Mercury in Pisces - Postcards from a Magical Mind

Stig Severinsen has Mercury in Pisces
4 times World Champion Free Diver, 'The Ice Guru', Viking Swimmer with superhuman lungs. He has held his breath after inhaling pure oxygen in a tank full of sharks for over 20 minutes emphasising mental control on the body and in 2012 he was awarded the longest breath held voluntarily by Guinness World Records for holding his breath for 22 min. His passion for water and yoga lead him to write Breatheology – the art of conscious breathing. Astrologically the breath and lungs are Mercury ruled.

Welcome to the mind-blowing tour of the magical mystery realm of the fish. Not one fish, but two, chained together as one entity for eternity. Mercury moved country on the 5th February, 2013 from the air space of of Aquarius into the watery depths of Pisces. This month it may have to act as the bringer of succour, healing, understanding and care.
 

On the 17th February 2013, the ICRC, International Committee of the Red Cross marks its 150th anniversary. Helping with suffering during war time it is now dealing with catastrophic humanitarian crises and complications in conflicts, including the kidnapping and murders of its own aid workers. 
Mercury in Pisces can also bring, carry or trade in abstractions and concepts which can be puzzling to follow and yet surrending and going with the flow may get us there and be the right the road to travel. During this time Mercury also appears to move backwards, it goes Retrograde, on the 22nd February 2013 after a spell in its Shadowlands. 
Mercury in Pisces Shadowlands Smoke Signals
This may herald some seriously wooly, or confusing, baffling and quite obscure communications and activities or conversely things might just appear to happen rather magically. We know that magic can be entertaining, and if we can't work out how it is done, totally puzzling. Magic can be used to disguise what is really going on because it's an illusion that distracts or numbs the left brain. 
                                          
Harry Houdini has Mercury in Pisces and is world famous as a stunt/escape artist often in water. He started as a magician in a 'double' act with his brother 'Dash' then later on with his wife 'Bess'.
Magic can also be used to intimidate or scare, voodoo and black magic are just words but scary easily springs to mind. Magic involves slight of hand and the fooling of the left brain that is used to being in control. With Mercury in Pisces this is used to powerful effect as we can lose ourselves and allow our brains to be taken outside the range of normally functioning. In much the same way as a drug can induce the brain to function outside of reality, Mercury in Pisces can take us to some out of this world places and to places right out of ourselves.

David Blaine has Mercury in Pisces and is world famous as a stunt/escape artist. He started as a street magician
'As a magician, I think everything is possible. And I think if something is done by one person it can be done by others. He went on to hold his breath for 17 minutes.
The roads in this land may sometimes seem off the map and uncharted but this can also make the exploration all the more bewitching. This is a time that generates unanswerable questions, that throws communciations and exchanges of any nature to either the top surface level or into the deepest darkest depths imaginable. Imagination is quite literally the place from where we will draw our thoughts and will colour therefore the very words we write, speak, text and type. Compassion, soul, empathy and emotion will be the choices in our water colour paint box into which we will dip our pen and brush.

NASA's Messenger spacecraft has been capturing high resolution colour images of planet Mercury for 2 years. This 3d model combines all the visual data showing volcanic plains as sand coloured areas and unclassified rock as blue areas, giving a brief impression of water where there cannot be any. More interesting and mysterious than previously thought, strange hollows have been spotted on the surface and minerals that 'should' have been burnt off by the Sun.
Mercury is in the watery space and territory of Pisces for these few weeks and it is to this language we must open our ears and to this environment we must acclimatise.

Whenever Mercury changes sign, we need to learn a whole new language and adapt to completely different customs to the ones we have become used and familiar. Mercury affects the way we process and deal with information. In other words: how we talk, think, chat, twitter, blog, text, write, read, listen and learn and Pisces is highly imaginative, flexible and conflicted with the facts. It knows that it must say difficult things after it sees the truth clearly but how to say it without creating conflict, hurting or causing pain that is the problem. It clearly sees that saving one hurts another, that there is always another side of the coin and a vast array of alternate possibilities. Sometimes it is all just too painful and unresolvable and Mercury in Pisces retreats, gets lost and may even lose the plot.

Papa Ratzy', Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Alois Ratzinger) has Mercury in Pisces, 

The first pope in nearly 600 years in the history of the Roman Catholic church who hopes to disappear on the

28th February 2013 alive. Significantly he made two trips to the relics of 13th century predecessor 

Pope Celestine V and in Pisces fashion, these two 'fishers of men' are now forever linked together as the only two popes to step away voluntarily, or so the story goes. Benedict's time has been turbulent and full of power struggles. He is ultra conservative at a time that seemed to call for a progressive. The Vatileaks scandal, his butler stealing documents, the continuing, ever growing, sexual abuse revelations within the church, its inappropriate connection with celibacy, the ongoing issue of women priests, an inability to accept homosexuality or deal with contraception, are all left unresolved but apparently exorcisms were allowed. 

A pope with a pacemaker but not easy for him to get out of impossible positions as a peacemaker.

 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'

When Mercury passes through such a wise old sign as Pisces it realizes it cant teach an old dog new tricks and that there is nothing new under the sun so might as well stop exhausting itself in the effort, better to surrender end the pretense of control and ‘just go with it’. Time to pioneer and energetically beat new paths will come soon enough when we reach the fire roads of Aries. Meanwhile the journey whilst not exactly ending is like the waters in the mouth of a giant river apparently slowing right down, leaden, pregnant and fecund with life giving silt and sediment ready to merge and enrich the huge ocean expanse.

Actress Ursula Andress has Mercury in Pisces
Eternally emerging from the ocean holding seashells first seen in the Bond film Dr No

Mercury is travel, trade, exchange, communication and busy activity and here in ‘let’s just wait and see’ Pisces it can all go off in a tangent with no apparent grip on what is actually happening. We may not exactly see the way ahead, it may wobble and be extremely blurred but we can use intuition and sense our path, if we try.

Magician/Illusionist Derren Brown has Mercury in Pisces
It is possible that whilst Mercury was in freaky and off the wall Aquarius, many of us noticed we had to switch our mental tuning to getting to grips with socio-cultural issues, the concerns of our friends or those in our group. 
Mercury in Aquarius - Postcards from a Fantastic Mind
Under Aquarius we may have had to re-think what we took to be authoritative and delivered to us as right 'from above'. We may have had to learn by disobeying rules and age old and respected traditions. We may have upset a few apple-carts along the way. Journeys and communications could have been surprising, unplanned and they may have even been disrupted or disrupting.

However, just as we have got halfway used to this style of speaking and thinking we will suddenly find ourselves in what appears to be a foreign country where everyone asks us to speak more emotionally, to go that extra mile to help or understand. We may have to use our right brains and bring alternative solutions to the table. We may have to learn by soaking up information and trusting in what we know.
When splashing its way through Pisces, Mercury will want us to employ our heart and minds to get to somewhere ‘kinder’ and more tolerable and tolerant. We will naturally incline to speak our truths but equally knowing full well that truth is multi-faceted each face sparkles, tempts and beguiles with a different allure, depending on persective. You may be standing right next to me in the river but the water rushing through my toes is uniquiely different from the water rushing over yours and yet it may look identical.

'No man ever steps in the same river twice, for its not the same river and he is not the same man..
everything flows and nothing abides, everything yields and nothing remains permanent. Sometimes it may seem safer to stay where we are than to accept change or take a step into the unknown. Bit inner peace can only come when we give up worry and trust in life's flow for the only thing that never changes is change itself. Heraclitus

Being adaptable is Mercury's middle name it will adjust to this new terrain we will adjust and find the new angle. It may well be with Mercury in Pisces, a highly adaptable sign itself, things get less defined and definite, after all infinity beckons. The truth of eternal change comes as waves of order then chaos, endlessly lapping, unable to ever leave the ocean. 

You will notice the difference and the change from Mercury in Aquarius to Mercury in Pisces, as you know the difference between sea and sky and wind and rain. You and others around you, remember we are all feeling Mercury’s shift, may appear more confusing but more accepting, baffling yet beguiling, frustrating but magical, open and also closed, transparent and subtly opaque. We may yet find a way for us all to express our inner rescuer in ways that respect social and cultural imperatives. We may even doodle or daydream our time away but then suddenly draw back a minute later to see the Renoir in the scribble. 

French Impressionist Painter Artist Pierre-August Renoir has Mercury in Pisces

During Mercury’s time in Pisces all of us on this precious planet of ours will be mentally processing with more imagination, irreverence, tolerance and also be a teeny bit more obtuse and confounding. Mercury in Pisces takes us along the ‘who knows’ path of the infinite. It presses us to processes in ways which are right brained, intuitive, and often pretty much ‘out there’. We all will be a little more compassionate, doubting a bit more, yet also more accepting and tolerant. We will be a lot happier discussing spirituality, art, boundless possibilities, a million what-ifs and what-nots, imaginative worlds, fantasy and illusion. With this Mercury our communications are about to get more unreal for good or bad.

FLNC Corsican nationalist member, Yvan Colonna has Mercury in Pisces
After 'disappearing' for four years he is now serving a life sentence for murdering French prefect of the island, Claude Erinac, something he has always denied and an anonymous group claimed the killing. In 2012 Colonna's lawyer, Antoine Sollacaro was also gunned down in a mafia style hit. In January 2013 Colonna has appealed to the European Court of Human Rights whilst the beautiful island continues to have the highest murder rate per capita in Europe.

We will all feel this change, this mental shift but you may well wonder just how does it affect us specifically. Well, the sign of Pisces sits somewhere in your birth chart, even if you do not have any planets in this sign. You will always have the mysterious Piscean ocean somewhere in your psyche. It is this Piscean zone which is entertaining Mercury as a house guest. Welcome your mercurial visitor and make 'it' feel at home. If you know where your ‘Piscean Country' is then slow down and put your full attention to it. It is here that you may be trying to exercise imagination and fantastical ideas. Take your time and respect the issues affected in this part of your chart. For instance, Pisces may be in your 2nd house of ‘Money & Resources’, in which case Mercury here will probably prompt you to think about and plan imaginative changes which could impact your bank balance. Or if Pisces covers your 7th house or zone of ‘Partnerships’ where your plans could be in for a major overhaul concerning your significant other. Making the adjustments will now go more smoothly. Or is Pisces pulling at your Venus, if so maybe these few weeks will get you thinking about deepening, or severing, your commitment to what you have placed faith on previously valued.Make the most of your facility to think ‘strangely’ to be taken out of your normal comfort zone and perhaps the literal space you inhabit. You are about to taken to some very different looking landscapes where all is not as it seems and yet it is all of what we imagine. The endlessness and boundarylessness of this space may frighten the life out of us. How can we possibly get our heads around infinity, and yet it is here to which we are magnetically drawn with an inevitability which can shake us right down to our fishes tails. We emerged from the waters and many of us continue to hear the latent echos, and whisperings from that place and want to reply in the same tongue. Poetry is one such language, abstract mathematics and religious verse also contain its murmurs. Diving into the source reveals our origins, Mercury seeks to pass on and exchange and during this time in Pisces we may come to know that the motherland is really the mother ocean, where we truly are ‘all one’ and that is magic.

Singer/Actress Doris Day has Mercury in Pisces

credits: the atlantic & celebrity image & corsicaindependance & bbc

posted by pippa ponton & jphibbs