Intimate Knowing, Ultimate Truth
by Jean Hinson Lall

How can we know what is true and how to live? This question comes into sharp focus as we approach the Full Moon in Sagittarius and the June 8 transit of Venus across the Sun in Gemini, with all four of the Mutable signs – Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces – highlighted by strong planetary placements and mutual aspects.

Two weeks ago, at the Taurus New Moon, we reflected on the Venusian way of knowing through sight, sound, touch and taste, through the immediate perception of beauty, and through love and intimacy. What Taurus knows in the body, Gemini puts into words – or argues against, for Gemini’s passion is to learn through differentiation and opposition. It brings things to awareness by means of comparison and contrast and by creating polarities. In order to see one thing clearly, it must set that over against something else. As the first of the Air signs, Gemini pushes off against the confines of Earth and rejoices in its freedom to go beyond what the senses know into speculative thought. It discovers and exploits the magical ability of words both to convey truth and to create illusion – for Gemini itself is double in character. The sign of the Twins is ruled by Mercury (Hermes), the messenger god who is also a trickster, a thief, and master of transformations.

This month Venus, lady of Taurus, accompanies the Sun in Gemini, while Mercury, Gemini’s lord, sojourns in Taurus. This "mutual reception" produces an intense engagement between the two principles of Earth and Air, sense and speech, body and spirit. The Venus-Mercury relationship was understood in Renaissance thought as highly creative. Their mythic background includes the story that Hermes (Mercury) fell in love with Aphrodite (Venus), but she resisted his wooing until his father Zeus (Jupiter) arranged to steal one of her beautiful golden sandals. To ransom her footwear she agreed to make love with Hermes just once, and the result was the irresistibly beautiful boy Hermaphroditus, whose own amorous misadventures would transform him into what we today call a hermaphrodite, a being in whom both sexes are united. The image of the androgyne or hermaphrodite appears in other divine figures such as Siva Ardhanarisvara and the "bearded Aphrodite," as well as in alchemy. It seems to point to the longing of the opposites to return to unity, something which does not always happen easily or neatly.

Over against Sun and Venus this month are the Moon and Pluto in Sagittarius. While Gemini exercises its verbal and logical skills and collects and distributes information, Sagittarius articulates unifying principles, global visions and long-term goals. It seeks wisdom and perspective rather than information. Rather than generating polarities, it recognizes variety and complexity and gives everything a place. The philosopher, the priest, the theologian and the prophet belong here in the sign of the Centaur-Archer. While the Sun in Gemini brings radiant energy to our analytical minds, the Moon in Sagittarius gives birth to the spirit, lifting us above logic to an intuitive perception of the whole.

Venus meanwhile is in exact opposition to Pluto. Both are retrograde and moving slowly, making the second of three exact oppositions in this series, the last of which will occur on July 25 with Venus direct. Pluto’s long transit through Sagittarius has brought out profound problems in religion and dramatized the need for changes in the institutions and thought forms that carry values and mediate the sacred. The astrological Pluto is identified with Greek Hades, the deity who ruled the Underworld and the soul’s relation to death, a mystery into which one could be initiated at Eleusis. There, through a ritual enactment of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, an essential truth was revealed which could never be spoken of but which transformed one’s life. A Pluto opposition has an initiatory potential, challenging yet ultimately strengthening the other planet. While Pluto confronts Venus’s Taurean love of life with the physical and metaphysical reality of death, this challenge serves to deepen Venusian values by taking them down to their essence through the Underworld experience.

Thus far we’ve touched on only two of the four Mutable signs. Currently in square to the Sun and Moon are Jupiter in Virgo and Uranus in Pisces, highly spiritual and mental planets placed in signs that are also concerned with the question of truth. Jupiter, ruler of Sagittarius, is the Full Moon’s dispositor, drawing her idealism and instinctive spirituality into the practical realm. Jupiter in Virgo learns through experience and a disciplined attention to the laws of cause and effect. He seeks to know things by developing an appropriate experimental design or philosophical method, reviewing and carefully citing the work of authorities and colleagues, and being meticulous in data collection, documentation and analysis. He polishes and tests his knowledge through clinical experience, fieldwork and experimentation. Ethically, he plays by the rules and holds himself to a high standard. For him, the proof is in the pudding: if an idea, doctrine or theory does not fit the data or serve the people, it is discarded.

Uranus, the god of Heaven, appears in our mental life as a direct and compelling insight into reality. He knows what he knows (and makes us believe it) regardless of the data. Belonging naturally to Aquarius, which he co-rules, he is now in Pisces, while Pisces’ ruler Neptune is in Aquarius – another mutual reception with important implications. The cool, dry clarity of intellectual perception of Uranus and Aquarius is now crossed with the moist, self-renouncing, image-based or imageless mysticism of Neptune and Pisces. The alchemical exchange between these principles raises the question of the nature of higher knowledge. How are poetic, mystical and philosophical truth related? Where do they coincide and diverge, and what can they learn from each other?

Here we have only begun to consider the many ways of knowing. Each planet has its own intelligence and expresses itself differently in different signs and under different influences from other planets. Within us, however, is the capacity to integrate what arrives via these many modes of seeing and thinking. We can begin the journey to knowledge wherever we are, with whichever planet stands forth, and move inward and outward from there toward a view of the whole. For each archetype, like each flower, opens onto truth, and while truth is multiple in its forms, it arises from, circles about and returns to the One.

The period leading up to and following June 8, when Venus crosses the face of the Sun, may offer an extraordinary Venusian window. She is, of course, the goddess most concerned with cosmic order and beauty, so perhaps she can guide us in placing our varied kinds of knowledge in harmonious relation to each other. At the time of the transit Venus, planet of attraction, will be aligned opposite the Great Attractor, the supercluster toward which our galaxy is moving. With this intergalactic orientation, the mutual reception with Mercury and the Pluto opposition, it may be a good time to reflect on the truth of beauty, the cosmic power of love, and the relationship between intimate knowing and ultimate truth.

Look for the Gemini New Moon
on June 17, 2004.