If the squares to Neptune made by the Sun and Mercury this week (Mercury-Neptune is exact today) have done their job constructively, you may have cleared out some psychic space in yourself regarding honesty and believing lies. If so, you’re in a great position to take advantage of this weekend’s Sun-Mercury-Uranus aspects, which offer a surge of inventive thought, perception and communication. Even if you’re not so sure how you’re doing in the honesty department, we’re nearing the midpoint of this period between two eclipses. That means the timing for this inventive energy couldn’t be more perfect.

Photo by Amanda Painter, Portland, Maine.

Sure, ‘inventive thinking’ could be a euphemism for lying, but it could also mean envisioning some very creative ‘third option’ solutions to problems that appear caught in a false dichotomy. Here’s how the weekend’s astrology looks like it will support this:

On Sunday, Mercury conjoins the Sun in early Gemini. This is an aspect of quick wit and the ability to teach well – if you do so through speech and writing. So instead of simply thinking all your best thoughts to yourself, communicate them. Write them in your journal, if you’re trying to ‘teach’ yourself. Lay things out in an email or conversation with a friend. The reason you want to loosen your tongue is so that you don’t keep yourself ping-ponging within your own psyche. Give your brain an outlet, because Uranus is joining the picture – and The Great Awakener comes with a jolt of energy.

Mercury makes a sextile to Uranus in Aries later on Sunday, so that means it’s basically happening at the same time as the Mercury-Sun conjunction. Sextiles occur between signs of complementary elements (in this case, air and fire). They are known for their flowing quality – but you have to actively use the energy.

In the case of Mercury-Uranus, there are a couple of interesting things to keep in mind. One is that Uranus is the ‘higher octave’ of Mercury. That is, this sextile tunes our conscious mind to the ‘Universal Mind’. You can take that in a spiritual sense, but I think the most useful meaning of ‘spiritual’ is the idea that one’s truth needs to be acted upon; you’re only as enlightened as your engagement with the world around you is active. Mercury’s sextile to Uranus gets the planet of the mind talking to the Uranus-Pluto square, the big 2012 harbinger of evolution and revolution. The message is that as your perception and intuition quicken, so must your application of what you learn. If you’re taking Len’s advice from yesterday to observe your thinking and stay present, all this activity in mutable Gemini should help with the necessary flexibility.

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Today Mercury enters one of its home signs – Gemini – (it also rules Virgo) at about 7:12 am EDT. This emphasizes the inner twin/duality theme that retrograde Venus and the Sun have opened us up to. As we test the permeability of the membrane between our psychic or internal halves, the sky is asking about the membrane between honesty and lying.

Simplified chart showing today's Mercury ingress of Gemini (the green glyph with horns), plus the Gemini Sun (yellow circle) conjunct the South Node (orange horse shoe) and square Neptune (blue trident).

Specifically, the Sun is conjunct the lunar South Node in Gemini (and therefore opposite the North Node in Sagittarius) – and all of it is square Neptune in Pisces.

Earlier this week, we considered Brad Blanton’s practice of ‘radical honesty’, but what good is radical honesty if you’re talking to someone determined to believe lies? Blanton doesn’t really address that psychic posture, despite its prevalence in our culture.

There are a lot of reasons why we may choose to stay in denial, whether about something personal (spouse is having an affair) or something cultural (political lies that perpetuate wars) – even when it’s absurd (Obama is a socialist Muslim who hates white people). We want to be comfortable. We want to avoid feeling ‘bad’ or guilty, and have not found adult tools for dealing with those emotions. We want to avoid conflict or loss. Our fantasies are richer than our actual lives. Maybe we’re just not paying attention enough to be discerning.

It’s convenient to believe lies. Lies give us a way to avoid responsibility, to avoid action – so people become eager to be lied to, and corporations relish the carte blanche this offers them to poison us in myriad ways. When lies get really big – think Fukushima or Sept. 11 – it’s overwhelming. To see the truth in such a situation means encountering a feeling of helplessness. Then what do you do?

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Here’s our second installment of the Venus Rx in Gemini Files: Brigham Young. [You can read the first installment here.] He has a very prominent Venus retrograde in his chart, and an extremely interesting personal life to match. As president of the Mormon Church he led its followers to what became Utah (becoming its first governor), and was famous for having 17 wives — or possibly 55. But let’s back up a little.

Brigham Young c. 1870, by Charles William Carter.

Brigham Young was born June 1, 1801 in Whitingham, Vermont to a farming family and first worked as a blacksmith and carpenter. His denomination of origin is not mentioned in his Wiki page, but he converted to Methodism in 1823, married in 1824, and later converted to Mormonism in 1832. After his first wife died later that year, he joined Mormon missionaries forming a community in Ohio, where he was ordained and took on a high-level leadership role a few years later.

Young assumed the presidency of the Mormon Church, after a ‘succession crisis’ following the murder of church president Joseph Smith by an angry mob, in 1847. The years of Young’s church presidency – which spanned an impressive 29 years – occurred during the time of westward pioneer expansion in the U.S. He moved the Mormon Church to unsettled territory, where they established the city of Salt Lake.

It was a time of inter-territory skirmishes, and in fact one of the controversies surrounding Young is that allegedly he was unable to get word to other Mormon settlements in time to let immigrants from Arkansas pass through the area “unmolested.” As a result, 120 men, women and children died in the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857 – despite Young’s promise, as governor of the territory to the federal government, to let settlers pass through.

Amidst all this, as governor, Young established Mormon settlements in other states, directed the building of roads and bridges, and organized a militia – in addition to the Mormon Tabernacle and the precursor to the University of Utah.

Now, what about those wives?

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