Mind

The mind in this vocabulary is not a single faculty and it does not have a single significator. It is read from Mercury and the Moon in combination, and the division of labour between them is worth learning, because it is the most useful thing traditional astrology has to say about cognition.

Mercury is the deliberate part. It governs reasoning, speech, writing, calculation, argument, and any skill that has to be trained. It is what a person does with their attention on purpose.

The Moon is the receptive part. It governs impression, memory, imagination, appetite and mood, and it moves faster than anything else in the chart, which is why the tradition uses it for whatever changes on a short cycle. It is what a person's attention does when it is not being directed.

A reading takes both and then takes their relation. Mercury conjunct the Moon describes a mind whose reasoning is saturated with impression. Mercury in aversion to the Moon, meaning in a sign that cannot see the Moon's sign at all, describes one where the two operate without reference to each other. The traditional term for that condition, aversion, is more precise than the modern habit of calling a planet isolated, because it names a specific geometric relation rather than an absence. Both significators are read for condition before they are read for content.

Having two significators is only half the method. The other half is the list of conditions the tradition applies to each of them, and the list is the same for every planet in the chart, which is what makes traditional astrology teachable.

The questions are these. Is the planet in a sign it rules, exalts in, or is debilitated in. Is it in an angular, succedent or cadent place, which fixes how strongly it acts. Is it direct in motion, stationary, or retrograde. Is it free of the Sun's beams, or hidden under them. Is it aspected by a benefic, by a malefic, or by both, and does the aspect apply or separate. Is it of the chart's sect or against it.

Applied to Mercury and the Moon, that list produces a description of a mind which is specific without being flattering or unflattering. A retrograde Mercury is not a defective one; the tradition reads it as a mind that turns back over its own ground. A Moon in the beams of the Sun is not a damaged one; it is one whose impressions are hard to see because something brighter stands in the way.

The value in this for a modern reader is the discipline of it. Condition is established before meaning is assigned, and a description arrived at that way is at least consistent from chart to chart, which is more than can be said for the impressionistic method that often replaced it.