Creator, Jester, Destroyer. Gemini Season & Jupiter’s Ingress into Gemini.
Familiarity is the biggest trickster; words are here to both create and destroy – but also to fool you.
Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957): The Concert
I married my husband thinking he was a Gemini rising. For almost a decade, the whole period he was my boyfriend, I considered him a Gemini rising. During our first date I considered myself so witty and smart for guessing that he was either a Taurus or a Gemini, only to find out he was a Taurus sun with Gemini rising (which he, after all, wasn’t). I thought I had taken all the possibilities for error into account and having intricately and closely watched him live life I thought it was set in stone, only to find out that his rising sign was something else completely. And funnily enough, it made perfect sense – it only adjusted the mirror through which I perceive him. Now what does this have to do with the sign of Gemini in general?
Gemini, by its nature, is a trickster. I think this reveals something very central about life and being a human. We can continue to think that we know what to expect and we know the way the world is but the biggest lesson in life is that we never really do — and the greatest lessons are delivered when we least expect them. This is relevant especially for the Gemini season of 2024, starting 20th of May, as a few days after the Sun’s ingress into Gemini,on May 26th, we also have Jupiter moving into Gemini.
To me, this feels like a glorious bang. Jupiter enlarges the horizon for that part of the chart it touches; it makes us realize there’s always more, more to see, more to learn, more to explore. With Jupiter, we can eat knowing that we deserve to eat; we can eat being hungry even with a full mouth. What we are hungry for becomes central.
With Jupiter in Gemini, we’ll be devouring stories, we’ll be devouring an interesting conversation with a stranger in a housewarming party. we’ll be devouring a chess game, we’ll be devouring a new-found or re-found love having fun with ableton or garageband or any music-making software you have an access to. We are hungry for communication, to understand what life is about – to thread a path with words (or with movement, sound, facial expressions) towards the Other, to reach the inner hand and grasp their hand, too.
Gemini is multi-faceted, a masked clown, anything in disguise. The biggest mask humans wear is language. Language and words are ruled by Gemini and its ruling planet, Mercury. Voice, when used, is Gemini-ruled, too; as a primal sound, voice is Taurean (as are most things embodied), but when voice is used to communicate it becomes Mercurial. Language both takes us further from and closer to others, it is a dance of two extremes but the tension it creates by this dance is essential to living. Anne Carson – one of my favorite Gemini Suns – recently said in an interview:
“I don’t think anybody ever knows what another person means when they speak, frankly. It’s more than translation, it’s just throwing yourself into the dark. Language is so very, very personal, private. Weird. I guess you could think of it as translation, that seems like a kind of euphemistic metaphor. It’s probably a lot more hopeless than that. But the effort of speaking as a human is the effort to get past that hopelessness with every sentence.”
Communication is a constant reach towards the other, through which we simultaneously lose and find ourselves. Communication is hunger-based, we are hungry to understand and to reach what is concealed, to lift the veil of being trapped in one body with limited senses.
Jupiter returns to a sign every 12 years; last time it was in Gemini was during 2012-2013. Personally, I remember those as years of great inspiration — of loneliness, too, but being in a dreamy soup of my own world of possibilities. The album Visions by Grimes came out in 2012. I remember having my headphones on and dancing alone in my room with my eyes closed in utter ecstasy. The music videos of Oblivion and Genesis still give me butterflies.
No matter what anyone thinks of Grimes nowadays, I feel her influence on my own creativity was like no other: she showed me that music and especially making it could be fun and effortless and you could just start making it. This was the time when I remember vividly realizing that I could make music, too. Or – anything else I would feel like making.
The last time Jupiter was in Gemini I remember being flooded and intoxicated with dreams about what could be, and realizing that anything could be.
The well of endless possibilities, which we also call life, becomes so visible with Jupiter in Gemini. This is because Gemini represents multiplicity and Jupiter represents widening, becoming more. In life, there is always more — more than we ever dared to imagine. We live thinking that we know what the world is like but truly, it is something else completely.
Even though Gemini isn’t the sign most associated with hiding and secrecy —but rather instead is associated with the familiar, mundane and everyday — this is exactly why it is the best at concealing and masking, acting like something it is not. Because what we consider normal, plain and easy to see is not at all how things really are. “Reality” is an illusion; what we are now surrounded by is only temporal; it is only in what is now concealed from us, death and beyond, that real life lies. The objective reality is sometimes called by the sanskrit term mahā-māyā, meaning a great illusion.
When we experience what we perceive as reality we only experience a false image; this is spoken about in the ancient texts, but it is also true from the perspective of what we now know about the brain. Nothing goes into our consciousness without being filtered by our senses, and not only that but also filtered by our personal minds.
I have a personal account about how fragile our senses are and how they translate things to our experience can change. After covid I experienced a loss of smell followed by parosmia, meaning my sense of smell came back but shifted. It has been a year and I don't think anything really smells like it used to, but it doesn't make me that sad anymore, as I am already used to how things now smell. This is the reality in which I now live.
The brain is very plastic, apt to change in ways we only realize when something is broken about our sensual world but then fixed by the body. How we perceive the world changes, but the brain (or the mind? whoever is in action) makes it seem seamless. Think of people who have brain damage affecting their visual perception and are only able to see half of the image; in most cases they act like the other half doesn’t exist, eating only half of the plate or putting on only half of the sweater. Or think about the sense experiences of other species who share this world with us. They experience the world very differently, depending on the species and the individual, even though objectively it is the same world we live in. There is always more than meets the eye.
This idea of more-ness is central to the ontology of Gilles Deleuze, too. If we try to conceive of what life or reality is based on our limited human capabilities, we are already in the wrong. When we think about living we ought not to think about a person living. Or rather, we ought not to consider a single experiencer to be the one that lives. In an ontology of difference the thing that lives can be any tension, any gesture, any relationship. What lives does not have to be Me or You but it can be whatever is between us or between me and a landscape or me and a weather or me and a house spider.
This notion of living makes it more fluid. A life is something limitless, constantly becoming and forming, reforming and deforming. It makes life an expanding adventure to which we take part – not seeing the whole of it, but trying to grasp beyond what is effortlessly in front of our eyes.
Todd May, in his book Gilles Deleuze: An introduction (2005) speaks of the deleuzian view of life in an eloquent way:
“To recognize that there is more than we have been taught, that what is presented to us is only the beginning of what there is, puts before us the greater task of our living. We have not finished with living; we are never finished with living. However we live, there is always more."
This Gemini season I want us all to recognize that we don’t even know half of what we think we know. I want us to embrace the fact that we are all beginners when it comes to understanding anything. In a world where accumulation is appreciated, fresh eyes are a true luxury – a luxury we could grasp at any moment if we just decided to do so.