21 Apr Psychoanalysis ~ Mercury Retrograde in Taurus

The second Mercury retrograde of the year has arrived, in the fixed earth sign of Taurus.

And it offers an opportunity to dig into the fertile soil of the deep mind to unearth the irrational dreamworld hidden beneath conscious thought.

Mercury’s retrograde cycle has firmly planted itself in the triplicity of earth signs. For all of 2021 and 2022, Mercury spent his retrograde almost entirely in air signs. But with his retrograde in Capricorn late last year, his retrograde cycle mutated from the air element into the earth element.

In alchemy, air operations are those that separate and sift the mind from rigid dogma and ensnaring beliefs. But alchemical operations of earth—and especially Taurus—are associated with conjunction. 

The earth of conjunction refers to the vessel where the spirit unifies with the soul—in other words, the body.  As the modern alchemist Dennis William Hauck writes: “Ancient philosophers saw the human body not as a physiological machine but as a vessel for soul and spirit.”

And so this Mercury Retrograde invites an opportunity for you to get out of your head and into your body—to unify spirit and soul in the mysteries of sexual alchemy. 

But the path of Mercury retrograde is anything but linear. And with this Mercury retrograde taking place in the middle of eclipse season, you’re being asked to dig deeper.

In order for the spirit to unite with the soul, the rational mind must penetrate the irrational self. You must explore the dream world, the unconscious garden of phantasms where all phenomena of experience find their deepest root.

Power of Three

Hermetic cosmology sees three worlds—heaven, earth and the underworld (divine, human, animal)—all connected by the axis mundi.

The axis mundi has been depicted in mythological traditions as a tree (Yggdrasil of Norse mythology) or mountain (Mount Olympus of Greece). It’s the pillar that holds up the entire universe and connects the human world to one that is at once animistic and divine.

It’s through Mercury that we learn our ancestral wisdom and divine origins in equal measure. Mercury’s Grecian counterpart Hermes was the only god granted the power to travel the full range of the axis mundi, from the heights of Mount Olympus to the depths of Hades.

When he turns retrograde, Mercury descends below the horizon. He transforms from the Winged Messenger into the psychopomp, the guide who carries departed souls into the underworld.

In Hermetica Triptycha Volume One: The Mercury Elemental Year, Gary P. Caton describes the visual phenomena of the Mercury Retrograde as a “disappearing act,” writing that it appears Mercury is “switching skies, appearing in the same degrees three times: first as evening star, then becoming invisible and making the inferior conjunction, and finally crossing for the third time as morning star.”

The Mercury Retrograde is an invitation for you to switch selves—to transform from ordinary consciousness to unconscious reverie, from a rational being into an irrational creature. You are being asked to switch patterns and change perception, lest you become a “victim” to the alteration of consciousness naturally underway during the Mercury Retrograde.

You may hear an invitation from Mercury the trickster to switch worlds. It’s an invitation to go within to discover the source of your discontent with others and the world-at-large, rather than point your finger like a heat seeking missile at an easily identifiable enemy. You are being called to break free of rationality, to embrace the irrational and see reality as it truly is (or at least seems to be).

The Heart of the Sun

On May 1st, 2023 Mercury will make his inferior conjunction with the Sun at 11 degrees Taurus. This transit is otherwise known as Cazimi, translating to “In the Heart of the Sun.” The image given here is one of a messenger entering the throne room of a great monarch.

The Cazimi is a great seed moment. In this cosmic temple beyond the limits of space and time, you may commune with the divine and bear witness to a greater plan for your destiny.

The Cazimi takes place in the second decan of Taurus, which the Picatrix describes as “a phase of planting and cultivation, building and development, ethics and wisdom.” This is Taurus at its most fertile, with Agrippa describing it as bringing “power, nobility and authority over people.”

Taking place on May 1st, this Cazimi corresponds exactly with the celebration of Beltane. This cross-quarter festival takes place in the middle of spring in the northern hemisphere, when Earth has grown ripe under the life-giving rays of the Sun. Beltane rituals often invoke sexual imagery and performance to symbolize the fertilization of the Earth by the Sun.

The astrologer Austin Coppock noted the sexual magic of this decan in his monogram 36 Faces, symbolizing it with the linga-yoni of Tantric mysticism. He writes: “…a tantric union moves slowly, rhythmically in this face. The partners do not race to climax—they breath deeply and undulate in slow motion. Their union and its fruits are both eternal and temporal.”

This is echoed by traditional symbolism of conjunction in alchemical manuscripts. Dennis William Hauck writes: “So fundamental are the forces of Conjunction that the alchemists usually portrayed it in overtly sexual terms and showed the king and queen (or Sol and Luna) mating passionately in a variety of positions and locations.”

The second decan of Taurus is attributed to the Six of Coins in the Minor Arcana of the Tarot. The Golden Dawn called this card “The Lord of Material Success” in Book T. Pamela Coleman Smith’s illustration in the Rider-Waite deck famously depicts a merchant holding the scales in one hand while distributing alms to two beggars with the other.

The merchant represents the Sun, the beggars the Earth. His coins are the Sun’s rays, received with deep gratitude by the lowly and humble Earth. In this card, you bear witness to the words of the Apostle Paul: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)

The Cazimi is your opportunity to contemplate the mysteries of Material Success. Unseen by the naked eye, the rays of the Sun penetrate deep into the soils of the Earth to bring forth the “substance of things hoped for.” As the light of the Sun fertilizes the depths of the Earth, you are given a chance to fertilize the deep mind with the light of conscious awareness.

To aid in this task, it’s advised that you embark upon a directed mythological study and magical practice. As Caton writes in Hermetica Triptycha, “To keep the passages between worlds open, and our basic self and non-rational worlds integrated, we should dedicate at least one of these three periods each year to taking a conscious descent into the worlds of magic and myth.”

When You Say One Thing, But Mean Your Mother

If you wish to penetrate the mysteries of the Mercury Retrograde in Taurus, then it might be time to have a seat on the couch of Dr. Sigmund Freud. 

Born with both his natal Sun and Mercury in Taurus, Freud laid the fertile soil from which modern psychology grew. While he was certainly not woke by modern standards—and most of his ideas would easily get him canceled on TikTok—there’s a core philosophy that should not be thrown out with the proverbial bathwater.

For example, his Topographical model of the mind mirrors the Hermetic triplicity, corresponding perfectly with the Heaven/Earth/Underworld model of the universe. And it’s a model that’s worth revisiting this Mercury retrograde.

Freud believed that the majority of what you experience in life—emotions, impulses, memories—are not available on a conscious level. He maintained that the majority of your drives are buried deep in the unconscious mind, completely obscured from conscious awareness. He developed the Topographical model of consciousness to illustrate his theory, which he described with the analogy of an iceberg.

The conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg. It’s your rational decision-making mind that functions at full conscious awareness. You notice you’re hungry, so you have a snack. You notice you’re cold, so you put on a jacket. There’s a traffic jam on your way to work, so you take a side street. This is the conscious mind at work.

Your conscious mind is also responsible for your logical and intellectual processes. It reads the words in this blog post this very instant and organizes them into a comprehensible gestalt of meaning. And it’s also your conscious mind that opens a new browser tab to look up the definition of the word gestalt just to make sure I’m using it right—because you totally know what it means yourself and need no reminder.

Just below the surface of the water is the preconscious mind, where free associations start to rise up from below. This is the level of things you don’t immediately know but can access through association. The song you danced to on prom night comes on the radio and you’re instantly transported back to that moment in time. The taste of Thrifty’s vanilla ice cream conjures that bittersweet sensation of innocence and melancholy you felt on the last solo playdate you had with your mom just before your baby brother was born. It’s where all those transient moments you never want to forget but can never seem to get a firm hold on go to vanish with the blink of an eye.

“The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.”

But hidden deep below the surface of wistful reverie lies the unconscious mind. You store your memories in the unconscious. The pleasant ones rise up to the preconscious surface through association. But the painful and traumatic ones remain buried deep below the surface, concealed from the light of conscious awareness.

The majority of mental activity is unconscious, but it still impacts your conscious behavior—whether or not it comes to conscious awareness. You might smell freshly baked cookies, which conjures the memory of visiting your grandmother when you were a child. And this, in turn, inspires you to make the conscious decision to call your mom and ask if she remembers. She tells you that she does, and so you both make the conscious decision to plan a day to get together and bake your grandmother’s secret chocolate chip recipe.

“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”

While pleasant memories are welcome to the surface, painful ones are not—and yet their influence still drives your behavior. A dog barks and you’re crippled with anxiety, because you don’t remember the dog attack you suffered when you were small. Another relationship falls apart due to your inability to trust people, because you can’t fully recall the abuse you suffered as a child.

This happens through repression, a process by which you push unpleasant or unacceptable memories, feelings or urges into your unconscious mind. Freud believed that the vast majority of your unconscious mind arrived there by repression—and so the vast majority of your conscious behavior is actually driven by unseen forces repressed in the unconscious.

“Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.”

This idea was revolutionary when Freud first published his theories of the mind over a century ago. The idea that human behavior was driven by forces unseen—that the conscious mind was nothing but a slave to an invisible master—thoroughly scandalized Victorian society. And it gave birth to modern psychology as we know it.

The Lord of Material Success

Freud’s theories haven’t always been used in good faith. His American nephew Edward Bernays used his uncle’s theories to develop the school of public relations, which has crystalized public opinion for the last century through its left hand of advertising and and right hand of propaganda both manipulating the unconscious into dogmatic belief and trust in corporations and governments.

But it was also through Freud’s student Carl Jung that we were given the discipline of depth psychology with its rich esoteric analysis of archetypes and the collective unconscious.

And it was Freud’s theory of the unconscious that inspired English painter and mage Austin Osman Spare to develop his theory of sigil magic. Seeking to reverse engineer the repression process as a magical tool, Spare developed a method by which you could intentionally sublimate your desire into the unconscious so that it could manifest into conscious reality.

The power of the unconscious mind was also tapped by New Thought writers like Joseph Murphy, Neville Goddard and Napoleon Hill as a potent mechanism to plant seeds for material success via affirmation and visualization. They would often instruct that you repeat your affirmations or use your visualizations while lying in bed, just before falling asleep. That’s when you segue into the preconscious state which opens a portal to the unconscious dreamstate, where you can plant seeds of intention.

The Mercury retrograde in Taurus is a fertile season for personal growth. It’s ripe with potential to dig deep for transformation on a primal level. With the Cazimi taking place on May Day in the second decan of Taurus—with its associations with fertility, sex magic and material success—this Mercury retrograde is a perfect season to till the soils of the unconscious and plant seeds of intention for health, wealth and material abundance.

The second Mercury retrograde of the year has arrived, in the fixed earth sign of Taurus.

And it offers an opportunity to dig into the fertile soil of the deep mind to unearth the irrational dreamworld hidden beneath conscious thought.

Mercury’s retrograde cycle has firmly planted itself in the triplicity of earth signs. For all of 2021 and 2022, Mercury spent his retrograde almost entirely in air signs. But with his retrograde in Capricorn late last year, his retrograde cycle mutated from the air element into the earth element.

In alchemy, air operations are those that separate and sift the mind from rigid dogma and ensnaring beliefs. But alchemical operations of earth—and especially Taurus—are associated with conjunction. 

The earth of conjunction refers to the vessel where the spirit unifies with the soul—in other words, the body.  As the modern alchemist Dennis William Hauck writes: “Ancient philosophers saw the human body not as a physiological machine but as a vessel for soul and spirit.”

And so this Mercury Retrograde invites an opportunity for you to get out of your head and into your body—to unify spirit and soul in the mysteries of sexual alchemy. 

But the path of Mercury retrograde is anything but linear. And with this Mercury retrograde taking place in the middle of eclipse season, you’re being asked to dig deeper.

In order for the spirit to unite with the soul, the rational mind must penetrate the irrational self. You must explore the dream world, the unconscious garden of phantasms where all phenomena of experience find their deepest root.

Power of Three

Hermetic cosmology sees three worlds—heaven, earth and the underworld (divine, human, animal)—all connected by the axis mundi.

The axis mundi has been depicted in mythological traditions as a tree (Yggdrasil of Norse mythology) or mountain (Mount Olympus of Greece). It’s the pillar that holds up the entire universe and connects the human world to one that is at once animistic and divine.

It’s through Mercury that we learn our ancestral wisdom and divine origins in equal measure. Mercury’s Grecian counterpart Hermes was the only god granted the power to travel the full range of the axis mundi, from the heights of Mount Olympus to the depths of Hades.

When he turns retrograde, Mercury descends below the horizon. He transforms from the Winged Messenger into the psychopomp, the guide who carries departed souls into the underworld.

In Hermetica Triptycha Volume One: The Mercury Elemental Year, Gary P. Caton describes the visual phenomena of the Mercury Retrograde as a “disappearing act,” writing that it appears Mercury is “switching skies, appearing in the same degrees three times: first as evening star, then becoming invisible and making the inferior conjunction, and finally crossing for the third time as morning star.”

The Mercury Retrograde is an invitation for you to switch selves—to transform from ordinary consciousness to unconscious reverie, from a rational being into an irrational creature. You are being asked to switch patterns and change perception, lest you become a “victim” to the alteration of consciousness naturally underway during the Mercury Retrograde.

You may hear an invitation from Mercury the trickster to switch worlds. It’s an invitation to go within to discover the source of your discontent with others and the world-at-large, rather than point your finger like a heat seeking missile at an easily identifiable enemy. You are being called to break free of rationality, to embrace the irrational and see reality as it truly is (or at least seems to be).

The Heart of the Sun

On May 1st, 2023 Mercury will make his inferior conjunction with the Sun at 11 degrees Taurus. This transit is otherwise known as Cazimi, translating to “In the Heart of the Sun.” The image given here is one of a messenger entering the throne room of a great monarch.

The Cazimi is a great seed moment. In this cosmic temple beyond the limits of space and time, you may commune with the divine and bear witness to a greater plan for your destiny.

The Cazimi takes place in the second decan of Taurus, which the Picatrix describes as “a phase of planting and cultivation, building and development, ethics and wisdom.” This is Taurus at its most fertile, with Agrippa describing it as bringing “power, nobility and authority over people.”

Taking place on May 1st, this Cazimi corresponds exactly with the celebration of Beltane. This cross-quarter festival takes place in the middle of spring in the northern hemisphere, when Earth has grown ripe under the life-giving rays of the Sun. Beltane rituals often invoke sexual imagery and performance to symbolize the fertilization of the Earth by the Sun.

The astrologer Austin Coppock noted the sexual magic of this decan in his monogram 36 Faces, symbolizing it with the linga-yoni of Tantric mysticism. He writes: “…a tantric union moves slowly, rhythmically in this face. The partners do not race to climax—they breath deeply and undulate in slow motion. Their union and its fruits are both eternal and temporal.”

This is echoed by traditional symbolism of conjunction in alchemical manuscripts. Dennis William Hauck writes: “So fundamental are the forces of Conjunction that the alchemists usually portrayed it in overtly sexual terms and showed the king and queen (or Sol and Luna) mating passionately in a variety of positions and locations.”

The second decan of Taurus is attributed to the Six of Coins in the Minor Arcana of the Tarot. The Golden Dawn called this card “The Lord of Material Success” in Book T. Pamela Coleman Smith’s illustration in the Rider-Waite deck famously depicts a merchant holding the scales in one hand while distributing alms to two beggars with the other.

The merchant represents the Sun, the beggars the Earth. His coins are the Sun’s rays, received with deep gratitude by the lowly and humble Earth. In this card, you bear witness to the words of the Apostle Paul: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)

The Cazimi is your opportunity to contemplate the mysteries of Material Success. Unseen by the naked eye, the rays of the Sun penetrate deep into the soils of the Earth to bring forth the “substance of things hoped for.” As the light of the Sun fertilizes the depths of the Earth, you are given a chance to fertilize the deep mind with the light of conscious awareness.

To aid in this task, it’s advised that you embark upon a directed mythological study and magical practice. As Caton writes in Hermetica Triptycha, “To keep the passages between worlds open, and our basic self and non-rational worlds integrated, we should dedicate at least one of these three periods each year to taking a conscious descent into the worlds of magic and myth.”

When You Say One Thing, But Mean Your Mother

If you wish to penetrate the mysteries of the Mercury Retrograde in Taurus, then it might be time to have a seat on the couch of Dr. Sigmund Freud. 

Born with both his natal Sun and Mercury in Taurus, Freud laid the fertile soil from which modern psychology grew. While he was certainly not woke by modern standards—and most of his ideas would easily get him canceled on TikTok—there’s a core philosophy that should not be thrown out with the proverbial bathwater.

For example, his Topographical model of the mind mirrors the Hermetic triplicity, corresponding perfectly with the Heaven/Earth/Underworld model of the universe. And it’s a model that’s worth revisiting this Mercury retrograde.

Freud believed that the majority of what you experience in life—emotions, impulses, memories—are not available on a conscious level. He maintained that the majority of your drives are buried deep in the unconscious mind, completely obscured from conscious awareness. He developed the Topographical model of consciousness to illustrate his theory, which he described with the analogy of an iceberg.

The conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg. It’s your rational decision-making mind that functions at full conscious awareness. You notice you’re hungry, so you have a snack. You notice you’re cold, so you put on a jacket. There’s a traffic jam on your way to work, so you take a side street. This is the conscious mind at work.

Your conscious mind is also responsible for your logical and intellectual processes. It reads the words in this blog post this very instant and organizes them into a comprehensible gestalt of meaning. And it’s also your conscious mind that opens a new browser tab to look up the definition of the word gestalt just to make sure I’m using it right—because you totally know what it means yourself and need no reminder.

Just below the surface of the water is the preconscious mind, where free associations start to rise up from below. This is the level of things you don’t immediately know but can access through association. The song you danced to on prom night comes on the radio and you’re instantly transported back to that moment in time. The taste of Thrifty’s vanilla ice cream conjures that bittersweet sensation of innocence and melancholy you felt on the last solo playdate you had with your mom just before your baby brother was born. It’s where all those transient moments you never want to forget but can never seem to get a firm hold on go to vanish with the blink of an eye.

“The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.”

But hidden deep below the surface of wistful reverie lies the unconscious mind. You store your memories in the unconscious. The pleasant ones rise up to the preconscious surface through association. But the painful and traumatic ones remain buried deep below the surface, concealed from the light of conscious awareness.

The majority of mental activity is unconscious, but it still impacts your conscious behavior—whether or not it comes to conscious awareness. You might smell freshly baked cookies, which conjures the memory of visiting your grandmother when you were a child. And this, in turn, inspires you to make the conscious decision to call your mom and ask if she remembers. She tells you that she does, and so you both make the conscious decision to plan a day to get together and bake your grandmother’s secret chocolate chip recipe.

“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”

While pleasant memories are welcome to the surface, painful ones are not—and yet their influence still drives your behavior. A dog barks and you’re crippled with anxiety, because you don’t remember the dog attack you suffered when you were small. Another relationship falls apart due to your inability to trust people, because you can’t fully recall the abuse you suffered as a child.

This happens through repression, a process by which you push unpleasant or unacceptable memories, feelings or urges into your unconscious mind. Freud believed that the vast majority of your unconscious mind arrived there by repression—and so the vast majority of your conscious behavior is actually driven by unseen forces repressed in the unconscious.

“Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.”

This idea was revolutionary when Freud first published his theories of the mind over a century ago. The idea that human behavior was driven by forces unseen—that the conscious mind was nothing but a slave to an invisible master—thoroughly scandalized Victorian society. And it gave birth to modern psychology as we know it.

The Lord of Material Success

Freud’s theories haven’t always been used in good faith. His American nephew Edward Bernays used his uncle’s theories to develop the school of public relations, which has crystalized public opinion for the last century through its left hand of advertising and and right hand of propaganda both manipulating the unconscious into dogmatic belief and trust in corporations and governments.

But it was also through Freud’s student Carl Jung that we were given the discipline of depth psychology with its rich esoteric analysis of archetypes and the collective unconscious.

And it was Freud’s theory of the unconscious that inspired English painter and mage Austin Osman Spare to develop his theory of sigil magic. Seeking to reverse engineer the repression process as a magical tool, Spare developed a method by which you could intentionally sublimate your desire into the unconscious so that it could manifest into conscious reality.

The power of the unconscious mind was also tapped by New Thought writers like Joseph Murphy, Neville Goddard and Napoleon Hill as a potent mechanism to plant seeds for material success via affirmation and visualization. They would often instruct that you repeat your affirmations or use your visualizations while lying in bed, just before falling asleep. That’s when you segue into the preconscious state which opens a portal to the unconscious dreamstate, where you can plant seeds of intention.

The Mercury retrograde in Taurus is a fertile season for personal growth. It’s ripe with potential to dig deep for transformation on a primal level. With the Cazimi taking place on May Day in the second decan of Taurus—with its associations with fertility, sex magic and material success—this Mercury retrograde is a perfect season to till the soils of the unconscious and plant seeds of intention for health, wealth and material abundance.