Archetypal Astrology

Ah, it's another  hot one here in the city.  August 31, the last day of the month...and temps are heading up into the 90's....another heat wave.  Enough already. It's been a long....and very, very hot summer.  Time for a break. I mean, here I am taking vacation next week and planning to go shopping for some new fall clothes...How can you even think of it in the midst of a heat wave?  I'd planned on taking a trek to Barnes @ Noble as well, but just happened to see they had reprinted one of my all-time favorites..."Through the Looking Glass."  It's an astrology book on which features Jungian psychology and myth.  And, being that I lost it somewhere down the line...and the little Barnes @ Noble I shop in doesn't have it, I ordered a bunch of stuff online. 

As most of you already know my four favorite subjects of my favorite subjects are Jung, archetypes, mythology, and astrology...and when I find them all combined in a subject, I am in 'seventh heaven'.  I started out with traditional astrology, but found that, after time, I began to veer more towards archetypal astrology...a merging of all of the above.  Two of my favorite astrological authors are Liz Greene and Demetra George; I have every one of their books...and you don't have to know about astrology to understand and love what they have to say.

I can get lost in the world of myth which is, when you really give it some thought, the voice of our ancestors. Because they did not know how to explain the world about them, they created myths to tell their history and to explain their beliefs. The telling of stories is the way they passed on their knowledge...from one generation to the next. These stories tell us so much about how  our ancestors saw the world and gave meaning to their lives. These ancient myths live on in our culture; they represent forces in our psyche and in our world.

Each sign of the zodiac as well as each of the planets is associated with a particular Divine character who may appear in different guises with different names, but their symbolic meaning has the same roots...an archetypal layer which is common to all of us.  For example, the themes The Hero's against evil or The Great Mother appear in all of our lives as we struggle to achieve our inner development.  Hence, by overcoming what is threatening to destroy us....whether it is coming from our inner self or from others in our surroundings, working with these archetypal patterns gives us an opportunity for growth.

As a matter of fact, what better place to begin than the Mercury archetype who has been giving so many of us trouble these past few days as he continues his retrograde travels.  I am not even going to get into what happened this morning... Oh well, you talked me into it.  My latest addiction is fruit smoothies from MacDonald's.  I have one for breakfast every day and MacDonald's is the only place I can buy one.  So, I go in there this morning, wait in a line that never seemed to move, only to get to the register and find out they were cleaning the machine.  Well, this is not the first time it happened, and I am sorry, but my feelings are if a store is open 24 hours a day, why not clean the machine in the middle of the night, not rush hour when people are trying to get to work...and, of course, I had to voice my opinion on the matter.

Then, I get to work.  The elevator is out.  Okay, it's bad enough to have to climb the three flights with my bum knees, but when I finally stagger to my floor, I find the fire doors are locked, and I don't have a key.  No one does.  The maintenance man has to take the whole door off the hinges. Takes a half hour. It's hot in the stairwell; I'm sweaty, the noise of his hammering is deafening, but I am NOT going to go back downstairs because I will only have to trudge up those steps again.  Finally in...put breakfast out for the clients, put breakfast away, run women's group; start doing group note and am called by receptionist that I have two intakes and three clients waiting to see me. Old Mercury continues to chip away at my sanity. And actually, I am finally here.  Didn't think I would even find the time or energy to post today.

HHermes or Mercury is one of the great Archetypal Energies of our World. His energies and insights, as with all the other archetypes, are available even in today's society. This is a recognition that our thoughts (Mercury) ultimately come to us from the archetypal realm (“the gods”). Mercury is the messenger who translates these archetypal meanings and impulses into our particular mental language; most of the time he does this so perfectly that we usually believe we are creating the thoughts ourselves.

As an archetype, he is both the messenger and the magician. Mercury is associated with the Greek mythic figure of Hermes, the Roman Mercury, the messenger of the gods.  Hermes was the god of communication and also the god of thieves.  He  is the trickster, an archetype with both positive and negative expressions. As a god of the Underworld, he  was able to travel back and forth between the underworld of Pluto and the upper world of gods and mortals. Thus, Mercury is a planet which allows us to traverse levels of consciousness and experience, to be a messenger within or without.

For a free chart and to find where your Mercury is go to:  Astrolabe