ASTROLOGY SESSIONS FOR MAY + JUNE
SATURN SESSIONS (7 left)
“A beautiful woman standing in the air, and she can sew.” — Ibn Ezra’s description of the first decan of Gemini in The Beginning of Wisdom
Tonight, a new moon in Gemini. The sky all fire and air, no water. And Mercury, our messenger and fleet-footed god of letters, almost touching the moon and the sun. The three of them congregating in the earliest degrees of Gemini, a transparent zone where we learn humble and humbling techniques. Arts and crafts that clear the mind and give way to vision. Scribes and seamstresses. Mystical experience or other knowledge from dedication and repetition. Gemini shows us how our hands, lungs, and heads are linked.
Gemini’s ruler, Mercury, is also the ruler of poetry. Mercury is a small, changeable planet—now here, now there—and poetry is often seen as small and hard to catch, too. (After my novel came out, people acted like I had graduated from poetry to the novel, like bigger is better). Not so, says Gemini. Its apparent smallness is its strength. Like the illegible planet, poems creep into corners of the mindsky we didn’t know existed. So, gotta sit with the weird text, let it work on us. Mercury rules poetry, craft, thievery, astrology. The handwork of taking dictation from beyond or beside, both elevating and humbling. In and out, in and out. It maybe has to do with breathing. The sign of Gemini—a twin on each lung. Lung, from lungen—-the light organ.
The image the Birhat Jakata assigns to these early degrees of Gemini is weird and lovely: “A female, fond of needle work, handsome, fond of ornamentation, issueless, lifted hands and in menses.” Like, in the flow state. Reminds me of the women in Vivienne. Vivienne quits art and becomes a seamstress. Velour is on her period (so many people have told me how disgusted, horrified!, they were by a particular period scene in Vivienne). The aura of the feminine first decan of Gemini has something to do with being in it. In one’s work, flow, blood.
Pen, needle, breath. Without, for the moment, a way out. The menstrual cycle, with its own text and intelligence. Deleuze and Guattari likened becoming a writer to becoming a woman. To become a writer is to enter the first degrees of Gemini, devoted to learning the bizarre art of cutting and connecting. Not for outside glory but to embroider what’s before you, which is its own glory.
This is making me think of a blind John Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters. The moon is new in the transparent zone of scribes and seamstresses. Freed from scorekeeping, networking—messy and taking dictation, faces blotted out and given, through drudgery, detail, and repetitions—-vision.
Below, horoscopes for this new moon, made of lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost.
