Mercury in Aries: Living with the Mind of the Warrior
I have Mercury in Aries way up by the midheaven (MC). If you were to step outside and look at the sky through the lens of a chart, the midheaven would mark the place where the sun is at high noon. The MC is the most obvious and visible place in the sky. Even dreamy, distant Neptune would be hard to miss on the MC, but Mercury in Aries is especially loud and attention-grabbing. Having Mercury in Aries in such a prominent place in my chart has given me a lot of opinions about it.
Most astrology books would say that Mercury in Aries is opinionated and brash. It doesn’t think before it speaks. It’s argumentative, blunt, and approaches delicate situations with the subtlety of a Mack truck.
Age has mellowed my character a lot, but for most of my childhood and adolescence, I was the kid on the playground who was always on top of the monkey bars yelling. That description of childhood me would probably surprise most of the people who know me. As an adult, I’ve worked really hard to sand off the rough edges of my personality and mature past my adolescent communication style. This is the way it should be.
But so many of the descriptions of planets-sign combinations match who people were when they were children. They assume that we will always be who we were when we were at our most immature, and I would love to see us broaden the collective understanding of what Mercury in Aries can be.
Mercury in Aries: Warrior Mind
Aries is the sign of the Warrior. According to evolutionary astrologer Steven Forrest, planets show up in Aries because they need to learn courage. Mercury is the planet of perception, thought, communication, and learning. If you were born with Mercury in Aries it means that you have come into this life primed for difficult intellectual challenges. People with Mercury in Aries are on this planet to learn how to say hard things, learn about things that might be scary or unpopular, have the courage to see what’s really there instead of what they want to see, and be courageous in their thoughts.
Mercury in Aries is… The scientist who hangs over the side of a volcano collecting measurements.
The calculus student who stays up until 3am fighting to understand their homework.
The activist constructing the perfect argument for why we should stop clubbing baby seals.
The psychologist explaining exactly why social media is harmful to children.
The comedian who gets on stage and punches up, knowing they will never get a show on Netflix.
The parent who advocates for their child’s learning disability.
The diplomat who creates a plan for freeing the hostages that kills no one.
The doctor fighting for the funding to develop the medicine that might cure his daughter’s illness.
The teenager reading articles on the internet about being trans from a farmhouse in Nebraska.
In short, Mercury in Aries is the mind, courageous.
I have Mercury in Aries, and, for a long time, I was puzzled by how to apply Mercury in Aries to my thoughts. What does it mean to think bravely, and why was that a lesson I particularly needed to learn?
How I Learned to Control My Mind
The fear of hell is hard to kick. The fear of public ridicule is just as hard.
I grew up an Evangelical. The Bible says that learning how to control your thoughts is important, so I grew up hearing that I was supposed to think about wholesome positive things and avoid thinking about sin.
I've always instinctively rebelled against the idea of mind control, so I dismissed this rule and quietly kept my thoughts my own.
For most of my childhood, I was lucky to belong to a church that believed everyone who prayed the sinner’s prayer would go to heaven no matter what, and I kept that mental freedom.
As a teenager, I started going to a church that believed that salvation was not unconditional. There were things that you could do to go to Hell, even if you were “saved,” and having bad thoughts was one of them.
Even so, it wasn't until my youth pastor preached a sermon about God’s judgement that I started to take controlling my thoughts seriously.
He said that when we die, we will appear before God and everyone who ever lived. It would be like being in the middle of a big stadium. There in that stadium, God would broadcast every thought I’d ever had in front of everyone.
The terror in the room was palpable. My youth pastor quickly tried to patch things over.
“It will be okay,” he reassured us. “God understands everything, and after we die, we will be much more compassionate with each other.”
“Not likely,” I thought, and I immediately started trying to control my thoughts.
It's amazing what fear can enable people to do.
Ever since that sermon, I treated my mind like a military base. Every thought that wanted to enter had to go through stringent security checks. Would I be horrified if my mother saw this thought? What about my friends? My youth pastor? My boss? If the thought didn’t meet those standards, it was blown out of the sky.
Most thoughts didn’t meet this stringent standard.
With practice, I developed an inner censor who could see bad thoughts coming and nip them in the bud without much thought. By the time I was an adult, my conscious mind was almost completely quiet unless I was actively thinking about something.
(I say “almost” because music was the exception. I get songs stuck in my head all the time.)
The Downside of Mental Self-Control
Since inner silence is the goal of some meditation practices, saying that I don't struggle with what Buddhists call monkey mind might sound like bragging. It isn't.
Censoring my thoughts to the point that I am not consciously aware of them most of the time has a serious downside. Intrusive thoughts are important. They tell you that there is danger coming. They tell you how you feel.
Because I have developed the instinct of squashing intrusive thoughts, I find it difficult to know how I feel about things. My body and intuition have to fill in for my silent mind. Even with that help, I don’t hear often hear it when my instincts are trying to warn me about dangerous people. I don’t know when a job isn’t working for me anymore until I’m too sick to get out of bed.
I suspect that there are tools and techniques that people who practice that style of meditation learn in order to avoid those problems.
I didn't learn them.
And for a long time, I was angry that I received this training without the tools to properly deal with it.
Another (More Positive) Approach to Mental Self-Control
Recently, I stumbled on an interview with an Indian guru. He was talking about what it was like inside his mind, and it made me sit up and notice. He said that his mind is his space. Everything that goes on in his mind is exactly the way he wants it.
It made me think about the training that I got. It was about control, but it wasn’t about keeping my own space clean and making sure that it is the way I want it to be. It was all about judgment and making sure that my space in my head met someone else's standards.
Theoretically, that standard was supposed to be God's standard, but it was the threat of what other people would think of my thoughts that motivated my behavior.
It was this realization that enabled me to finally begin to understand Mercury in Aries in my chart.
Navigating the Aries/Libra Polarity: Individual vs. Society
Aries is opposite Libra, which means they are two answers to the same question. Whenever there is a choice between doing what is good for the individual and what is good for the group, Aries always answers "the individual." Libra always answers "the group."
This is why Aries is the sign of courage. Like Dumbledore says in Harry Potter: “It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
Neither Aries nor Libra is right all of the time. If we listen to Aries all the time, cooperation becomes impossible. It we listen to Libra all the time, human individuality, difference, and innovation gets melted down into a mass of conformity and compliance.
By evaluating all of my thoughts based on what I thought other people would think about them, I was thinking in a very libran way, more than was right for me.
Having a planet in Aries means that you are living a life that will require you to take the path of the individual more often than your community might desire.
Having Mercury in Aries means evaluating your thoughts based on your own criteria instead of the criteria of the community.
A Path Toward a Healthy Mercury in Aries
The timing of this realization of how a health Mercury in Aries works couldn’t have come at a better time. I am in the process of moving into a new home. As I set up my home, I am practicing benign selfishness. In the places that are mine alone, I am setting things up exactly the way I want them, for no other reason than that it works for me.
Acting this way in my space in the outer world comes naturally to me, and I am starting to get into the same headspace when I filter my thoughts. I’m not trying to relinquish control. (Learning to move the filtering process back up to the level of consciousness is another project entirely.) But I am changing my filtering criteria.
Because music was the one thing that was immune to my ability to exercise mental self-control, I’m starting there. I’m practicing changing the music that’s playing in my head by imagining changing the channel, for no other reason than choosing what I want to listen to.
Right now, I’m playing “Bad Karma” by Axel Thesleff (YouTube). It feels oddly appropriate.
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