Mercury enters Scorpio

Mercury crossed into Scorpio today, and it stands at the very first degree of the sign. This is a change in the planet the tradition gives to thinking itself, so it is worth understanding what the move means.

Sepharial, writing in 1920, starts from a line of Ptolemy's: Mercury is the ruler of the rational soul, the Moon of the animal soul. Sepharial reads this as a division of labour. The Moon governs what people share with other creatures: instinct, reaction, the body's responses. Mercury governs the faculties that reason, compare and judge. When the tradition asks how a mind works, it looks first to Mercury and to whatever touches it. Sepharial's rule is that planets in aspect to Mercury "impress their nature strongly" on the character of thought.

Scorpio asks something specific of that faculty. The Pavitts describe the sign as intensity of purpose and unflinching determination, carried out with thoroughness and persistency. They credit it with long, retrospective memory and "inexhaustible argument." They also say it is suited to the detective and the analyst, and to authors who "bring to the surface all the darkest corners in human life." A mind working through Scorpio is called to dig rather than skim, and to follow a question to the bottom. The Pavitts also name a sharp sense of right and wrong that can harden into an eye for an eye.

They add a warning, and it is the centre of this lesson. Scorpio types, they write, "discredit all they cannot personally feel or understand, looking upon the limits of their understanding as the limit of nature." The same depth that makes the sign a good investigator can make it certain too early. It trusts what it has uncovered and dismisses what it has not.

Mercury does not enter quietly. It arrives inside a grand cross with Mars, Pluto and Chiron. The Pavitts say Scorpio under hard aspect turns domineering and argumentative, so that tendency is live from the first day.

The practice follows from the warning. At some point today you will likely feel sure about something: a person's motive, a problem's cause, an argument you are having. When that happens, stop and ask one question. Does this certainty rest on what you have found, or on the edge of what you have been able to see? Write down one thing you have recently dismissed for no better reason than that it did not match your own experience, and look at it again with the same thoroughness you gave your own view. Scorpio's depth is at its best when it is turned on its own conclusions as well as other people's.