MERCURY/CHIRON: The Trickster/Healer Mind

The words we use to express our worries and struggles, but also to laugh at life itself, can reveal more than we realise. Yet few of us ever think to look there for clues to our healing.

When Mercury contacts Chiron, we learn to follow our words as they form a trail of clues that can lead us to the origin of our shame-based wounds. As these two stellar bodies conjunct in Aries, we embark on a 12-month journey to gain clarity on the mental pathways to our wounds. Our core complaint, whether turned inward or aimed at others, will contain the seeds of the resolution we seek and to discover this, we just need to look inside. The objective is to unlock the thoughts and ideas that, whether willfully or unwittingly keep us in a rut, then replace them with ideas that assist us to evolve.

Understanding how traumatic memories are stored will shed some light on what happens to our words when we’re overwhelmed. Mercury rules the mind, the flurry of thoughts and ideas that circulate around us from which we draw upon to create the lexicon of our daily vocabulary. From the moment of our conception, through birth and early education, the repetitive language defined by our sensory perceptions begins to shape our brain and develop the neural pathways which become the pattern of our communication.

These patterns appear to be hardwired into the brain, and since they begin to be formed before we’re even born, we do not have a conscious choice in the development of our neural circuitry.

Naturally, our very specifically applied ‘neural coding’ contains all our programming – the mental hacks, loops and patches, indoctrinated into our minds primarily through our mother, father, relatives, teachers, preachers and media culture alike. Our mind is hence a sophisticated network of portals which connects our perceptive senses to a myriad of stored memories.

Our memory is hence divided into two main categories: assertive (conscious) and latent (unconscious). Assertive memory, also called explicit or narrative memory, is our dexterous ability to draw on facts or events consciously. It depends on our linear language system to identify, classify, and file away information and experiences which will later become retrievable memories. When we can consciously convert our memories into words and recall them as a part of our history, this is Mercury at work.

However, the unspoken experiences that reside in our unconscious mind are also all around us. These are the more abstract, less conventional symbol systems that inform us. They appear in our quirky language (like when we’re being ‘pious’, ‘nerdy’ or ‘cool’, etc.). They are also found in our cultural rituals, our art & music, our mysticism, our sacred healing ceremonies and rites of passage. This is also in this language used to express in our chronic symptoms, our wounds and inexplicable behaviours, which seem to surface in the repetitive struggles we face in our everyday experience of love and toil, especially when we feel stressed or are going through a period of transition or initiation.

These unspoken stories and experiences, stories of archetypal significance, are stored in our atavistic mind and form the basis of our core language. This is the domain of Chiron.

When our unconscious breaks down our door to be heard, we start to hear our core language. As Mercury and Chiron conjunct in Aries, we begin to hear the core complaint in our everyday language. It gets louder and more repetitive, and we look for the deepest thread of disturbance, shame or woundedness within the fabric of the words we speak.

These are the times to listen carefully for words that have a strong emotional resonance to them. Sometimes there is a debilitating fear that holds us captive. Sometimes there is an urgent quality of something that is being asked for or requested. Sometimes there’s just great pain.

If you feel anxious, isolated and alone, you may complain, “Nobody loves me”, or “Why has everyone rejected me? Am I not good enough? What is it about me that is failing to connect?”

Chiron brings out the Trickster in Mercury. The ‘Trickster’ or ‘Fool’ is a ceremonial character who, in the guise of the prankster or the shaman, initiates us into the higher mind. He connects us to our deepest atavistic memories; animalistic instincts which afford us the capacity to communicate through our core language. This process, or ritual, allows spiritual forces to take over the mind and guide our consciousness into unused or dormant neural pathways, allowing abstract, mythic or archetypal communication to become open, clear and fully accessible. It is here that we can universally identify the things that eat away at us.

In indigenous cultures, the jokers and tricksters were essential mediators between the mundane and the sacred realms. People could not relax enough to heal until they had laughed, because laughter opens the channels of compassion and forgiveness and frees us from rigid preconceptions and prejudices. Even today, we employ humour in our significant presentations. Hosts and MC’s of important events entertain by telling jokes and ironic stories to loosen up what may otherwise be a difficult transition. Even the most sacred ceremonies include some form of mind-trickery since the sacred often comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The joker/fool/trickster type, in most traditions, is essential to the initiation or birth. Naturally, our mind is equipped and ready to engage with this, even before we are born.

Through tapping into our trickster mind, we see how we are preprogrammed, acting on impulse, interrelating a vast memory of data into the whirling pool that is ‘our lives’ and somehow bringing order to it. Building a complex web of truths, deceptions, misconceptions and bluffs through our language, our mind is both creator and destroyer, giver and negator of truth. It holds the key to our sicknesses and healing.

Through the discernment of our euphemisms, ambivalent or negating words and phrases we repeat both to others and ourselves, we see how our trickster mind may often fool others, but always accomplishes to fool ourselves… Whilst the Mercurial ‘trickster mind’ distinguishes neither ‘good’ nor ‘evil’, it is responsible for creating the pathways to both. Our mind, on its own, possesses no value, moral or social… yet through its repetitious use of certain words, all values come into being in ways that either create wounds or open pathways to healing.

What are your thoughts made up of? How would your life be different if you ceased repeating worrying thoughts about things you can no longer control and focused your mind on the things you can? You can free yourself from futile worries by seeing the silliness or hopelessness in repeating thoughts that you can not affect, and take effective action on changing the thought patterns you know are negative or defeating you.