Mercury in Gemini recently turned retrograde and today (June 4) squares Neptune in Pisces for the second of three times in a sequence lasting through early July. A theme continues that began when Jupiter entered Pisces on May 13: the unconscious stirs. The unconscious. That place of images unseen, dreams yet to be dreamt, stories yet untold, mysteries perhaps never to be solved. With Mercury in Gemini squaring Neptune in Pisces, the goal is perhaps not the common pursuit of ‘making the unconscious conscious,’ but rather hanging out with the imagination, the language of the unconscious, the soul’s style of communicating. Yet, as Jung noted, “Most people find it quite beyond them to live on close terms with the unconscious.” What to do?
It should be no surprise that L. Frank Baum, the author of “The Wizard of Oz,” was born with Mercury in Gemini squaring Neptune in Pisces. We could say that “The Wizard of Oz” is an archetypal template for Mercury in Gemini squaring Neptune in Pisces. What we are experiencing for six weeks he lived and embodied for over six decades.
Gemini and Pisces are considered “double-bodied” signs. Double-bodied, as in the twins of Gemini and the pair of Pisces fish. Double-bodied signs hold the great archetypal duos together. In myth, one twin is mortal while the other is immortal. One twin guards the entrance to the Underworld while the other explores the dark depths. Time and eternity. Above and below. You do not get one without the other. The fish of Pisces keep the limited reality of earth-life entwined with the boundless reality of the imagination, the facts of life woven into the fantasies and healing fictions of the soul, prose imbued with poetry, the black and white world painted and permeated and renewed with color. Mercury in Gemini squaring Neptune in Pisces keeps Kansas twisted with Oz, by means of a twister. Dorothy is knocked unconscious (there is that word again) and awakens to a new world, a world packed with munchkins, flying monkeys, talking trees, et al.
Among the vivid characters, Oz features a good witch and a wicked witch (the Gemini twins). In one scene, after having cast a spell over Dorothy and her friends who find themselves in a poppy field fast falling asleep, the green-faced wicked witch peers into her crystal ball as fresh snow falls and breaks her spell. The witch scowls and snaps, “Somebody always helps that girl!” This is quintessential Mercury-Neptune, not to mention Jupiter in Pisces. Not only is help possible, but help arrives, in its way and in its time, the kind of help literally impossible in an only-literal world, the kind of help that requires imagination, is imagination.
Without imagination, we remain stuck in Kansas—grey, desolate, dusty, depression-era Kansas. I like Salman Rushdie’s response to Kansas: “And this is the home that “there’s no place like”? This is the lost Eden that we are asked to prefer (as Dorothy does) to Oz?” As an author immersed in magical realism, he has the right idea. Jung, in his later years, had a mystical experience so extraordinary that he rather resented having to come back to Kansas, I mean earth. From that mystical moment on, he referred to limited life on earth as the “box system.” L. Frank Baum called it Kansas. I call it boring! It can be easy to separate the twins and pick a favorite, or cut the cord tying the two fish together. Double-bodied images get boxed up and marketed online as single-sided signs. But the oft-“forgotten” double does not really go away, it stirs within the unconscious. “The Wizard of Oz,” as spokes-tale for our Mercury in Gemini square Neptune in Pisces sensibilities, asks us to re-double our efforts, long for more, reach somewhere over the rainbow, keep the other world close at hand, and follow the yellow brick road of life.