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PLUTO AND MERCURY
Quick, bright as a bright star, and yet hard to glimpse — that's Mercury, the planet of Thought. It buzzes rapidly around the Sun, never veering very far from that basic symbol of ego and its compelling gravity... MERCURY ITSELF
Two concepts interweave in Mercury's symbolism. One is perception; the other is communication. We see. And then in response to that seeing we experience twin desires: to express what we see, and to learn what others see.
PLUTO-MERCURY ASPECTS IN THE NATAL CHART
Whenever Pluto and Mercury are linked in the birthchart, there is an intense curiosity (Mercury) about the dark or taboo sides of human life. Socially, this quality may be viewed as a fault: the child who asks "too many" questions about a divorce in the family, the "precocious" eight-year-old with her persistent questions about exactly where babies come from. As such a person matures, the basic principles remain essentially the same, but the questions naturally become deeper and more baffling. Here is the man or woman who, depending on our viewpoint, either tends to ask "obtrusive" questions or in whom we experience a welcome "realness" and willingness to move beyond the pointless babble of "normal" life.
In bleaker expressions, the Mercury-Pluto alignments can be cruel. Insight is a sharp sword; expressed without good will, it can be destructive. That destructiveness may be unconscious — an innocent, "Gee, you've gained a lot of weight!" Or it may be darkly intentional malignity masquerading as innocence — "Gee... et cetera." Curiosity and open-mindedness are the fundamental qualities of Mercury as a healthy psychospiritual principle. This is our human desire to learn, and to grow through the process of learning. This is our ability, in other words, to tolerate unexpected perceptions.
Mercury also represents our skill at sharing our investigations with others: speech, but more than speech. It is also our connection with media. And that implies everything from a simple, quiet conversation, through letters and books, and on into the modern realm of film, video, and cyberspace communication.
The dark side of Mercury lies in the way we can build glib, convincing walls of rationalization around half-truths. All the misuse of language is Mercury's madness: lies told, lies believed, pretty words that spread like an oil slick upon far deeper waters.
THE NATAL CONJUNCTION
With Mercury and Pluto separated by a few degrees or less in the birthchart, the mind naturally takes the form we might expect to encounter in a police inspector or a psychotherapist: suspicious. So does the tone of voice and the phrasing of sentences. This is not intended as a negative comment; suspicion can lead to penetrating questions, and thus, to truth. Here is an intelligence that excels in working with anything that is not obvious, anything hidden or obscure. It can, for example, do well in scientific or historical research. In a physician, it correlates with a capacity for diagnoses in elusive or contradictory medical situations. In criminal law, it's the classic "Miss Marple" who finds the one obscure fact upon which a defense or conviction hinges.
Mercury-Pluto energy can manifest in a lot of differing ways, as is the case with all astrological configurations. But the examples I've used so far — deep research, crime, and healing — capture the spirit of the conjunction with its intellectual taste for the unsettling, the serious or the obscure.
Such a voice can be overpowering and disturbing. It can also appear to be impassioned over trifles or "unnecessarily strident." There may be argumentativeness or what appears to be obsessiveness. There may be an inability to "lighten up."
Are these Mercury-Pluto problems real or are they merely symptoms of other people's inability to deal with such intense truth-seeking? There is no simple way to answer those questions. Certainly, even in an admirably healthy human being, this energy can be misunderstood — or understood perfectly, and still not liked very much. And when it goes sour, it can indeed manifest a perverse delight in creating not insight, but upset and discomfort.
Keeping a natal Mercury-Pluto conjunction healthy depends radically upon making sure that it has a few positive avenues of expression. One deep friendship with a verbal, articulate person in which any subject at all can be discussed. A relationship with a counselor who does not flinch from strong language and raw, dark emotion. And any set of interests that involve delving into life's Plutonian mysteries: a study of Jungian psychology, shamanism, the psychology of violence, natural catastrophes, nightmares, the literature of horror.
THE HARD NATAL ASPECTS
Squares or oppositions between the natal Mercury and Pluto suggest a verbal explosiveness — an almost involuntary tendency to "blurt things out." Typically, these "things" are authentic psychological truths that might not be acceptable to the listener... or particularly welcome as after-dinner patter. Hard aspects of these two planets are the signature of the "reluctant truth-sayer." Such reluctance is understandable; telling the truth is often punished harshly. In a mild person much concerned with approval and social harmony, hard Pluto-Mercury energies tend to go under-expressed for long periods. When they do burst forth, as they undoubtedly will, they take the form of the unexpected and uncharacteristic tirade, often accompanied by copious tears and chased with abject apologies. The shock value, awkwardness and intensity of such pronouncements might obscure their essential validity.
In the chart of a more direct person, there is less tendency to store these Plutonian insights, and therefore less tendency for them to fester. Here, we are more likely to observe the potentially insensitive or poorly timed side of the contact, although the heart of the matter remains the same: such Pluto-Mercury contacts breed depth and an uncanny instinct for ferreting out the real truth.
Squares and oppositions always have a compelling, coercive quality. Sooner or later, something pops. In this Pluto-Mercury case, it's the mouth. The conscious path lies in making sure that not too many truths get temporarily sacrificed on the altar of convenience, people-pleasing, or conflict-avoidance. An anger or a difficult observation expressed in a timely way may be no more than what it is, and therefore reasonably digestible; saved up, it gathers a moldering aura of decomposition, and simultaneously drifts further from the immediate circumstantial context that gives it meaning and clarity. This is a formula for brewing the bitter, calamitous, involuntary speech sometimes connected with this kind of Mercury-Pluto contact.
THE SOFT NATAL ASPECTS
As a patient, I'm a nightmare for eye doctors. I've got an overwhelmingly powerful "blink reflex." Nobody can get near my eyeball, not even myself. The idea of wearing contact lenses is right up there with chemotherapy for me. I don't choose to be this way; it's just the way I am.
A lot of people are that way about Plutonian perceptions. They have a very hard time accepting into their awareness the pain of their own wounds. It's not even a "choice," in the simple sense; like my eyelid, the mind just won't cooperate.
The reverse can be true; there are people who wear contact lenses every day without a second thought, and people whose minds gravitate naturally toward Plutonian psychological scrutiny. Trines and sextiles between Mercury and Pluto suggest the existence of that second kind of intelligence: one that is naturally, almost automatically, psychological.
The delicate question is whether such a person actually takes advantage of the full penetrating power of this skill, or whether he or she will settle for shallow glosses instead. Here we may find the man or woman with an extraordinary gift, but relatively little inner compulsion to push his or her natural proclivity toward its highest potentials. It's easy — but only if an attempt is made. Otherwise, we may encounter one who settles for the kinds of "insights" that keep the greeting card industry flourishing.
Such soft Mercury-Pluto aspects also correlate with a gift for the verbal expression of difficult Plutonian insights in ways that are acceptable to the listener. There can be grace with language, often interlaced with skillful bolts of humor. Such fluidity empowers an individual to speak wisely and lovingly to the bereaved, to the shell-shocked, and to the shattered.
Those same qualities, twisted and made to serve a darker master, suggest the presence of a most excellent and skillful liar.
PLUTO-MERCURY EVENTS
Mercury is always ultimately about information. Pluto, at least at first, is about unsettling or troubling insights... and later about the fiery visions that give renewed meaning and direction to life. Thus, when Pluto-Mercury contacts occur through transit or progression, they signal the arrival of data we might prefer to ignore. In fact, the central challenge here is to see what is actually before our eyes — and the most relevant piece of cautionary folklore is the notion that "what a fool believes, he sees."
Under these kinds of events, books are thrust upon us that give us the eerie feeling that the author has been spying on us for a decade or two. Friends offer throwaway lines that leave us insomniac at four a.m. Parents casually reveal shocking childhood tales about themselves or ourselves. Always, the challenge is to accept the reality of the incongruent information, and to begin to re-weave the tapestry of reality in its light.
In a nutshell, passing Mercury/Pluto contacts suggest a season of near-shamanistic seeing and listening... purely phenomenological, unjudging, and open. And as alert as a nerve-ending.
The relatively fleeting transits of Mercury through aspects to the natal Pluto do carry the significance we've just explored, but in a watered-down way. They are too brief to develop much meaning unless there are other, slower Mercury-Pluto developments occurring simultaneously. What we are mainly concerned with here are the transits or solar arcs of Pluto itself through aspects to the natal Mercury, or progressions or arcs of Mercury to aspects of the natal Pluto.
THE MOVING CONJUNCTION
The fusion of thought and vision with a deeper knowledge of one's own humanness is the aim under the moving Mercury-Pluto conjunction. Thus, the previous few paragraphs apply in their entirety.
It is easy to underestimate the significance of Mercury, dismissing it as merely the blither of mind and mouth. In fact, Mercury is the world in which we actually live — the world we carry between our ears. If a young person sincerely believes that there is no hope for young people in America today, then that person will consistently fail to recognize the opportunities that do arise. It's not a question of being "a slacker;" it's not a moral or characterological question at all. Such behavior is in fact perfectly logical — provided we remember that all logic is based on assumptions, and can be no more accurate than those assumptions.
Under the conjunction of slow-moving Plutonian and Mercurial elements, one must face the fact that one's own mind has been wounded by fervently-believed misinformation. Ironically, people often become quite impassioned in their defense of the old lies. If we get past that trap, these seasons of life can make us feel as though we were taking off blinders. Suddenly, we see liberating, invigorating possibilities for ourselves that may have been there all along. Ignorance is the world's most secure prison.
THE MOVING HARD ASPECTS
When tense aspects — squares and oppositions — occur between Pluto and Mercury, the ideas and perspectives we are asked to internalize are nettlesome. This is an excellent rule-of-thumb with all hard aspects: they bother us. That's why they are still sometimes viewed as "bad" aspects or "afflictions," although such an attitude can only survive in the most unreflective of minds. Most of us, by the time we start to harbor suspicions about the reality of the tooth fairy, have figured out that challenge and difficulty sometimes breed wisdom, healthy pride, and an empowering sense of accomplishment.
Under such Mercury-Pluto energies, we are often assailed again and again by the facts we are trying to resist. A woman may, for example, be working for a company that is verging toward bankruptcy. Astrologically, perhaps she also has progressed Mercury passing though her Tenth House (new information about work) and squaring her natal Pluto (the news is probably heavy in its implications and she isn't going to like it.)
When the company collapses, so will her job. The handwriting is on the wall. She reads articles in TIME magazine about the difficulties in her industry. She observes talk of lay-offs, the failure to replace or maintain critical equipment, tight-lipped, frightened faces on her "leaders." Does she freeze like a rabbit caught in the headlights? Well, that may not be very logical, but it's still a popular response. Losing one's job is scary; the temptation is strong to pretend that it is not happening.
Perhaps the person in our tale, bolstered with good astrological counsel, accepts the messages reality is sending. She begins a vigorous search for a new job. Maybe she realizes that the old job bores her anyway, and the only reason she accepted it in the first place was that she had swallowed a lot of lies about "how dumb she was." The new job-search becomes part of an energizing pattern of self-discovery.
Sad stories abound in this world, but so do happy ones. To experience the wild heat of a pedal-to-the-metal Plutonian life, we must first believe that it's possible. To do that, we must perform the Mercury-Pluto work of weeding out all the weakening, limiting lies we've been told... even the lies we love.
THE MOVING SOFT ASPECTS
Not all Plutonian messages need to make our knees knock together and our lips quiver. Sometimes heroic, liberating truths come to us gently, falling into our lives and our awareness as naturally as ripe apples falling from a branch. Such are the insights that abound under the moving sextiles and trines between Pluto and Mercury.
The trick is to gather the apples.
Circumstances are ripe for a leap forward in your life. You are poised to jump…and the trigger you’re awaiting is new information, ideas, and perspectives. Depending on the rest of what’s occurring in your chart at the time, you may feel good or you may feel like an abandoned puppy. Either way, the Mercury-Pluto contact signals that you are well-positioned to seize a set of insights that will transform your inner image of reality and your place in it. These insights may come from a lecture happening tonight. If you miss it, the opportunity is past. There is nothing to make you miss it -– except your own inertia. Here’s an inspiring, useful book in a bookstore…fascinating – and soon to be out of print and unavailable. Buy it! There, in your mail, is an invitation to your twentieth high school reunion. Go, and you’ll hear about what you really looked like back then. Skip it, and you’ll have to wait until the next reunion – and by then, maybe the person with the critical information has moved out of state and won’t be attending. These simple images capture the spirit of the soft moving aspects between Pluto and Mercury: easy, low-key opportunities to learn, grow, and transform…precious, but here now, then gone.
Lindaland
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posted January 29, 2006 03:24 PM
GemStar
posted January 30, 2006 12:28 AM
and, it is just as described above but, with that retro influence, there's an added bonus! I'm fairly certain, that this and, my own retro Merc are what we are currently learning about. It gets pretty rough sometimes too 
Being born only about 6 months apart, my Pluto conjuncts his but, in that, my Pluto is retro.... Think I'll go have a peek at what's going on now, with all this energy of ours.....