A quickie!

I said I’d send a post Tuesday.

I had some complications on that plan; however, it’s still Tuesday here. And this is a newsletter post (or e-mail).

A reminder:

The registrations for the course on Basic Celestial Mechanics for astrologers are open.

It’s 50 USD until Thursday. My paypal address is [email protected]. Don’t forget to tell me where you are, so I can schedule a time that suits most of the students (or that displease the fewer ones possible). More info here and here.

(I won’t close the course by then, but it will be 60 USD).

On flowers.

Flowers are obviously a Venus thing. They’re beautiful, with nice colours, and pleasant smell. They’re the reproductive part of the plants, and attract not only our vision, but also bees and other animals.

But that’s flowers in general.

Some of them are aggressive; some of them, unpleasant; some of them are huge; some of them are small and multicoloured; some of them look like they’re made of water or milk.

And some of them are majestic.

That is, while “flower” belongs to Venus, each of them may be associated with one (or, sometimes, more than one) planet.

This applies to many things. Vultures, for example, are Saturnian creatures, but this beauty here is certainly solar:

Its behavior seems to match the colors, as one might expect.

This exemplifies the distinction between what the ancients called gender and species.

The species is, well, a specification of the gender.

Machines may be mercurial, but a certain machine might be martial, saturnine, etc.

I’m not saying things cannot be symbolically associated with more than one planet, but that’s not the case here. These examples are associated with one planet — but the level we’re looking at them decides which one it is.

On writers.

Mercury, being the way into our mind (it’s related to perception), is also the way out of it (expression).

I have looked at many charts of writers, over the years, and Mercury seems to give us a hint of how a writer structures their text (as opposed to what they write about).

Mercury in earth signs seems to indicate propensity to set firm foundations for the story, to explain the roots of what you’ll read. Either spending pages describing the city, the building, and every social relationship before actually telling the story, such as Balzac, or creating an entire Cosmos with its creation myth, such as Tolkien.

Mercury in fire signs seems to signify an emphasis in action, sometimes at the expense of details and structures, such as Dostoievski, Conrad or Hemingway, or even Kipling.

Mercury in air signs seems to symbolize a taste for concatenating ideas and events as they were logical consequences one of the other, or as parts of a discourse. Even if, as Machado de Assis, they subvert the chronological order of things; or the natural order of things, as Stephen King. Or even when they’re discussing what is behind the order and above the things, as Dante.

Mercury in water signs seems to show an interest in describing ambiance, highlighting impressions, emotions, or aesthetics; Oscar Wilde is the most obvious example, but Flaubert is another writer that appears to fit the description. So does Neil Gaiman.

This is by no means precise or detailed, but there seems to be some truth in it.

I decided to check whether there was something obvious about painters, too.

And… I don’t know if I found anything yet.

Ok, Edvard Munch has a very hot Mercury (in a fire sign, and combust), and his painting “the Scream” seems to express this.

But, apart from that, I still don’t know what there is to say about Mercury and painters.

Maybe the firmness of the lines drawn has something to do with the modes. Picasso and Dali have fixed Mercury (Scorpio and Taurus, respectively), while Da Vinci, Miró, and Van Gogh have Mercury in Aries; Monet and Munch have mutable Mercury. But I’m not sure.

One thing I know, this painting looks like “exalted Sun meets exalted Venus”, and Van Gogh does have both:

That’s it for now. I hope you like it.

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