Tuesday: Mercury conjoins the Great Attractor

Dear Friend and Reader,

We are in the middle of enjoying the conjunction between Venus and Jupiter; a time when the air overflows with big love and dreams, where you want to take your arrow and point it up into the sky and let it fly you don’t care where, as long as you can watch its gorgeous flight. Fittingly, Mercury in Sagittarius is bouncing its way across the Great Attractor. This phenomenon can be described as the senses heightened by a feeling of One-ness, perhaps the same uniformity experienced by a group of little fish in the sea.

The Great Attractor is located in Sagittarius. Basically it’s a shapeless shade of mystery so heavy that it is pulling the galaxies towards it. It is believed that the Andromeda Galaxy is headed towards ours at 200,000 miles an hour, lured by the pull of this mighty force waiting just beyond. It is hard to tell what exactly the thing is; many astronomers are more comfortable calling it a quasar as supposed to a blackhole. Personally, I prefer to call it the Giant WTF. For a more serious explanation of what the Great Attractor is, please read The Centaur’s Arrow, an article Eric wrote with the help of Phil Sedgwick.

Astrologically speaking, the Great Attractor seems to present a sense of optical illusion in a chart, or a skewed or exaggerated perception. Sedgwick writes: “The perception is that people on the Great Attractor have unusual appeal or potency. They find themselves in vast circles, accidentally. Or they have impacted masses of people and think they have created no influence in their lives whatsoever.”

Another interesting aspect of the Great Attractor is the fact that no one knows what this thing looks like, yet everything is racing towards it. Do you remember those cartoons with Pepe LePeaux (the Warner Brother’s skunk?) He had this love interest, who was a cat, and he was always running after her, in hot pursuit and as much as he ran towards her, she ran away. The power of attraction and the energy of the hunt comes through with the Great Attractor. Time and space bend and become something different. It is no longer a distance of twenty feet, it’s just distance to be crossed.

Mercury is regarded as the planet of the intellect, the mind and communication. This is partly due to the speed with which it travels around the Sun. When the Greeks met the Scandinavians and introduced their gods to one another, the Scandinavians found a lot of similarities between Mercury and Odin. Odin is the god of poetry, among other things in the Norse tradition. Another name for him is Wanderer.

I suggest that this conjunction signifies a journey of unknown distance. Perhaps it is freeing to know that you have so much more in store for you, perhaps it is daunting to know you have many more miles before you sleep. Either way, the time and space which this journey of the mind will undertake is unknown. Perhaps, since Sagittarius-Mercury can be a bit…scatterbrained, it is an image of the mind-as-rubber-ball, caterwauling through the annals of consciousness, and coming to the realization that the walls, the aisles, the whole system, also represents a part of you. Or does it?

The Great Attractor, in many ways, is an optical illusion. Mercury combined with the Great Attractor is the mirror of perception. To quote Anais Nin: We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.

Merry Met,

Genevieve