The Middle Way

by Jane Lewis

As the Sun moves into Gemini wildflowers fill hedgerows and waysides.  In keeping with this mutable air sign, wildflowers are functional and unpretentious in attracting bees and insects in a great rush to get the job of pollination done as quickly as possible.  Gemini is the sign of busy-ness and industry both out in nature and in human life.

In the sequence of signs, Aries and Taurus are about ‘me’ and ‘mine’ and then Gemini introduces awareness of others through relationship: what you can do for me and what I can do for you.  Swap, barter, exchange, buy, sell, make a profit to earn the means to pay for the basic necessities of food, shelter and clothing that come next with Cancer.  Gemini is about affairs of Monday to Friday but always with an opportunistic eye to do a deal out-of-hours.  In mythology, Mercury is a puckish or ’Jack the Lad’ character, a trickster and cattle-stealer not to be trusted, always on the make, driven by amoral-imperative.  Questions of principle, ethics, social nicety are of no concern for anything goes so long as it brings in the dosh and serves the immediate purpose.  Naturally quick-witted and dextrous, learning supports the Gemini function because it facilitates the climb up the greasy pole, thereby earning the social respectability that the later signs of Libra and Capricorn crave, turning the School of Life into the degrees of the modern Business School.

The Twins do things in twos or multiples, so it’s no surprise that Geminian Donald Trump, businessman extraordinaire, is now in his second term of office.  In the news now is his latest spat, this time with Harvard which has won the right to block his ban on the university accepting international students.  Trump takes his own approach to sorting out the world’s problems and, as a Gemini archetype, forms a strong magnet for Americans to attach their own Gemini traits onto.  The bi-wheel showing his horoscope around the US Sibly chart shows how his Gemini Sun taps into the nation’s 7^th house Mars, enabling him to embody that part of the nation’s character, psyche and soul lesson.  Trump’s Sun is conjunct Uranus and the Moon’s north node, tipping us off to the fact that this is very much part of his destiny.  Astrologer Reinhold Ebertin describes someone with a Sun-Uranus conjunction as ‘a person trying to carry through reforms in a self-willed manner’.  Fair comment.  He certainly doesn’t shy from courting controversy or conflict.  Like Marmite, there’s no middle ground for people simply love him or hate him.

Image by David Everett Strickler

Gemini corresponds with The Middle East in the world zodiac * which explains why it has always been a place of conflict because it manifests the inherent conflict between any two poles or opposites.  The essence of Gemini is duality, the twin poles of right and left, up and down, forwards and backwards.  It is the Double Truth.  The deep lesson of the sign is about finding the Middle Way between the twin pillars which takes us into the Holy of Holies inside Solomon’s Temple.  Inner and outer; esoteric and exoteric; higher and lower; frontal mind and higher mind.  Mercury is not just the cattle-thief but also the Divine Mercury, or Christ Child.  White Eagle’s teachings revolve around this double truth and provide an education in how every human being, irrespective of culture or adherence to religious tradition, can conceive, gestate and give birth to the Christ within.  A basic education in the zodiac signs and their meanings, outer and inner, are fundamental to these mystery teachings.  These energies are alive within and outside of us, present in our physical bodies, our inner nature, and equally alive in the world around us with which we exchange both physical matter and psycho-spiritual energies.  Macrocosm and microcosm, above and below.

White Eagle teaches the inner meaning behind the outer surface interpretation.  It’s not that one or the other is right, rather both are true at the same time because the Double Truth is embedded within Earth life.  If we don’t know this then we can spend lifetime after lifetime fighting on one side or another, when all along we’re meant to be seeking the still point of balance in between, allowing each pole to exist and following the pendulum swing from one to the other as being a simple fact of life.  No wonder life is so confusing!  So many problems  we don’t know how to fix, so many conundrums we can’t puzzle out.  And, so much karma arising from our misconceptions which form the substance of our next incarnation, individually, nationally and as families and groups. 

Gemini is about questions.  In the Grail tradition the Quest finally hinges on the right answer being given, but the right answer can’t be found from asking the wrong question. In today’s chaotic world of conflict we should perhaps meditate more within our still point in order to intuit whether or not we’re asking the right questions in the first place.  When we discover the right questions to ask then we should start finding some right answers.