It’s a portal. It’s the double doors of the horizon. The doors that open to joy and sociability, opportunity and the expansion of words and ideas. It will come, however, through conflict and intrigue. The double doors will open to passion and negation at one and the same time, as we will be doubling down on our perception of reality. True or false? Here and there. It is the New Moon that takes place on 6 June 2024, at 12:37 GMT, and at 16 degrees and 17 minutes of Gemini.
As the sun and moon meet in Gemini, the winds of change are blowing in our personal relationships, in our expressions of communication, and our sense of curiosity is inflated. Fast moving planets travel through Gemini, Venus and Mercury. Slower and more impactful Jupiter has just entered Gemini too. They are preparing us for a much longer stay of Uranus’ entrance to Gemini next year. So a lot of mental and aesthetic movement, in topics of relationship, attraction, multiplicity, exchange of information and transference, repetition and projection, belief and judgement.
The very unusual deck of Shakespeare Playing Cards offer us a suggestion of what all that is ahead of us might mean. It’s in a very unconventional way. Unsurprisingly, the answer has come up in the two pairs of Ten of Hearts (Desdemona and Othello) and Nine of Hearts (Beatrice and Benedick), with the Ace of Clubs between them.
Desdemona is a young and divided figure in her own right in terms of her affections and in the manner of her actions. She carries with her all the elements of youth, curiosity, playfulness and mischief, but she’s also a married woman to a powerful ruler and, as such, committed to a mature responsible role within both the partnership and society. The Ten of Hearts is a climax. The apotheosis of an event, feeling or situation that is tied in the seeding moment of this new moon. So despite the Gemini levity, this new moon contains in it supreme depth and intensity.
Desdemona is a steadfast personality true to her self, while Othello, charismatic and privileged as he is, he still manages to loose a sense of emotional balance through deception and an inflated ego. They are both of them victims and perpetrators at one and the same time. It’s inescapable. We still have Neptune at the last degree of Pisces and Saturn nearby. No need to get into aspects and make this more complicated than it already is.
The cards show us an independent female personality, which also conservative and submissive in a style that reinforces the hierarchical values of the times, against an archetypal masculine alien force, representing the doorway to conflict between belonging and individuation that couldn’t be any stronger. The outcome does not, ultimately, resolve anything, and the conflicting basis to the argument is on going as a perennial truth. The Gemini element of air blows in both directions and has no begging or end. But we should never lose sight of the fact that in the Shakespeare deck, the Hearts represent Lovers. It is a chaos created by love. And love is its own ruler.
Whereas Clubs, represent Fools and Jesters. Such one is Nick Bottom as The Ace of Clubs. The Shakespeare company had two actors who specialised in playing fools. They played the philosophers and tender-hearted cynics in the plays, often themselves being the main comic or tragic character. In A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Nick Bottom is a weaver and amateur dramatics enthusiast who has his head transformed into a Donkey by Puck, a mischievous fairy. Even so, while in the middle of rehearsals for a play about Pyramus and Thisbe, Titania, Queen of the Fairies, falls unexpectedly and madly in love with him. Bottom exists in the play in order to progress the stories three main lines by offering the element of magic and transformation as real energies that yield material practical power in life. Symbolically, just as we go about our daily business, our life stories may reverse, transform or transmute in unexpected magical ways.
The Nine of Hearts are the unresolved love just a step away from completion and, therefore, close but still in the state of flux. Beatrice and Benedick are in constant competition. They talk big but truth will out differently. Benedick swears that he will never marry, and if he ever does, he wants his friends to kill him. Beatrice says that Benedick is a fool, a jester and a bad soldier. They insult each other at every opportunity and have been waging ‘marry war’. But we are not fooled. It’s the feminine-masculine archetype in all of us that is competing for primacy. It’s about attraction and resistance, performative action against genuine feelings, switching allegiances and finding truth through falsity. The ruler of Gemini is Mercury, and Mercury is a healer, his/her own negation, both a teacher and a student, who doesn’t favour of represent one gender over the other. Mercury can go everywhere, back and forth.
The Ten of Hearts and the Nine of Hearts are cards of happiness and accomplishment. But with the Ace of Clubs in between, they come with a caveat to be mindful of fools errants. With the Ten of Hearts we learn how and in which ways we are still entangled in each others destiny and that magic is always there to manifest itself. Through Bottom (the Ace of Clubs represents innovative ideas) wisdom may appear foolish, but there is foolishness to assume one’s own wisdom. So tread cautiously, do not embark in purposeless non nonsensical undertakings, employ Gemini curiosity, learn the facts, but do not get stuck in them. There is deception as words will fly more freely than usual through this month. We are not moving forward in a straight line but rather through contradiction and a state of disagreement, duplicity and opposition. However, magic will find its way in surprising and unexpected ways to offer solutions and opportunities for progress. This is the nervous energy that we will be working with for the next two weeks, in the short term, and into next summer, for a longer term perspective. So we better enjoy it. The double doors open to otherworldliness and beyond with the theme of love and surprise weaved throughout.
Flavia