bougie you know, status-seeking and clutching and grasping, and Venus Saturn can also reflect again, just that we need to have a long term view of how we deal with things that will inevitably pass away.

Things will not last forever. You can build something beautiful, but you can't try to build it in a way that, like, well, if I just build this beautiful thing, if I reach this goal or realize this desire, then I'll never have to deal with problems again. This is the mature voice of the elder. You know the High Priestess, the Venus Saturn combination with Saturn and Pisces saying Don't forget, everything dissolves eventually.

Okay, so we have a theme with Mercury and Jupiter squaring of building something beautiful, and maybe it's heavenly, but it will fade, and it will fall apart. Eventually, there will be an autumn to this romantic project.

Then synthesis. After I take all of that, I usually write the themes that you usually see on the five themes you would usually see. So I hope this was fun today. I'm just taking you into what I thought was very appropriate, like Mercury-Jupiter. Let's let me show you the way in which I usually craft, you know, craft my list of archetypes to watch for, and so I might have made a list that said something like building something trying to build Heaven on Earth. I would have talked about having a long-lasting vision for what you're building that's beautiful but understands impermanence, right? I would have come up with ways of encapsulating it like that.

Anyway, hope this wasn't I don't know. We'll see what you guys think of it, and I'm not going to be doing this every day or anything, but if you guys like this kind of like under the hood, if it helps you learn and if it helps you get to know me a little bit better as an astrologer then all the better. We will be taking a look at the new Moon in Aquarius tomorrow. Hope you guys will enjoy that. Hope you guys are having a nice week.

Don't forget to sign up for the upcoming talk on Venus-Pluto on the 15th; head over to the Nightlight Astrology website. Click on the Live Events tab to register. If you can't make it live, you get a recording of it. So hope to see some of you there. Alright, take it easy bye.