Rewind: The Fascinating Quality of Mercury in Cancer

Transcript:

Hey everyone, this is Acyuta-bhava from Nightlight Astrology, and today we are going to take a deep dive into Mercury's placement in the sign of cancer. This is another rewind episode. Some of you who are newer to my channel may not know that a couple of years ago, I did a series for Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Sun, where I took those planets through all 12 signs. And I have had a lot of people asking me about the ingresses of planets into new signs. Mercury recently entered cancer. Venus eventually will enter cancer coming up pretty soon here; when Venus entered Gemini, people were asking me to talk about it. And so I've decided this week to do a few rewind episodes so that you can be aware of what's in the archives and that anytime a planet is changing signs and moving into a new zodiac sign and you want kind of a deep dive on the meaning of that planet in that sign, you can actually look in my archives in the Planets in Profile series and dig it up. I'm also doing a few rewind episodes this week because I am preparing some new content and new material, including the next installment of my Planets in Profile Series, which will involve the moon through all 12 signs. So we will be doing a Planets in Profile Moon series coming up here later this summer. Next week, in the middle of July, I usually take a week off around my birthday, I've got some family coming into town, and I will be starting to write the new Planets in Profile Series developing some new content. So I will be off next week; I may throw up a rewind episode or two here, or you know, here or there, depending. But I will not be making content next week. And we'll be back the week after. So I wanted to let all of you know that in case you are like, Hey, where's the Monday through Friday content next week?

The other thing that I'm going to be developing next week, during that time off, which is substantial, it takes me, you know, I'd say that there's a process of two to three hours every day of producing the content, not including the spiritual practice that precedes and is a big part of the prep work that I do to make these. So having about a week off gives me the chance to do new stuff and create new stuff for all of you guys. The other thing we're going to be creating next week is my wife, Ashley, and I will be sitting down and starting to create the curriculum for our 2022 Moon series, which will be a pairing for people who are interested in planets and plants of the astrology of the month we'll meet under new and full moons and be working with certain plant medicines that we diet throughout the month. You know, things that anyone could work with as a way of deepening our relationship with the planetary transits month by month. So my wife and I are shaping the curriculum for that offering next week, and probably in the next week or two, we have that up on the website, and I'll promote that, so you guys know how to get signed up if you want to check it out and be part of that group. So anyway, all that is a long-winded way of saying that I hope you will enjoy this rewind episode.

Don't forget Mercury in cancer is going through a square to Jupiter in Aries. So this is also a good way to deepen your understanding of what this Mercury in cancer dynamic is going to be like over the next few days. If you haven't yet watched the talk that I did yesterday on Mercury square to Jupiter, that'll, along with this deep dive into Mercury and cancer, should give you a lot to think about. Before we dive in, with that, I hope you guys have a fantastic weekend. I hope you guys have a great week next week as well. While I'm off, I'll miss all of you, and I hope you guys will enjoy this. This deep dive into Mercury in cancer. All right, take it easy, everyone.

Hi everyone. This is the Acyuta-bhava from Nightlight Astrology, and today, we're going to take a look at Mercury in the sign of cancer. This is part of an ongoing series that I've done called Planets in Profile. I've taken a look at Venus through all 12 signs and Mars through all 12 signs. We're going to start Mercury through all 12 signs in this episode with cancer. So you can follow along and watch for updates. And I'm following this now as Mercury is moving through cancer via retrograde at the moment in like June of 2020. But this series will go on as Mercury moves through the signs.

So as always, there are a few important things to say about Mercury. What does Mercury stand for? And then about cancer, the sign that Mercury is inhabiting when we talk about Mercury in cancer and how that modifies the expression of Mercury. And then we'll give some examples of famous people who have Mercury in cancer just as a kind of fun exercise. But obviously, you know, the really interesting thing I'd like to hear about is from you guys who have Mercury in cancer. What is your experience of Mercury in cancer? What's your Can you share with us? Those are always fun, too; historical examples, celebrity examples, they serve a good point, they serve a good purpose. Some people hate when astrologers use them, I get it. But they do. The archetypes are very alive, and in what we know about people in the lives they live in the public eye to so we can use them as great ways of demonstrating some of the core concepts.

Anyway, so what is Mercury all about? Well, Mercury was traditionally the God of thieves and merchants, the God of highways and of marketplaces, and also of courts where things go back and forth like a basketball up and down or a hockey puck up and down. Mercury is the God of, you know, money exchanged between merchants in a marketplace for the exchange between teams on a basketball court. Mercury is the exchange of ideas and information and is the God of communications, speech, intellect and intelligence, and rationality, but also, it is the God of hermeneutics of messages, messengers, and interpretation. Mercury is also a God that, in a sense, represents the divine profusion of multiplicities. And of sometimes of interesting ambiguities of changeability, and to a certain extent, divine chaos, like in a Mercury Retrograde, if you ever tried to go to the airport and you're rushing, you know, Mercury Retrograde, everything just turns to chaos, and yet there ends up perhaps being a deeper message in the chaos. So Mercury is a God that tends to throw things up in the air.

This is how ancient astrologers talked about Mercury. That Mercury is a God that doesn't put things together into Grand coherent unified holes like Zeus Jupiter does, but rather, is the thing that takes things, the part of us that takes things apart or deconstructs things and analyzes things. So it has a connection to the mind. But in order to understand our psychology, we have to understand a lot more than just Mercury. Ancient astrologers looked at the ascending sign, the ruling planet of the ascending sign planets in the first house, the moon, they had calculations of temperament that they performed, so there was a lot to it.

At any rate, Mercury did play a crucial role in understanding individual psychology 1000s of years ago, and so it still does today. So we're going to talk about Mercury in this video, especially for people who are trying to interpret their birth charts. And you want some understanding of how Mercury might represent your mind and the way that you relate to the world in all of the messages that it gives you in the way that you speak and relate to the world as an intelligent being. So we're gonna take a slightly more psychological approach, but I will say this, in your natal chart, Mercury is not just going to represent, you know, your mind or your communication style or something like that. Mercury is going to represent the topics that it rules in the chart; it could rule the house of money and therefore represent money, it could rule the house of home and family or spouse or job, or it could rule your health. So Mercury will always have topical designations in the chart that are not exactly the same as its natural significations, just like Venus rules love, but could in the chart represent, you know, could represent something about your religious experience, religious or academic environments, Venus could end up representing something about sickness or Venus could represent something about pregnancy. So the planets are always standing in for multiple topics in a chart. And some of those topics are not going to be read psychologically. They're more predictive concrete events of karma that we will experience at some point in life. So in these videos, what I'm really doing is taking a look at the psychological end of things.

Now. When Mercury is in cancer, cancer, we have to understand is the feminine, feminine sign, you say, Yin, cardinal, or we could say tropical water sign. And this is the home or temple of the moon. So those are the pieces all together. Feminine, cardinal, or tropical water sign domicile of the moon.

Cancer is also called the gateway of man and was a sign that represented the descent of the spirit soul into a new body. In that sense, it represents birth and incarnation. It was on the ascendant of the ancient birth chart of the cosmos called the Thema Mundi, which ancient astrologers worked with. And so, cancer is associated with birth and life and has an old history in Egypt as well in association with the flooding of the Nile and, and so forth, which brought life back. So the point is that cancer, as a turning point sign, starts well, I should say, starts at the summer solstice, on the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. And that turning point represents symbolically, not literally; it doesn't you participate in this symbolic language wherever you live; symbolically, It represents the turning point of the sun; it's going to start sinking in the sky. So it represents the descent of spirit, the sun down toward the earth matter. And this is a birthing moment, and it's an embodying moment. So it's feminine, Yin, and it's watery. So birth feminine Yin, turning point Tropos, to turn, the cardinal sign, the tropical sign, the Tropic of Cancer, the turning point means that it's an initiation of birth.

Now, remember, this is also the temple of the moon. And the moon as a planet represents a number of other themes, memory, mystery, the night, dreams, reflections, illusion, intoxication, romance, nostalgia, melancholy; these are all lunar things, Insanity, you know, the lunatics, the lunatics. So that's the moon. And the moon also, generally speaking, carries the symbol in ancient Astrology of the material world itself. It's the emissary of the other heavenly planets that brings them into manifestation on the earth. And so the moon is connected to the wheel of fortune of material dualities that are always turning and fluctuation and impermanence. You can't step in the same river twice that Heraclitus. So the moon is like that. Now, in order to understand Mercury in cancer, you have to therefore understand that Mercury is being filtered through this lens of the moon. And therefore, in the birth chart, through what's called the guest-host relationship, Mercury has to be interpreted not alone but also according to where the moon is, what its dignity is, what house it's in, and what aspectual connection it has to Mercury. That's the full way of really understanding Mercury in cancer; we can't leave that out. For this video, we're just simplifying things. And that simplification has to do with understanding what a person will say psychologically might be like in mind, in speech, and in the way that they relate to the world as an intelligible communicative realm, through the lunar themes through the Cancerian themes.

So I'm going to now talk about some people that embody certain dimensions of this and use people to illustrate different dimensions of Mercury and cancer, which hopefully you find interesting. And again, I use celebrities, specifically because they make good everyone knows them. And it's, it's easy for a big audience, right. And they illustrate themes in ways that are mythic that because the way that popular people in the collective are understood as a sort of legendary, iconic mythic dimension to them, that helps illustrate the archetypal pattern. Oftentimes, the deep stuff we don't get to see about celebrities and historical people. So there are going to be elements of this that are superficial, but you know, for the sake of learning, it can be fun. So let's talk about the obvious one. Mercury in cancer for Donald Trump. Now, Donald Trump has Mercury in cancer. And his Mercury in cancer, of course, is in the 12th house, which gives it a much more secretive dimension and also tends to involve him with enemies undermining gossip, and he owns a gossip tabloid of one kind or another, maybe the National Enquirer does that sound familiar? But it adds a real secretive dimension to the way he works or that he also that there's more to him than meets the eye, and that he's going to have also a very emotional temperament, that his mind is going to be more influenced by the constant changing and fluctuations of the moon. So he's already he's mercurial because his sun is in Gemini, but then you're adding an even more deeply changeable and moody element and emotionally more responsive and reactive element. By virtue of Mercury being in the moon sign when he was born, the moon was being eclipsed. It was a lunar eclipse. So the moon is very important and, in this sense, can also signify potentially some mental or emotional health challenges at some point. At any rate, that's an aside that could happen, especially with Mercury in the 12th house. If people watching this may think it already has, but no offense, if you're, I know that I have people from all around the spectrum that watch my show. So anyway, um, so Donald Trump, very mercurial, very secretive. Very, actually, he'll, you know, crab, the sideways walk of the crab. You notice Mercury in cancer; people will often circle around things a number of times and kind of repeat the same idea a number of times. I was born with Mercury in cancer. Now, his 12th house placement is a big deal for him.

Now, go to Lana Del Rey; I think that's how you say your name. I don't. I'm not like a big fan or anything, I don't listen to her music much, but I, you know, did some. I sort of scoped out her music when I was looking at celebrities and famous historical people with Mercury and cancer. And what I thought was interesting was the way that her music was described. And it's very accurate because I listened to a bunch of her songs just to hear what she's like. And it was described as stylized cinematic with themes of tragic romance, clamor, melancholia, and reference to pop culture, particularly the 1950s and 1960s. Americana. So it's nostalgic, right? You've got that it's broody and melancholic, and romantic and sort of tragic and really emotional. And there's maybe some way in which she also projects a kind of young tragic Shakespearean element, which is very Cancerian that sort of the theme of the child and the motherless child or the mother and the child or the or the attempt to stay in idyllic, almost youthful place.

For example, I have Mercury in the third house, and I studied memoir writing in my MFA program. So I wrote I wrote a memoir, and I love storytelling in general. But also, when I was young, I just like definitely had a hard time with the nostalgia and the kind of tragic romantic stuff. Carl Jung was born with Mercury and cancer, which is really interesting. Because of course, Carl Jung pioneered along with Freud and others, but he was one of the major voices in pioneering the exploration into the unconscious psyche, the unconscious soul, psyche means soul in ancient astrology and ancient philosophy. So Carl Jung was someone who was a therapist who often worked mostly predominantly with women. And he also mined the unconscious depths of the soul, all lunar stuff, and was someone who valued the red book if you read the Red Book and exploration of his own psychic material. So lunar Mercury in moon people often like that, the unconscious, the deep, the romantic, the mysterious, the unseen, the hidden, the secretive, stuff like that; when I was a kid, one of my favorite movies that my mom showed me, that I really, really loved was called The Secret Garden. And there was a book based on it too. And I love this because of the secretiveness of the story. And there's this, this voice, it's that's crying during the night, and it's this little boy that the main character finds and it's a beautiful story, there's a lot of secretiveness to it, there's a lot of sadness in the book as well about the loss of parents and orphans and things like that. And, and a secret garden, you know, so anyway, the secretiveness of Mercury in cancer can be there with the moon.

Now, Judy Garland had Mercury in cancer. So Judy Garland is, of course, a, you know, she was Dorothy in Wizard of Oz. And, of course, her childlike innocence. And her fame comes from having this whimsical song that she sings Somewhere Over the Rainbow. And, you know, she wants to she, you know, she is clicking your heels together the ruby red slippers to they're saying, There's no place like home. Now, it's not that people often misunderstand; how can you make an association between a planet and a role that a person plays? Well, this role became the iconic role that defined her whole life, you know, I mean, so it's pretty important. And how many times that you sing that song over and over and over and over and over again. So also, she had this deep, illusive, enigmatic, mysterious, gentle, shy quality to her. Now, she had a moon that was all kinds of trouble in her sixth house, for I remember correctly, and was very fiery; I think it was Moon in Sagittarius. So, at any rate, but I could be getting that wrong, but Mercury in cancer again for that for her, switch it up a little bit.

People who are also masters of mimicry are often Mercury in cancer, Will Ferrell, for example, has Mercury in cancer. And the moon was not called; it was called a counterfeit light. And not like we would think of like a counterfeit, like a forgery but like a not the real thing, but a mirrored thing. And so people who often have the ability to really shape shift in their voice or their mood or their thoughts, their intonations and so forth. Often have Mercury in cancer Will Ferrell is a great example of someone who can really he really has this way of walking in and out of characters and inhabiting them and mirroring them in you know, it's quite amazing, a similar actor that was like that that had the similar Literally mercurial but like, intensely emotional lunar quality was Gene Wilder, Willy Wonka if you know who he is. So that was another really interesting one with Gene Wilder. There's a great interview of him on Conan O'Brien; if you ever want to watch it, it's like, it's just watch his body language and the way he speaks and the way he processes information, you'll get Mercury and cancer feeling right there.

Let's see Nick Drake if you know Nick Drake, super romantic, melancholic singer-songwriter, Mercury and cancer. I believe he drowned too. But, at any rate, Pablo Neruda, I don't know if you guys know who Pablo Neruda is. But Pablo Neruda was, you know, an incredible poet and sort of a serene; he had an ability to write in a surrealist manner and also wrote love poems. And definitely, I would call him I would place him not formally, but I would say, you know, he's a romantic, but I don't mean to say that, that categorizing everything that he did is romantic literature. But he has that really amazing fluid. And also, like the crab that collects things on the beach and stores them. If you listen to a video, I did not long ago on the silver ring of a solar eclipse and cancer. In that video, I talk about the alchemy of silver and lead. And one of the things that's neat about silver is that it's that thing that shines in the world, el chemically. And an example of this is the crab that likes to collect little things into its hole, and cancers like to collect things that glimmer with the light of memory or the light of romance or have some special memory or emotion. And so cancers can sometimes be collectors like that. Pablo Neruda had this way of collecting beauty from worldly things that was quite profound. In my experience, I've had to read a lot of him in my graduate school.

Anyway, Thoreau is kind of similar in nature writer who goes out to nature, and that's what he did. But he was, uh, you know, he was a romantic who, you know, if you think about that movie, Dead Poets Society, a lot of that was inspired from, you know, the, a lot of the students in that film are inspired by what's the name? Robin Williams, who is quoting?

Who is constantly quoting from Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, as well. But yeah. Okay, so now, the next one, I'm almost forgetting the name of so I'm going to have to come. I just have to make sure I got this right. Okay, so the next one on my list is Conor McGregor. Now, this is I include him because a lot of these have been very, you know, more feminine examples of the lunar side. But this can also come out in very interesting ways and much more aggressive masculine personalities like Conor McGregor, who is this very sort of abusive, but also deeply nostalgic, like family, tribal kind of Irish fighter. And, you know, I don't know a lot about him. But I've seen, you know, I've watched a few of his interviews, and I've seen one of his fights before. And he's just like, very, very emotional, very a lot of sentiment and connection to his Irish heritage, and so on and so forth. So, in that, one of the things he's known for is, of course, having this way of really capturing the emotional energy of the crowd and stuff like that. And so he's an interesting example of like a much more sort of macho personality.

Martha Stewart. Now Martha Stewart has Mercury in cancer, surprise, surprise. That makes a lot of sense as she does business. Think of Mercury in business and deals and things that are in the home. So I think that one is pretty interesting. And then, let's see. Anderson Cooper is another one. Where you think, okay, Anderson Cooper was raised. Here's my note. Oh, was the Vanderbilt was his connection to his mother was Gloria Vanderbilt if I have that, right. And anyway, he is maybe one of the more soft-spoken emotional, and shy characters on CNN, like, have you ever watched CNN New Year's special when he's there on New Year's, he's always very shy, and very sensitive. He's probably one of the anchors that cries more readily than others. And also, just, generally speaking, has this very interesting connection in the literary world in the world of media to things that Mercury covers through his family connections. He was, you know, born like I said he was born in the Vanderbilt line, and they were, of course, you know, Vanderbilt shipping and railroad company that he was, you know, he's born into all of that. So, at any rate, he has studied German journalism formally, and his background in his family was part of a big part of what led him to journalism as well. So now, those are just some simple examples. I feel like maybe Anderson Cooper is a little bit harder to capture. But if you watch him and watch the way he speaks, you know, you can always tell Mercury in cancer, it's like, they'll there, there'll be a way in which they're speaking very fluidly. And then they can sort of hide or get shy or back off, or they can be very effusive emotionally, but then also be very secretive or hard to pin down. Those are all kind of Mercury in cancer qualities. So and then there's one more; let me just pause. Right, so Louie Armstrong is the last one. And of course, you know, you're talking about one of the most famous, charismatic, and innovative jazz musicians of all time. So one of the things that defines him and he's a very emotionally charismatic personality. And, you know, also but also has a shy side to him. There are some really interesting movies about his life. I watched them a while ago. But anyway, he's one of the maybe more great examples of the fluidity where you see the poets or the musicians, and there's often this very strong like just fluid quality that kind of pours out of them. So Louie Armstrong was a great example of Mercury, of course, the inventor of the Lear. And so sometimes musicians will have this very powerful emotional effect, or they just they're able to pour their emotion in or stir up some feeling of nostalgia for the past or romance and so forth. Pretty interesting quality. Anyway, so those are some examples. I would love to hear from you guys and hear your examples of how you've noticed Mercury in cancer appearing in your life or the lives of others that you know; as someone with it in my own third house, I know that I am. I know I'm; I'm the kid who grew up crawling under my bed with a flashlight at night to read books very Cancerian. Like in that respect.

I work in my blue office, which is like a little shell that I love to be in and read and create media for you guys. And yeah, I studied memoir writing in, you know, in grad school and stuff like that, wrote a memoir. So that's how I've seen it appear in my own life. I know that one may be heads up as Mercury in cancer that I have to be careful of is recognizing how much my current mental state is based on the environment that I'm in and the emotions that I'm feeling. It's very important to like water in my mind, and water is super important for me in general, as well as a cancer son too. So. Alright, anyway, that's what I've got. Hope you guys are having a great day. I'd love to hear your comments. Take it easy. Bye.