MERCURY, Virgo & Gemini.

Before the Sun passes out of zodiac sign Virgo and into Libra next week, a look at Mercury, Virgo's ruling planet - a ruler shared by Gemini.

I'm using recently acquired book, (published 1964) Astrology by Louis MacNeice. MacNeice was not an astrologer, but a poet and scholar of the classics. More about him in a previous post HERE.



To write Astrology MacNeice must have spent many hours of painstaking research, as befits his own Virgo Sun/Mercury/Venus. He cites much material from older sources, some ancient. The book can in no way be seen as "a fluff piece", it serves, in many cases, to clarify how we got to where we are in interpreting the planets and signs.
The Kalendar of Shepherds, from which he quotes below was published in 1507, translated from (I think) a French version of some years earlier. The illustration, right, comes from the Kalendar. I'm not sure whether it relates to Virgo, but the partially obscured glyph at the top resembles a Virgo glyph, and the corn in the field is cut and awaits stacking, so time of year is right for Virgo.

Here's part of what Louis MacNeice discovered about Mercury.

"The fair planet Mercury", says the Kalendar of Shepherds is "very full and dry of nature and is lord of speech, as the Sun is lord of light......Who is born under Mercury shall be subtle of wit....(that is and always has been Mercury's first characteristic) and shall be very crafty in many sciences......He shall ever follow and resort to them that be of good manners, and shall be fortunate on the sea to use the course of good merchandise."

Mercury is the traditional patron not only of intellectuals but of merchants. He is also the patron planet of transport.

But the Mercury man, according to the Kalendar, will not have it all his own way. "He shall be very gracious, and he shall have harm by women, and when he is married, men shall not set so much by him as they did before." All the same, "he will have great love to ladies and gentlewomen, but yet they shall not be masters over him. He will be a very good man of the church or a religious man, and he shall not love to go to a warfare.....He shall love well to preach and to speak fair rhetoric language, and to talk of philosophy and geometry."

The Kalendar details other intellectual, artistic and commercial activities and ends: "He shall be servant to some great lord or else a receiver of his money." (The original god Mercury himself had been something of a lackey on Olympus, always running errands for the greater gods.) "He shall have a high forehead, a long visage, black eyes, and a thin beard. He shall be a great pleader in the law and will meddle with other men's deeds if they do not well and say against it."

There has been general agreement that Mercury stands for the intellect and for most types of communication, whether mental or physical. Not surprisingly, however, he is undependable; astrologers have named him "the chameleon among planets" (compare the adjective "mercurial") and have explained that he is neutral because, in the aspects, he takes color from other planets but does not give color in return. This idea goes back to Ptolemy, who says that Mercury is "generally speaking in nature like whatever of the planets may be associatedwith him." By Ptolemy's time he was also firmly established as the ruler of two signs, Gemini and Virgo. Rupert Gleadow, who calls him a "sexless planet", points out that both these signs are "somewhat lacking in emotion".

Mercury can make you a genius; he can also make you a crook. The original god had been both, as is shown by the early Homeric "Hymn to Hermes" in which he is described (in Shelley's translation) as


A schemer subtle beyond all belief;
A shepherd of thin dreams, a cow-stealing,
A night-watching and door-waylaying thief
who yet, while still an infant, went on to invent the lyre, killing a tortoise to use its shell for the purpose.
(Left: Carving shows Hermes making the lyre).





..................The planet Mercury, like Venus, owing to its actual nearness to the Sun, is always seen from earth as lying in a sign near the Sun. Consequently Mercury and Venus are comparatively often found in conjunction. In spite of the frequency of such conjunctions an 18th century English astrologer, Ebenezer Sibly, used one of them (retrospectively) to explain the French Revolution: "The active position of Venus and Mercury, conjoined, denotes much restlessness and instability in the councils of France, which seem distracted by the arbitrary will of the Gallic Queen, here represented by Venus, upheld and assisted by light, volatile, time-serving men, pre-noted by Mercury."..........................

As for aspects, it is generally considered that Saturn, having such a different and therefore complementary nature, is the best influence on Mercury.

(Illustration below from Astrology, showing a French Bank advertisement for travellers' cheques. In both astrology and mythology Mercury is considered to be the patron of commerce and transport: thus the two roles here symbolised by the god are equally typical of the planet.)