Third: Gemini

If you haven’t already, I urge you to read the article explaining how the zodiac may be seen as a collection of twelve psychological types and thus gain context.

With Gemini, we arrive to the final stage of the spring experience. The raw and impetuous Day Force of Aries reached a more fruitful and calmer level in Taurus due to man’s work. The dynamic energy of nature turned into an organic power to carry out a function in life’s structure. The task is now to broaden the capacity for human relationships and, ultimately, for all kinds of relationships, both internal and external. In general, the psychological type of Gemini desires to widen his sphere of experience, projecting the energy of his feelings over a host of unknown objects and personalities.

The Night Force diminishes to its minimum intensity in Gemini, having just enough to represent the family matrix and its collective traditions, the subtle customs that adhere themselves to the impatience of youth so as to emerge from any slavery to the past where his roots are nonetheless found. The Gemini individual systematically rejects such slavery, even though his exaggerated sense of independence is but a negative reaction against everything that still ties him to the deepest levels of his own subconscious. He achieves an illusory freedom by fighting against the ancestral collectivity, whereas true freedom relies on liberation from that which has been consciously realized, only to be later regarded as slaving and perhaps only kept as support. The Night Force in Gemini is completely negative, an inverted force fueling subtle psychological complexes that will be projected subconsciously.

Youth, however, has no time to waste in complexes, nor to analyze how its impetuous desires condition its acts in order to leave the established relationships of familial life. All it wants is to reach new horizons one way or another, to associate the budding personality, still uncertain, with the multiplicity of new factors. At a purely biological level, the raw materials for an associative activity are imprints, nerve sensations, and immediate reactions to impacts reaching the senses consciously. At the mental level, the combination of memory, comparisons, and the formation of mental images expressed through words, are phases of the activity that develops the intellect through the use of language. Such process is at first confined to the immediate surroundings, through which the Gemini individual relates himself with a growing number of human-nature facets.

Need to Classify

Language in Gemini is in its initial stage: mind is born with the creative zeal of the springtime Day Force. We thus have the poet, a word artist who expresses his individuality, building his own personality through the memorization and exposition of particular experiences. To him, words originate from deeply personal life experiences while the philosopher in Sagittarius searches for universal meaning conditioned by societal experiences. The Night Force in Sagittarius acts with great intensity to concentrate and link distant factors through generalization. In Gemini, however, the intense Day Force tends toward particularization and personification. The process of “life expansion” in Gemini deals with an individual expansion of concrete experiences with the goal of forming a personality plus the base on which such personality will act: the Cancer home.

At a more complex level, Gemini has a need for classification. The Day Force brings so much energy that he feels dizzy from the complexity of his life experience, for he can barely keep up with the many things he touches, feels, thinks or experiments, and it all seems nebulous to him. There are so many sights, smells, feelings and emotions that he needs some concrete order; else, his flowering personality would be incapable of dealing with such an intense “expansion” of his being. Thus, we see that Gemini needs to classify, to establish categories about all that he is learning, requiring the use of words to help him remember the fleeting experiences and their fragrance, and must imbue all human contacts with logical patterns.

The Power of Naming

Naming is essential to the Gemini person. Through names, he can deal with his personal feelings, for names are words projecting the proper classification of his experiences and feelings. Names serve as screens to protect the still immature personality from the impact of unforeseen experiences, they serve to feel secure and in familiar territory. Rudhyar points out that the search for personal and intellectual security amid constantly changing experiences gave rise to Greek logic, later leading to the European science as conceived by Descartes. Logic, and the ethical concepts of “good” and “evil”, grew out of a need for security to men immersed in the incessant flux of experiences invoked by the Day Force and the anxious desire for all that is new: sensations, feelings, emotions and dreams. They were originally created for the pioneers who entered new realms of personal psychological experiences, realms that would quickly be filled with safeguards and taboos for those deemed weak or foolhardy.

Words are safety devices that reduce the strange to a collective normalcy. Logic and ethics are systems that set limits beyond which catastrophe appears as a threat to the more enterprising persons. These structures will be properly developed as social factors in the phase of Sagittarius, but they must be initially developed in Gemini. At this stage, they are created to satisfy a personal need which arises when confronting new experiences, which can be related to the past when giving them a name. This is the poet’s creativity, and at first all poets are “magicians”. It is the Gemini individual who bestows the names, the magician able to control the forces of nature through their “true names”. The power Words, magic spells and formulas are primitive forms of poetry and, in the long run, every culture emerges from the first attempts to meet the strange and mysterious entities of the night.

The Dark Side I

In Gemini, man feels the imminent arrival of the Night Force at the summer solstice and knows he will have to face it. Therefore, he makes preparations by building a home where he will receive a stranger who, at the same time, will be the beloved. The personality in its totality will be born from that encounter. There are so many dangerous possibilities for the self in such confrontation that it must be restricted, walled behind more names and more taboos. All of this gives rise to the concepts of matrimony, home life, monogamy, and all the ethical and social norms surrounding this encounter of the self with the other.

Gemini’s insecurities, however, are different from those of Aries. It isn’t a simple fear of being retaken by the past but the concrete realization that certain structures must be established to avoid completely losing all that one is experiencing, or having the personality scattered in a multiplicity of incoherent reactions arising from new experiences. The complete understanding of the human activity in the phase of Gemini must have as basis the identification with two types of organic correspondences, which are associative connections. During this phase, there exists the possibility of transferring our consciousness from one level to another, which is why the Gemini individual at times faces psychological problems.

Earth and Air Correspondences

The first type of correspondence belongs to the Taurus realm, it is the earth correspondence symbolized by the fact that all plants growing in our planet have their roots in the same soil, the pedosphere, one continuous layer; even under the oceans. This type essentially characterizes all the links stemming from the sign of Taurus: correspondences through the “roots of the self” (physical contact, food, sex, etc.), connections defined through a common link with the Earth and with the “fecundity” factor.

The other type of unifying correspondence is established through the air, the air that all living organisms breathe, from plants to animals and, of course, human beings. In reality and concretely, we are unified to all breathing organisms. It is a fact that the air we admit to the deepest part of our beings, our lungs and blood, is the same air that just before was breathed by prostitutes, holy men, and criminals. Moreover, we simply cannot avoid such relationship, it will mean a sudden death. The limited circle of our conscious relationships with other human beings becomes expanded against our will in this manner, through the air we constantly breathe.

In addition, air unites us in terms of our most basic means of expression: speech, since sound travels as air waves. Air waves connect us with an airplane flying a mile above us when we listen to its engines. Air moves the pollen that gives us allergies. We may build fortified castles around our ego, perhaps from our pride or egoism, or our desire for “isolation”, only for air to mock such childish fantasies and force us to connect and be one with everything (and everyone) we want to escape. Air is thus the element over which man can experience a fundamental prolongation of his relationships. Gemini is the first air sign in the zodiac.

A Thinker is Born

A living expansion of our being through the constant search of new connections: such is the essence of the human experience under the sign of Gemini. At the biological level, this expansion surged when the hand appeared as an evolutionary fact among living organisms. In fact, the hand, which is ruled by Gemini, is the primordial symbol of the human realm within organic life. Through the use of his hands, man learned to make tools, and tools allowed man to control and change his environment. The new sensations gave way to new relationship models and a progressive betterment of his reactions and sensibilities. From the hands to the nerves and then the brain: such is the control process of Gemini in the development of a personality. Along this path, the thinker is born, the descendant of a tool maker.

The Aries person does not experience thinking as an associative process based on the raw materials of his personal experience. He feels “ideas” as seeds from the past, belonging to the previous cycle when the Night Force was dominant. Throughout Taurus, those ideas or inspirational revelations are sunk in the substance of human sensations and organic reactions. Only in Gemini the process becomes a conscious and organic behavior under the guidance of the Day Force.

The thought process controlled by the Day Force energy is very different from the one controlled by the Night Force in Sagittarius. Gemini thinking is, both, linked to the personality’s needs and caused by the environment. It is learned. At any level, Gemini thinking is what gives a concrete expression to the impulses and inspirations felt in Aries. It is a verbal thinking conditioned by language. The Gemini person selects words and concepts from past civilizations which can help him grow as an individual. Gemini thinks psychologically whereas Sagittarius thinks sociologically. Thus we see why Gemini is a poet and not a philosopher. He builds with words just as hands build with clay, rocks and wood.

The Dark Side II

What he builds is a perfectly logical representation of reality based on the intricate correspondences and classifications of things, events and emotions. Unconcerned with social issues, this is a highly personal and functional representation that will inevitably collide with society’s view of the world. A well-adjusted Gemini individual will refine, rename and perhaps completely redefine his personal classification to bring it in line with socially-accepted knowledge, but there is a temptation to adapt what his senses and his mind perceive to the classification he has already produced, to his reality. This is the world of “alternate facts” infamously made popular by Donald Trump in the US and Boris Johnson in the UK, both born with Sun in Gemini, and the often invoked “other data” by the Mexican president López Obrador who has Gemini in the midheaven of his birth chart, his public life.

The Gemini type of person is filled with a vivid eagerness and curiosity for sensation and knowledge. Unlike Aries who is identified with the adolescent desiring to express a personality that is just an ideal, Gemini becomes the young college person who feels that all experiences are his for the asking, that there is nothing not to be known, no secret door the lock of which cannot be forced. With candid ardor he seeks to link all acts, to classify all data, to catalogue the gods and stars of the entire universe, to engineer adventures to heaven and hell, all of which may generate an unbridled impatience.

Gate to Human Fulfillment

The zodiacal symbol of Gemini is a conventional representation of two columns, linked above by the roof and, below, by the floor of the temple of which they mark the threshold. The Free Masons use two columns in their symbolism, Jachim and Boaz, each representing a polarity of being. Everywhere these two symbolic columns can be envisioned by the discerning mind, for everywhere there is duality and polarity. Gemini is the Gate which leads to the temple of human fulfillment. Through the Gate the wind of destiny blows. Beyond the Gate mystery and glamor mix with fear. At the Gate, the disciple pauses, facing the innermost in understanding and expectation.

At the Gate is the place to pause, to accept, and to know the peace which alone can ensure to the seeker of spiritual reality success in his search. At the Gate is the place where confrontations have to be met. It is where, between the two towering columns, our entire past is concentrated in an experience of intense awareness, often bleak with despair and frightening in its horror, as we accept and overcome the dreaded “Guardian of the Threshold”. At the Gate, the youthful and unprepared soul, filled with excitement and eager curiosity, may wish to rush headlong into the mystery. Little does he care to wonder at the majestic columns. Blind to the haunting presence, he would force his way into the temple. What would he find there? Nothing, save the avenging fury of his frustrations and his fears, save the aroused image of his darkest failures. And he would reel back, stunned and blinded.

The Gift of Letting Things Happen

Therefore, the Gemini-type person must learn to pause and to wait. He must learn to understand first, to act afterward. At the Gate of all experiences he has to stop and listen; and to bow as he meets the two great columns of life, for they are to teach him that all nature obeys laws which cannot be broken, and is structured by cycles whose rhythms compel all things. The beat of life is measured by tides of destiny which control the unfoldment of events. It is true that every goal and event clearly envisioned and persistently sustained comes to maturity. Nevertheless, he who strives after the goal must learn to let the goal happen to him. Not in passive expectation and careless wishing, but in the silence and the pause which is peace. Peace compels all mysteries to reveal themselves. Eagerness is not enough, power out of understanding is necessary.

Rudhyar wrote: “What draws to itself all things? A vacuum contained within a strong vessel which no pressure can shatter”. There is an inner emptiness of mind which will draw to itself all knowledge. It is difficult for the typical Gemini person to see that such a statement can make sense. But to learn that it does make sense is perhaps Gemini’s greatest need. “The art of letting things happen” is the greatest gift of the Spirit to his eager curiosity and his passion for getting at knowledge and things in general. It is the gift from that which is totality of being to the person who overvalues his tense striving to be “conscious” at all cost; merely to be conscious.

One can stress too much the will to intellectual clarity and mental formulations to such a degree that all except the relatively few facts able to fit in the conscious structures of the mind are left unnoticed. One can stress too much the value and importance of conscious representations. One can strain one’s power of perception and classification so much that there develops what Carl Jung called graphically and most accurately a cramp in the conscious. Unless this cramp is resolved, unless man lets life pour again within the relaxed structures of the mind, the seeker after reality will never find human fulfillment, however much he may think he knows.

Wisdom is not to be rushed into: it is to be received from the wholeness of life by the wholeness of one’s nature. Impatience and the eager rush of desire will only disturb the sacred performance. Wisdom which is of the Spirit is a gift. It is a gift because it comes to the recipient as a completed whole. He does not piece it together, part by part, hurriedly putting for a scaffold and throwing into it every bit of available material. Wisdom is a gift. One must not force the giving of gifts. This truth is for Gemini to learn; and it, too, must be received as a gift. All seeds mature slowly, and both wisdom and integration are of the nature of seeds. One must grow into them, effortlessly, serenely, in faith and in beauty.

Always Love. 🌹🙏💖