Rethinking Mercury in Pisces..

byjove

Account Closed
I'm not sure what policy I'd advise in that situation. Even if it's hard or risky to Mercury Sag/Pis natives to learn other languages, I woudn't recommend a Sun in Libra native not to take the lead at work though. So I don't know if I'd discourage language learning with Sag/Pisc Mercury natives. (I'm not saying that you do of course!)

The ironic thing about Merc. in Pisc. is that 'academic' learning is most strongly valued with accrediting foreign languages I think. Yet, just about every language teacher that I've had (just as the Rosetta Stone teaches) they recommend 'situational' or 'environmental' learning is the best; learning amongst natives in casual day to day life. So, the Mercury in Virgo academic style is most respected, perhaps, yet the Pisces absorption is what language teachers recommend. Maybe it just comes down to the rest of the chart, the rest of the chart may support these things or maybe you have to be frank and say, study music/art/other things but mathematics/languages are unlikely to be the strong point.
 
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M

may28gemini

Actually, I think Libra can make better leaders than Aries. Aries is too into themselves and have to have their way. Aries always think they're #1 and they're like allergic to accepting failure. Libra is collaborative and will be concerned for others. Libra is always in danger of bending too far backwards for others that they can easily overcompensate with austerity (like V.Putin). However, I find that Libran qualities are more agreeable as to what would make a good leader as opposed to selfish Aries.

Yeah, Virgo Mercury is like the world's "standarized" way of learning. That is necessary because Virgo Mercury brings with it the importance of objectivity and facts. Without it, the world would get nothing done and be floating around being loopy. Granted, Virgo Mercury can be dry and axe out some interesting possibilities.

Oddly enough, the world doesn't respect Gemini Mercury. It's funny that Mercury's "nature" is predominantly Gemini and yet, even though both Gemini and Virgo Mercuries exist on the same high functioning level, the world opted for the Virgo Mercury way of learning. Gemini is into facts and objectivity, but it's also creative and intuitive as well. Gemini will use intuition and other various methods that will lead them to facts, whereas, Virgo will stick with just the facts. Gemini Mercury has the upper hand with articulation but Virgo Mercury reigns supreme with numbers. Virgo Mercury (numbers) have a specific structure and sequence and can be checked. Gemini Mercury is difficult to pin down and control because it's the fastest Mercury and likes switching everything. With the opposite of Virgo Mercury, Pisces Mercury is in detriment because it doesn't give into account of facts... it operates on belief and that's not something that can be checked. Pisces Mercury doesn't really care that what they believe doesn't get checked. Thankfully, the world doesn't exist that way.


What would I suggest to you? Nothing? I thought we were just discussing what we thought.
 
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Breakthrough

Active member
My father has Merc in Pisc. He's vague, that's for sure, I often have a difficult time understanding delineations of his thoughts which seem to be shifting dunes that you can perish in for good. But he's smart, a nuclear physicist by education and is good with structure and organization, Although, the latter could be attributed to his other placements (Mars in Virgo, Sun and Merc conj Sat, Merc opp Uranus, Moon in Cap).
 

vanessanz

Member
I have this heavily emphasized in my chart;

3rd house Pisces Mercury is opposite Virgo Moon/Midheaven

Moon conjunct MC in Virgo [2 degree orb] > exactly square 12th house Neptune

12th house Neptune is square 3rd house Mercury in Pisces [So a T-square]



I also have Venus in Pisces 3rd house & Sun in Pisces 4th house

Mercury [chart depositor along with Neptune] is closely trine Uranus /North Node in 11th house

Mercury & Uranus are both closely sextile A.C

This combination certainly makes me very intuitive & able to feel the energy of any environment. I struggle to logically process this awareness sometimes though
I was an academically gifted kid put in accelerant classes, but failed maths / chemistry :smile: So it doesn't make you dumb, but probably true that it's not the best combo for maths!
I also think visually - i even do maths visually in my head...
It gives me a highly refined & intuitive 'eye' or sense of aesthetics.

I can confirm that i have heavily relied on my intuition & ability to visualize, to create built environments / businesses – I can basically feel a finished structure then i work backwards to analyze the detail & the steps needed to build it
I flip between the two modes continuously highly analytical vs visionary – not always in balance………………..
 

vanessanz

Member
Thanks for your post Milkywaygirl! Your experience sounds very similar to mine, which i find interesting.
I also have Mercury in Pisces 3rd closely trine Uranus in 11th.
Very quick intuitive mind able to master most skills quickly - i think this might be more to do with our Mercury / Uranus trine than our Mercury in Pisces though...
 

cspencer

Banned
I note that traditional users would refer to Jupiter being the ruler of Pisces and that these assumptions of peril don't appear - they appear with the modern ruler of Neptune. Hopefully, some discussion on this may be possible.

That's true.

Also, when reading the ancient texts, they tended to give either the best case scenario or the worst case scenario. It's up to you to build off of that based on the actual condition of the Star.

The issue is which Mercury shows up in Pisces.

Is Mercury retrograde? Fast or slow? East or west of the Sun? Nocturnal or diurnal? Combust or under beams?

And then is Mercury assembled with other Stars?

Pisces Mercury assembled with Venus and Sun is not the same as Pisces Mercury assembled with a Sun and combust Moon.

Is Mercury in aspect?

Is Mercury assembled and in aspect to another Star?

Is Mercury regarded by the malefics or in aversion to them?

All those things really do matter and really do make a difference.

Oh, and then are Mercury and Sun in aversion?
 

CapAquaPis

Well-known member
When one has a Mercury in Pisces-9th come in close to the Sun/Moon conjunction in Aquarius-8th, while Mercury opposites a stellium: Jupiter/Mars/Saturn/Lilith in Virgo-3rd, what would become of one's intellectual abilities? Like I said in earlier posts on other threads about the placement of Mercury linked to autism and mental disability, there should be a bigger role other than the smallest planet in our solar system: the Sun and Moon are the two most influential celestial bodies on charts and they have to conflict Mercury.
 

Oddity

Well-known member
...there should be a bigger role other than the smallest planet in our solar system: the Sun and Moon are the two most influential celestial bodies on charts and they have to conflict Mercury.

I think you may be looking at this the wrong way.

Mercury can be the killing planet. It can be a marriage planet. It can be the most important planet in your chart. It can do a lot of things. Planets are hugely influential, their relative size doesn't matter. Look at modern astrology's tendency to pretty much invoke Pluto to explain everything - and Pluto is tiny.

If you feel that only the sun and moon are important, you could limit your astrology to those, but I don't believe that's the case. Sometimes, often, they are not the most influential planets in a chart.
 

byjove

Account Closed
I've been thinking about this one again.

Why does Mercury not do well under Jupiter's rulership?

Many astrologers I've discovered don't have a high opinion of Mercury in Sagittarius. Too scattered intellectually etc. In Pisces, delusional, naive etc.

But Jupiter is the Great Benefic. It illuminates intellectually. It can also be over optimistic. Is Jupiter not an older, wise teacher able to guide the young, curious mind?

Not all astrologers consider Mercury in fall in Pisces, only detriment. Why two bullets?
 

CapAquaPis

Well-known member
So, there's a Mercury-Jupiter connection in astrology. :andy: Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. In traditional astrology, Jupiter rules Pisces where Mercury happens to be its detriment. Oddity: Responding to your post response from July, I'm very aware all planets in astrology are important. I commented about my sun/Moon Aquarius placed in 8th near my Mercury in Pisces in 9th. Do you know what that means?
 

Oddity

Well-known member
Good point, which begs one to ask the question of who assigned the rulership of the sign of Pisces to Jupiter?......
You have go back to the time when the choice of planets ended at Saturn, now who would you have given the Pisces rulership to?

It's in the thema mundi - http://horoscopicastrologyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/thema-mundi-large.jpg

We know that Saturn is like an opposition because its houses, Capricorn and Aquarius, oppose the houses of the moon and the sun. We know that Jupiter is like a trine because it trines the sun from its day-house, Sagittarius, and trines the moon from its night-house, Pisces. We know that Mars is like a square, because it squares the moon from its day-house, Aries, and squares the sun from its night-house, Scorpio. We know that Venus is like a sextile, because it sextiles the sun from its day-house, Libra, and the moon from its night-house, Taurus. Mercury, being right next to the sun and moon picks up the influence of that which it is next to.

So...is Pisces the day-house or the night-house of Neptune? What gender is Neptune? Which sect? Where are its other dignities?

The more I look at it, the more it seems the concept of rulership at all doesn't fit into the modern schemata. Not a criticism. An observation.
 

david starling

Well-known member
Oddity, sign-rulership is vital to me as a "modern" Tropical astrologer. We need Traditionalism as the roots, and modern for the branches. And, in branching out, we have to let much of the Traditional schemata go in order to expand the rulership pattern. Thank the Trads for protecting the roots!
 

Birch Dragon

Well-known member
This thread – a great thread which has been around for a long time now – already offers argument and testimonial against the common notion that Mercury somehow doesn’t work well in Pisces. But allow me to add to it...

As a Virgo rising and Gemini Midheaven, my Pisces Mercury is of central importance in my chart. Just one degree off my descendant, it sits square to Saturn (within one degree), and Neptune (within nine degrees), making it the base of a wide t-square that winds up having real power in my chart due to it’s very close alignment with my angular cusps. To many an eye my Mercury is badly placed, and given it’s centrality in my chart we might think that would bode very poorly for my life.

And yet I’m an Ivy League trained PhD and a working professor. While it’s true that all academics focus on certain fields over others, and my smarts aren’t equal in all areas, I’m serious when I say that I’d put my raw intelligence up against anybody’s in the world. (Which I say, of course, purely for the sake of astrological inquiry and not at all out of some Arian boasting!)

I’m going to say that if the Piscean Mercury starts out essentially musical and metaphor-minded, in it’s great flexibility and (maybe more correctly) receptivity, it can be disciplined and trained, shown the ways of solid structure, empirical observation and hard analysis. Underneath these things, always, the Pisces mercury will be singing the universe to light, dancing endlessly through oceans of ambiguity and symbolism, synthesizing the component pieces to reveal the oneness of everything. But to communicate what it sees I think the Piscean Mercury can learn any language, including Logic, Rigor, Stuffy and Math (which at a certain level actually starts to look very mystical).



I really like what Oddity is doing just a few posts above this one. Great stuff! I’ve long wanted to write something about Gemini as the first sign of distinction/duality, and how that connects it so intimately with language. (Though it’s probably already written somewhere, by a real astrologer…) Language is only made possible in the act of distinguishing concepts, and distinguishing the squiggles and sounds we use to signify those concepts. The difference between “cat” and “cut” is only a slight squiggle in the second letter, but that distinction allows us to envision two separate concepts in our mind. And so, with each distinction, a whole system of language grows.

When we turn to Virgo, Mercury again is cutting, parsing out and making distinctions. Here the mind is less focused on the pure form of ideas, as it is in Gemini, and more on the practical. Science applied. But still, essentially, Virgo is making distinctions. Analysis is actually the act of taking a whole and parsing it out into smaller component parts. It’s the opposite of the Piscean/Neptunian impulse to synthesize and dissolve distinctions: to take component parts and see them as a whole -- a whole the sum of which is greater than the parts.

Looked at that way, Mercury’s basic nature seems at odds with Neptune, for sure, and as byjove and Oddity suggest, seemingly Jupiter as well. But why be satisfied to think the mind is working best when it’s dissecting and making distinctions, analyzing and bringing clarity to our language? Don’t our minds also and equally need to synthesize? To merge together? To create ambiguity in murky symbolism?

The Piscean mind is musical because music is symphonic. If you tear apart a symphony, or even a pop song, into it’s individual tracks and play them one by one, you’ve actually killed the song. Or at least reduced it to something less. The human mind analyses, yes. But the human mind also has to merge together in symphonic harmony.

The Piscean mind is sympathetic because the human capacity for sympathy is a dissolution of the mental space between us --- a momentary merging of our emotional lives. Yes, we are each separate individuals, with our own unique psyches. But we don’t actually exist in emotional isolation. The merest love, the merest friendship, or even just the involuntary twinge of pain we feel when we walk by somebody else in pain, reminds us of that.

Yes, we need clear language and sharp argument to spell a thesis out to us systematically. But we also need poetry – waves of symbols that merge together in ways we can feel but never entirely explain – to grasp why this or that thesis really matters in our lives.

Mercury in Pisces is of a different nature than the essentially distinction-oriented nature of Gemini or Virgo, but human life does require we have both, and balance, those mental natures. To my mind, it’s not actually about Mercury fitting “poorly” or “well.”
And again, I'd strongly suggest that whatever lack in rigor, structure, discipline, distinction-making or practicality we may think Pisces Mercury suffers from, it's well equipped to simply absorb that trait and make it a part of it's own nature.
 
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Oddity

Well-known member
A few things that might tickle you then. Mercury joys in the first house because it rules the tongue and language, language being a big part of what makes you - you.

The moon is the instinctive, non-rational mind, and the sun is the light of mind, or consciousness. In hermetic thought, the mind is what works on the brain - it's rather too important to be left to one planet alone.

I always get the impression when I say 'Mercury is detrimented and in fall in Pisces' that what people are hearing is: 'Odd just said I'm an idiot'.

Not the case, but it means Mercury is working against its grain. You have Mercury ruled signs rising and on the midheaven? How have things been in your profession and being known in the world, and with your health and other first house matters? If they're all terrific, Jupiter (Mercury's ruler in your chart) is probably well-placed. If they aren't so great, you're experiencing some of that detriment and fall.

It doesn't make you stupid. It means a planet isn't doing its proper job for you. You've talked about some of the creative ways to work around that, and they are there. But in my experience, the debility will show up somewhere, either in the house where the debilitated planet is, or in the houses it rules.

Cheers.
 

byjove

Account Closed
^^^

Birch Dragon just illustrated in poetic motion and intelligence, the higher octave of Mercury's gifts in Pisces. I couldn't have put it better myself. I felt the poetry and symphony in that construction. :)

Oddity, as for fall and detriment, the sad truth is, it's clear to me that many astrologers believe that M in P natives are in fact idiots. I've come across more critical laughs, jokes and this:

http://www.astrologyweekly.com/forum/showthread.php?t=31548

than I have with any more detrimented placing. Why is that, I wonder?

I've said it before, I've never seen that view with the Sun in fall in Libra natives. Are they incapable or stupid? Of course not.

I found this in my opening post:

"Although Mercury is in detriment in Pisces, this position does not impair intelligence. It merely suggests that the mind resists the rule of pure logic and refuses to be pinned down to hard facts..."

http://www.mindfire.ca/The Planets Through the Signs/Mercury Though the Signs/Mercury in Pisces.htm

Another eloquent quote:

Mercury is also in its fall in this sign, showing that ultimately criticism and analysis must be dissolved in compassion, thereby making love rather than intellect the guiding principle of life.
 
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Oddity

Well-known member
I don't think so. The vast, vast majority of astrologers around practise modern astrology, and have no truck with such dodgy ideas as detriment, fall, or God forbid, malefics! They say much worse things about traditional astrologers (purveyors of doom that they see us to be) than they do about people with Mercury in Pisces.

Or okay, someone wants to feel superior (astrologers with powerz, sadly they are around) and says that whatever is debilitated is representative of how YOU are defective. Not always the case. It can be, sometimes, but those planets in exaltation and rulership can be pretty snotty to deal with, too. Especially when someone's regaling you with stories of how spiritually evolved they are because of that, you peon-who-will-reincarnate-as-roadkill-you.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Planets in detriment and fall are working against their own natures. Again, there are some creative work-arounds. Go look at Arthur Ashe's chart for a prime example.

But that only goes so far - unless there are some serious mitigating circumstances, there will be problems in the areas of life the planet rules in your chart. That does not necessarily mean that you're doing something wrong, though you may be, because none of us is perfect. Sometimes it's just a horrible series of circumstances because the planet can't bring about good.

I know that's a difficult concept in modern astrology, where the worst things that can happen to you are only 'challenging', but real life - it doesn't work that way.
 

Birch Dragon

Well-known member
^^^

Birch Dragon just illustrated in poetic motion and intelligence, the higher octave of Mercury's gifts in Pisces. I couldn't have put it better myself. I felt the poetry and symphony in that construction. :)"

byjove, you're a wonderful human being with astoundingly good taste!!! (If I could find a winking emoji face I'd stick it in here.) I've always enjoyed your posts and the threads you create...

Mercury is also in its fall in this sign, showing that ultimately criticism and analysis must be dissolved in compassion, thereby making love rather than intellect the guiding principle of life.

Super well quoted!!!
For me, this quote has serious resonance, the likes of which I can't begin to get into...
 
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Birch Dragon

Well-known member
Thanks Oddity.
And I realize we won't agree on this - which is fine - but I just can't help myself to point out...

It means a planet isn't doing its proper job for you. You've talked about some of the creative ways to work around that, and they are there. But in my experience, the debility will show up somewhere, either in the house where the debilitated planet is, or in the houses it rules.

This is exactly what I'm trying to suggest against. I'm not suggesting that I've had to work around a Mercury that isn't doing it's proper job. I'm suggesting that my Mercury is great in Pisces. It analyses. It synthesizes. It's logical. It's poetic. If the proper job of Mercury is only two of these four, than I want a Mercury that can do its proper job and more...
Of course, as always, ultimately this discussion would have to be about the whole chart... But as a person who makes their career on their mind, I wouldn't trade my Mercury in Pisces for any other option put on the table. :smile:
 

Lunachic

Active member
I have mercury in the 11th house at 16 degrees pisces and I have fun doing maths but I guess that's mostly because I love my math teacher . . . I'm also not too shabby at these maths things (unless I'm doing it totally bizarre and not using logic at all . . . ) I do prefer using creativity a lot more than logic though, but I like using logic to show that I can do it and that I'm not a total wacko . . . like, I've got a brain hEllo
 
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