Curious, communicative, flexible, deceptive, duplicitous, talkative, unstable, verbose, variable Gemini. After all it’s mutable air. What kind of air moves really fast? A tornado of thoughts. Or a wind of change.

Gemini is ruled by Mercury, not only the messenger of the gods, but the very archetype of the trickster. Mercury has in his protection travelers, orators, merchants, and thieves (sometimes it’s one and the same).

As soon as he was born, Hermes stole some of Apollo’s sacred cattle, sacrificed two of them and made the first lyre out of their entrails. Though Apollo was at first enraged, after hearing the instrument he exchanged the rest of the herd for it and added the caduceus Hermes is so well known for as a gift. Now that’s a deal!

Throughout mythology, Mercury plays many roles. Running errands for the gods, helping mortals, causing mischief, but perhaps most importantly, travelling through all 3 realms as a psychopomp, that is a soul guide. This skill or ability to reach everywhere is not held by any of the other gods, except Hecate, another goddess of crossroads (though originally imported from a foreign mythology to that of the Greeks). The underworld was off limits to all but its denizens.

In the sky, Mercury can be seen just before dawn, or just before sunset, exactly as expected from a god of crossroads.

To unpack that, the planet Mercury in a chart also represents how we think, our mind, our communication. When we speak, it is our Mercury relating to the other person’s Mercury. Hermes’ ability to cross the realm’s boundaries is akin to the mind’s ability to travel everywhere. Unlike the body, which is limited by time and space (thanks, Saturn!), we can think about the past and imagine ourselves there, we can think about the future and imagine ourselves there. In other words, the mind is extremely flexible. It’s the mind that gives us the ability to learn anything we want.

And just like the Orphic hymn which hails Mercury as “in arts gymnastic and in fraud divine” so Gemini borrows this divine deceit, because Gemini embodies the duality of the mind.

Gemini is the extroverted, diurnal side of Mercury, as opposed to the introverted, nocturnal Virgo side. Gemini learns the tricks and techniques, Virgo applies the scholarly understanding. Gemini exchanges ideas, Virgo analyses ideas. Gemini asks “how does it work and what can I do with it?”, Virgo asks “how does it work and how do I improve it?”

Both Gemini and Virgo are mutable, and as we learned through the other mutable signs, this is the modality which seeks climax and change (making Gemini the Wind of Change. You heard it here first). Air has a natural inclination towards being communicative, but in Gemini more so than its airy brethren of Libra and Aquarius.

Gemini takes the prize for the worst zodiacal rep, as being two-faced or duplicitous. And it is, but the symbol of this constellation are the twins, that is literally two persons. With two faces. It’s not that Gemini is trying to trick everyone, but being flexible and intellectually oriented, it is able to understand and morph into what they need to be. Gemini lives in a space of logic, but it is not the fixed space of Aquarius which holds on to the same ideology with Saturn’s titanic grip. Because Mercury bestows an aptitude for words and an outstanding ability to use and bend language, Gemini is the journalist, the information distributor, that buzzingly interesting person who talks to everyone at the party and might or might not be able to pull some card tricks. Or that programmer who is a bit socially awkward but has the some might say divine ability to create things just with letters (which makes all programmers magicians. You heard it here first).

The trickster might be a master of manipulation, but might also sacrifice himself for humanity, because let us not forget Odin is considered a trickster god associated with Mercury, and in the realm of mortals our friend Edward Snowden has not only Gemini rising, but also Sun, Mercury and Mars in the same sign.

The archetype of the twins appears in many cultures. The Dioskuri, Castor and Pollux were both born at once and separated by death, due to one being immortal, then reunited in the sky. Regardless of how much Gemini we have in our charts, we all have twins inside of us. The double DNA helix is a pair constantly twinning around itself, in a language twisting-twisting, exploring all possibilities of life by letter arrangement just like Gemini explores all possibilities of thought.  This is the theme of the twins, separation and reunification. It’s the polarity of human and divine. Of cruel and kind, of good and evil.

Gemini is able to contain within itself these polarities, because Gemini is constantly looking for a way to change things and understand all the facets of experience. Duplicity is just taking flexibility to the next level. It’s a multiplication by division, it’s the understanding that everything exists in polarities. Which is a pretty tricky concept.