by Robert Wilkinson
Following up on the general meaning and function of the "Inferior Conjunction" between the Sun and Mercury, today we explore specifics of the Inferior Conjunction of November 27 at 6 Sagittarius. This “fusion of life and mind” will impact the rest of the retrograde period, and many weeks after.
As I offered in earlier articles, an Inferior Conjunction is when Mercury (mind) conjuncts the Sun (life) while retrograde. This indicates that signals, messages, and ideas from either outer sources or subconscious sources will fuse with the life principle, setting the tone for the lessons involving how our minds are relating to our lives during the next four months. Since Mercury is retrograde, the degree of the inferior conjunction shows how our lives will merge with our perceptions and bring forth a new understanding of our light.
The Sabian Symbol for the Inferior Conjunction
The Sabian Symbol we’ve been given for the 6th degree of Sagittarius is “A game of cricket.” In the Astrology of Personality, where Rudhyar uses the original Dr. Jones' class notes on the symbols, 6 Sag is said to be a symbol of “socialization of man’s competitive instincts,” “instinctive solidarity building race consciousness,” and “capitalizing on skill.”
We are told in the Astrological Mandala that this symbolizes "the development of skill in group-situations testing collective goals,” where an interplay between people in group situations show us “the rules of the game” and how to play it.” He says this teaches us “personal skill, fairness, and cooperation” in our process of becoming more collectively and culturally aware.
He goes on to offer that this decreases the lower so we may open to the higher and broader “group rituals” we need to learn to develop greater “group consciousness and an individual sense of responsibility to the group” to embrace a greater “group solidarity.” He states this falls in the Span of Receptiveness, and is the initial degree in the social, emotional, and cultural level of the Scene of Abstraction.
According to Dr. Jones, creator of the Sabian Symbols, the degree is one of humanity’s “insatiable desire to refine and strengthen every last potentiality of (our) own personal character and skill,” with our need “to gain recognition for our success in this from each area of life.” We are told this degree symbolizes our “capacity for holding steady” through any confusing situation, and “for bringing a measure of stability to every situation in which (we) may be involved.”
He speaks of being at our best when we “are most seriously challenged” to be ourselves and play our part “in strict accordance with the rules.” He offers us the keyword SPORTSMANSHIP, and states when operating in a positive manner, this degree is "exceptional competency in crisis.”
So we enter a time where Life is moving forward as Mind looks back on past skills and how we acquired them, as well as times when we developed “group solidarity” which built collective consciousness. This may mean a looking back at old friends and the things we did together than made us feel more connected to each other and our strengths and skills as valuable things we brought to our world.
Looking Back, Looking Forward
Just remember that all Mercury RX phenomena take a while to unfold, often during a subsequent RX period. Things that happen during a retrograde seem to have a way of moving forward at future retrograde. Right now we’ve all received some sort of blessing since December 2017, as well as seen new dimensions of who we are. This Inferior Conjunction will bring echoes of past eras when Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus were in this part of Sagittarius.
What’s extraordinary about this Inferior Conjunction is that Jupiter is at 5 Sag and moving forward like an express train! That implies Jupiter will boost this degree energy to the max in the immediate future, with Mercury bringing new information and ideas when it crosses over this degree again on Dec 17-18 and Venus bringing solidity, value, appreciation, and people related to these themes when it also crosses this degree on January 11-12.
So we enter a time of the fusion of life and mind that offers us new insights about past and present truths, adventures, or spiritual truths which opened The Way to a greater Spiritual Communion, whether a “Sacred Union Within” or the “Sacred Union Without.” This can bring insights that will help us see how we came to cooperative-collective group consciousness through dynamic interactive circumstances in the past which show us the way to the future.
Remember how you developed the skills you have, and what the rules of those games were. It may help you get clear about future circumstances which demand the same willingness to cultivate cooperative skills while playing by “the rules of the game.” Take a new look at recent new developments in doing your Being, and open to a greater view on your life!
This Inferior Conjunction can fuse hindsight and life experience to see how new forms of light, life, and perspectives have come forth after the past year of “tag team retrogrades” which set us back at certain times, and compelled us to withdraw from old ways, places, and people because we no longer projected an expectation of being fulfilled by those things. The next four months are a time to embrace new ways of managing transitions into the future already formed by seeing the past through different angles and interpretations and finding alternative views or understanding.
A benefit of Inferior Conjunctions is they offer us views of how we prepared in the past for current attitudes and ideals, or conversely, through the retrograde lens see how past attitudes and ideals led us to where we’re at right now. When Mercury gives us a backward look or alternative view and understanding of something from the past, it also in a strange way prepares the ground for the future when other planets cross this degree. Just as January 2019 will bring powerful manifestations of what is set up by the April Inferior Conjunction at 12 Aries, and the Leo Inferior Conjunction at 17 Leo will bring powerful manifestations in July 2019, this one will “blast off” into current “echoes of the future” in the next few weeks!
Aspects in Play
Remember that in any celestial event, forming aspects show the future and closely partile separating aspects show what’s activated now. In an Inferior Conjunction, the Sun and Mercury conspire to bring separating aspects back into play, with forming aspects activated now and in the future when Mercury goes direct.
This Conjunction makes some extraordinarily heavy aspects! Rather than reinvent the wheel, I offered you quite a bit about the current transit to transit aspects in the recent 3 part Full Moon series. Almost all the aspects are the same in this chart, except for the Moon and a few others which are barely separating from what they were. Please consult those recent articles if you want to know more about the Grand Irrationality, the Rhombus Diamond, the Mutable T-square, and the numerous 5th and 10th harmonic aspects making this a time of specializing and polishing our gifts!
Elements, Dispositor Backdrops, and the Jones Pattern
I also addressed these in the recent Full Moon article. The chart of the Inferior Conjunction shows a more imbalanced distribution, with 5 planets in Fire, 2 in Earth, 1 in Air, and 2 in Water. This also makes for a very inspired time, lighting and warming up everyone! This is more hot than cold, and isn’t very interactive. The Air is more about finding connectedness with the life that’s all around us, while the balance between earth and water keeps it grounded and fluid at the same time. Still, with the conjunction in Fire, the emphasis is on the fusion of Life and Mind in a Distributive Inspirational mode.
With the Sun conjunct Jupiter, we now have both Mercury and Jupiter leading the Sun! This takes the “lead to the Light” away from Venus and opens a brief window when “the Guide of Souls” is tight with “The Bestower of All Blessings.” This should be a VERY expansive period, and ushers in a time when we’ll have a planet leading the Sun for many months to come.
In this chart, we have four “final dispositors” for all the other energies. We have the Venus, ruling itself; we have Jupiter in Sagittarius, ruling the Sun, Moon, Mercury, and Mars; we have Saturn, ruling Pluto, and we as always , have Neptune as a “standalone” in Pisces. Jupiter will continue to be highly influential along with Saturn in the next few months, since all the inner planets are transiting a sign one of those two rules. There will be a third contender to the throne come January, when Mars enters its home sign of Aries, but most of the time either Jupiter or Saturn will rule the other planets until mid-April.
This Inferior Conjunction occurs during this period where we will have a “Bucket” Jones pattern. I discuss the Jones patterns at work in each Lunation article, so if you want to know more, please refer to the New and Full Moon articles in the archives between Feb and May when we had this pattern. Or use the site google box. In this one, the Moon is the handle, or nozzle, focusing all the other planetary energies, so expect some forceful and dynamic releases of heart energy!
So Just How Does the Process Work?
Though I’ve given you the general concepts in other retrograde articles, there’s so much misunderstanding that it bears repeating here. The Inferior Conjunction between Mercury and the Sun is the second step in a two-conjunction process. The first step is when Mercury conjuncts the Sun in forward motion after its retrograde period. This is called a “Superior conjunction.” Most recently this occurred at 29 Virgo on Sept 20-21, 2018.
That “fusion of life and mind” marked the beginning of Mercury getting out in front of the Sun. The period since then has brought us through a major transformational period, where we saw “the gestative power of the Ageless Wisdom,” and found techniques of educating and being educated on the mental-spiritual levels of existence. This reoriented our perspective, and we’ve been moving through a process of metamorphosis on a “practical-distributive” level of life since then.
Now, at the Inferior Conjunction, we’ve reached the end of the direct influence of that conjunction, and now will go into a process where some will remember people and unifying experiences in the past that are connected to something being reconsidered, researched, or rehearsed now, while others will remember old connections or renew connections with people and views from the past to come to a new understanding of a fellowship they once shared with others. The “pulses” of the Inferior and Superior conjunctions of the Sun and Mercury constitute an entire field of research unto themselves.
As Mercury is faster than the Sun at any “Superior Conjunction,” after that event Mind again outraces Life, gets ahead of the Sun, and explores ideas and perceptions of experiences yet to occur. That’s what we experienced between late September through early November before Mercury began to slow down.
After Mercury gets as far forward from the Sun as it can, it begins to slow, eventually going stationary retrograde. By then it is slowing rapidly. That marks the second step that leads to the point when Mercury again conjuncts the Sun while retrograde. This is when Mind is being absorbed by Life, or Life takes on the results of subconscious or collective ideas returning to source.
Then Mercury, still slow in speed, becomes distant from the Sun anew as the Sun moves forward while Mercury is still retrograde. Eventually Life gets as far from Mind as it can, Mercury goes stationary direct, and begins to speed up preparing for the first step anew in a different part of the zodiac. I explain this process in greater detail in A New Look at Mercury Retrograde.
Mercury, or Hermes, the “Guide of Souls”
All Mercury retrograde periods teach us about how Mercury functions. Mercury’s duality is “Life/Death,” so we can get a new look at how our consciousness and responses are either creative, destructive, or both, to cite the venerable Kabalistic Arhat Paul Foster Case. Mercury is where we learn if our mental processes are creating chaos and disorganized scattered conditions through ambivalence, and thus come to see how to use discernment to coordinate various functions to bring forth perfect knowing how to do whatever needs to be done.
As the backdrop to how our mind and life relate to each other, perhaps we can learn how to deal with Mercurial energies in ourselves or others from a different angle of view, organizing or reorganizing or ideas, perception, interpretations, and way of communicating. As this Inferior Conjunction falls in Sagittarius, it should provide us new ways to understand, communicate, or interpret the signs and signals of our future through looking back on fiery understanding and emergent developments which are breaking loose as we speak, and will accelerate in the very near future!
All in all, the coming 4 months will bring interesting returns, reflections, and rehearsals of how and what we’ve already dealt with in the realm of learning to use Sagittarius energy productively. This includes all the usual Sagittarius themes, such as opening to a greater truth, vision, life adventure, or understanding of “Fire by Friction” which keeps everything Light and warm. This can strengthen our past, present, and future connections with others, as long as we play the game by the rules with a sense of cooperation.
So the new views, understandings, and reinterpretations shown by this Inferior Conjunction should be considered in the light of the house in which this retrograde and inferior conjunction is happening. We can see our ideas from a different angle, find a new focus, and make progress in some form of transforming initiative that will be the source of much information and activity in the next few weeks. Wherever you have early Sagittarius will bring a fusion of Life and Mind.
Once the Inferior Conjunction happens, whatever has seemed delayed, postponed, or dragging along will move forward soon. This can bring forth a greater holistic vision of how events and people are connected, as well as why we must rethink some things, people, and plans.
Generally, the 11 days before the inferior conjunction (fusion) of mind and life is a good time to take a new look at how you can bring out your inner wisdom by adjusting to a future vision or broader perspective that's opening for you. It's also good for getting a new point of view regarding what your imagination is willing to consider and how to coordinate your life to reorganize it productively.
It's great for intuitive flashes, insights into the larger collective consciousness and unconsciousness, and seeing how you're being led to see elements of your Soul you may not have recognized before now. So think back on what's happened in the past couple of weeks, and find a new way to view how those things may symbolize the future somehow.
Just remember during retrogrades, especially Mercury retrograde, that often things that don't turn out one way lead directly or indirectly to other things somewhat related manifesting down the road. It's as though nothing should be taken at face value, and often what we do or think during Mercury retrograde creates odd echoes in the future that take different shapes, or different functions related to the original intention.
A New Look At Mercury Retrograde
Because we’ll still be dealing with Mercury retrograde through December 6 (and to some extent for the 2 weeks after that while Mercury is still in its shadow zone), if you haven’t already, you should get a copy of the 2nd edition of A New Look At Mercury Retrograde. It offers in-depth information about Mercury retrograde in the various signs and houses, and what the Mercury Retrograde phenomenon is about.
By knowing more about 2016’s Mercury retrograde periods in Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn, as well as the 2017 retrogrades in Capricorn and Sagittarius, Taurus and Aries, and Virgo and Leo, and 2018’s retrogrades in Aries, Leo, Sag and Scorpio, you may see patterns in what has been going on in your life, the different things you’ve been taking a new look at and why, and how this "looking back" has influenced your choices as you moved through past events. And, by taking a look at the qualities of the coming March 2019 RX in Pisces, you’ll get important information about what to expect in the months to come!
Here's the Amazon link to the page where you can order your paperback or ebook copy of A New Look at Mercury Retrograde. It is an invaluable resource for understanding past, present, and future Mercury retrogrades, so get your copy today. Just make sure you get the 2015 edition, and not the 1997 first edition, since the second is a far superior product!
If you want to go back to any of the previous articles in this series, they are linked at the bottom of this article:
Copyright © 2018 Robert Wilkinson
Glad to say cricket and religion going the same way...
Posted by: sue | November 27, 2018 at 09:04 AM
Great information, thanks Robert.
Blessings be to all.
Posted by: Nic | November 27, 2018 at 04:42 PM