Sun in Gemini Tag

June 10, 2022 In Astrology, Relationships, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Midsummer Moonlight Magic—Supermoon⁠—June 14th

Do you bow your head when you pray or do you look up into that blue space?
Take your choice, prayers fly from all directions—Mary Oliver.

June arrives, blue skies, mauve fields of lacy phacelia, an excess of light that shimmers, bright and strange.

Things are not all they seem at Midsummer when we’re drunk with heat and dazed by light. Some say that the veil between the worlds is thin as we approach the Midsummer Solstice. That faery folk make mischief in the shadows, especially when the world is awash with golden moonlight. Tonight, there is magic everywhere as the Moon nudges close to our earth, appearing bigger, brighter than usual.

In 1979, American astrologer, Richard Nolle, named this moon which glows in the slow sunset, Supermoon. We’ve borrowed the name “Strawberry Moon” from first nation people who gathered wild strawberries and other early fruit at this time of midsummer celebration and abundance.

This so-called Supermoon is moving through the sign of Sagittarius, a sign ruled by jovial Jupiter, hedonistic, entitled King of the gods in Roman mythology. In the language of astrology, Jupiter is often simplistically described as bringing “good luck”. Yet “good luck” is as ephemeral as happiness, as fleeting as our attention. We invoke the buoyancy and resilience of Jupiter when we keep the faith, when we dare to hope even when we’re standing in the lengthening shadows. Jupiter may be the silver lining in the dark clouds of circumstance.

Full Moons can accompany enchantments, or wreak havoc in the lives of foolish mortals. This Full Moon is veiled by a square to enigmatic Neptune in dreamy Pisces, signifying moonlight-infused magic, but also, as Shakespeare so beautifully described in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a siren song that brings confusion, misunderstanding and a dream-like quality to our ordinary lives. An over-heated Mars in Aries collides brutishly with Chiron (archetype of the Wounded Healer) on the day of the Full Moon, a complex symbol that speaks of wounded warriors, a Fisher King wounded in the groin. Chiron wounds can’t be cured or fixed. This lunation speaks to the ongoing carnage in war-torn Ukraine, the limitations of our leaders, those hollow, wounded men who wound others. Disruptive Uranus edges closer to the North Node in Taurus this month, highlighting the polarising square to Saturn (Saturn is moving Retrograde until October 23^rd) as the old order clings tenaciously the vestiges of power-over. Boris Johnson, who attended Eton College and read Classics at Oxford, ought to know that the gods are fickle and never benign. Still arrogantly presiding over a fragmented kingdom, the British Prime Minister celebrates his birthday on June 19^th, as Neptune draws every closer to square his loquacious Gemini Sun and Venus. The man who would be king of the world may yet recall that wrathful gods destroyed those mortals who transgressed their limits; that hubris was the greatest offence of all.

The Sun arrives in Cancer on June 21^st, the day of the Midsummer Solstice as the fires and the joyous gatherings in places like Stonehenge mingle with formalised feasts in celebration of St John. Bonfires are kindled, vestiges of magical protection to ward off evil, herbs infused with healing faery charms are gathered from the hedgerows to enhance the flames. The eating and drinking and merry-making lasts as the light lingers.

When the first stars shimmer like sequins against the mauves and corals of the heavens and the flames burn low, some may sense an ancient dread that infuses this still point in the year. A primal helplessness against those things we cannot tame or control as the days grow shorter and winter comes again.

Venus begins a new cycle on June 23^rd, joining Mercury in Gemini, accompanying us on our journey through days that may draw us away from rigid routine, offer tantalising possibilities to think, relate, differently. The tide turns on June 28^th as Neptune goes direct again (25° Pisces) heightening our intuition, drawing us back to our spiritual centre.

This month of June, may we release our prayers from all directions, allow grace and gratitude to wash over us as we savour the magic of Midsummer.

May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder—John O’Donohue.

To book an astrology appointment please get in touch: ingrid@trueheartwork.com

May 21, 2018 In Astrology, Relationships By Ingrid Hoffman

The Lovers—Sun in Gemini—May 21st.

Set me as a seal upon your heart, a seal upon your arm. For love is as strong as death. Passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire. A raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it out—Song of Solomon.

The break in protocol and formality, and the sermon that blazed its way across eons of formality and protocol on Saturday, was depicted in the astrological portrait—Venus in the very last degree of Gemini, the Moon in Cancer and Sun in Taurus. Uranus, that planet associated with Prometheus, the Greek Titan who stole fire from the gods, conjunct the Sun of Queen Elizabeth 11. In the unifying symbolism of this wedding, in the impassioned sermon by Bishop Michael Curry, and the transcendent words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the Power of Love reverberated through the walls of the 14^th Century chapel: “We must discover the power of love, the redemptive power of love, and when we do that, we will make of this old world a new world. For love is the only way…. There’s power in love.”

The Sun enters the sign of Gemini today, May 21^st. In the round of the zodiac, we encounter the archetype of The Twins.

In Gemini we encounter duality and division. The Light and the Dark Twin. Gemini encapsulates the essence of The Lovers, the sixth card in Tarot. A mythical depiction of our human need to bond, to relate, and in so doing, to experience Love’s Illusions, Love’s Triumphs, and Love’s Redemption. Mercury, the Trickster, Prince of Thieves, the Liar and the wily Psychopomp, is the planetary spirit who guides the Lovers into the possibilities of choice encountered on the labyrinthine path of life. We may discover, within us, the shadowy twin, who arrives like an uninvited, and unexpected guest at the table. Mythic twins betray one another, the lie and they steal, they murder. “Some things, however, are true, no matter how hard you might try to block them out. And a lie is always a lie, no matter how prettily told. Some doors, once they’re opened, can never be closed again, just as some trust, once it’s been lost, can never be won back,” writes Alice Hoffman.

296a629e7567af86cdf81e1a104a9796 In Gemini we meet the complexities of relating with another who may disappoint us, who may leave us, who may break our trust.

The image of twinship is portrayed in mythic stories throughout the ages. Astrologically, the Gemini theme is threaded through the birth charts of family members. Literal or physic twinship brings exits through separation—school, college, marriage, estrangement, and death. In our sibling stories we write a narrative of bitter rivalry, and deep enduring love.

The desire to stay bonded in our adult relationships, and the need to separate and individuate, even the ability to leave unhealthy relationships may be anchored in our very first experience of separation with our siblings.

The Romans called the Twins Castor and Pollux and to the Greeks, they were “The Dioscuri”, the sons of the sky-god Zeus. The masculine bias in our culture ignores the other set of twins born out of Zeus’s rape of Leda. The twin daughters, Helen and Clytemnestra. The story of these twins is threaded with duplicity. Helen and Pollux were the progeny of the god Zeus, while Castor and Clytemnestra were the son and daughter of Leda’s husband Tyndareus. Diversity, difference, and the ultimate loss of connection underscores the Gemini motif and is powerfully depicted in myth. Castor and Pollux achieved fame and recognition in the skies. Helen and her sister, Clytemnestra did not fare so well. Bronze age misogyny is still lodged deeply in the marrow of our culture. But an increasing awareness of racial and sexual diversity, the # Me Too Campaign, and the Irish Referendum on Abortion, bring recognition to the disowned parts of ourselves, to re-claim the lost sisters, to redress past wrongs.

Gemini is a metaphor for separation, duality, opposition. The life long search for something from which we feel separated. Our disowned self, a sibling who might have died or been aborted, a sibling from whom we are disconnected. Gemini is a symbolic representation for the pathos of profound loss, a sense of something that’s “missing” that’s so often projected outwards. So often awoken in our intimate relationships, our close friendships. Gemini is the metaphor for The Soul Mate. The search for The Soul Mate is cling-wrapped around our modern concept of “romance”, yet as Elizabeth Gilbert reveals, our Soul Mates can be our Wound Mates, those people who break us open, who speed our evolution and maturity. “A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave…”

In the mythic story of Gemini we may we encounter, personally and collectively, the search for the Twin Soul who will mirror our shadowy doppelganger, bring to our attention those parts of ourselves that we have disowned and discarded. This month, personally, or collectively, we have the opportunity to encounter the paradox of choice, the pathos of separation, the indecision of opposition and the mythic story of The Twins, and the Power of Love.

This is the sacred dance of yin and yang, masculine and feminine energy, that is the lustrous pearl at the heart of a Spiritual Partnership, the paradox, the pathos, of Gemini.

I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both—Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

For astrology readings on Skype or in person, and for more information about workshops for women, please get in touch—ingrid@trueheartwork.com Gemini 22 Casablanca