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TWELVE PHASES OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE: GEMINI
With Gemini we come to the last phase of spring experience. The Day-force, which we saw rushing and bubbling in adolescent impetuosity like a mountain stream (Aries), has reached in Taurus the quieter level of plains fruitful with the work of man. The dynamic energy of nature has become organic power — energy put to use and made to assume a function in the economy of living. The adolescent has met his first loves. He has learnt to feel his way and to establish himself as an individual entity among his kin. He has learnt to give a somewhat formed expression to the ancestral forces welling up from his tradition. His now is the task of extending his capacity for human relationship — indeed, for all kinds of relationships, within himself and outside of himself. His whole being now yearns for a vivid extension of the sphere of his experience. Perhaps college life gives him full opportunity to meet many new comrades, to delve into many new kinds of thought, to experience new facets of himself in scattering the energy of his feelings among a multitude of unfamiliar objects and personalities.
The Night-force, at this Gemini stage, reaches its lowest ebb. It represents then the power of the family womb, of collective tradition, of all the subtle ties and habits which cling to the youth eager to emerge from every possible kind of bondage to the past in which he nevertheless has his roots. He refuses, as a rule, to acknowledge such a bondage; yet his buoyant and cocksure feeling of independence is mostly a negative reaction against things which still bind him in his subconscious depths. He gains his illusory freedom against the ancestral collectivity; while true liberation is freedom from that which has been consciously fulfilled, then dismissed as bondage while retained as substantial sustainment. The power of the Night-force is thus almost entirely negative in Gemini. It is inverted; it energizes more or less subtle psychological complexes which the youth, unaware of their existence, will project unwillingly upon the sensitive plate of his future home-life.
But the youth has no time to bother about complexes or to analyze the manner in which his eager desire to emerge from the set relations of his family life operates. All he seeks to do is to extend into new fields whatever means he has of associating his as yet uncertain sense of personality with a multiplicity of new factors. At the purely biological level, the raw materials of associative activity are impressions, nervous sensations, immediate reactions to impacts reaching the senses and the consciousness. At the level of the mind, remembrance, comparison, analysis, and the formation of mental images to be expressed through words, are phases of an activity which develops the intellect through the use of language. This development is originally contained in the sphere of the near environment and constantly referred to the individual who, through it, relates himself with an ever increasing number of facets of human nature.
In Gemini we see language in its incipient stage, mind being born with the creative fervor of the Day-force in springtime. We see the poet, the artist in words expressing his self for the sheer joy of building his own personality through the extension and the memorizing of particular experiences in relationship — the poet, not yet the philosopher; words that are rooted in images of the living and in personal experience, rather than in the search for universal meanings conditioned by social experience (Sagittarius).
In Sagittarius the Night-force operates with great intensity, and, as always, it manifests as a tendency to gather in many and distant factors through generalization. But, with the Day-force so vitally active in Gemini, the basic trend is one toward particularization and personalization. Thus the process of "vivid extension" which Gemini represents deals with extension in terms of particulars, of concrete experience; and the aim of this extension is the building of a personality and of a basis for the operation of personality: the home (Cancer).
At more complex levels of mental development we find the Gemini force manifesting as a craving for classification, for ordered enumeration, for logic; that is for structural patterns of association. The individual filled with the energy of the Day-force tends to be overwhelmed by the complexity of his personal experience. There is so much that is felt, touched, dimly sensed. The world is so full of flowers, the nights so sparkling, the fire of self flames forth in such intricate designs of living that some definite order must be evolved at any cost if the budding personality is not to be shattered by the very vividness of this "extension of being."
Thus Gemini must classify, must force into set categories the multiplicity of the things sensed, must produce words to help memorize the fragrance of fleeting experiences, must impose logical moulds upon the elusiveness of human contacts. It needs to find guiding lines of reference, a framework for its activities. Conveniently it discovers polar opposites, good and evil, right and wrong as compass-points by which to steer its course. It symbolizes personal feelings into cosmic entities. Exteriorize it must. And behold! the world is being peopled with gods and elementals, with demons and "Masters." Words they are; projections of experiences duly classified and to which names have been given — names which serve as screens to guard the immature personality from the shock of unexpected experiences and metamorphoses; names which are useful means to make one feel securely on familiar ground; props for the living.
This search for personal, intellectual security in the midst of ever-changing flow of experiences gave birth to Greek logic, to the syllogism, to classical European science as conceived by a Descartes. As man began to develop more autonomous and less instinctual forms of thinking, he found himself in an unfamiliar realm of psychological complexities and of mental transformations swift as lightning. Who could hold the evanescent thoughts? Who was not afraid of the strange pranks of the mind, of that mind whose dangerous uncertainties made it be called "the slayer of the Real"?
Logic was built — as "good and evil" were built — to give men more security in the midst of the bewildering flow of experiences summoned by the Day-force and its ever-shifting eagerness for new things, new sensations, new feelings, new thrills, new dreams. They were built, first, for the individuals who pioneered into the newly opened realms of personal psychological experience; realms soon to be filled with safeguards and tabus for the unwary or for the weak. Gods and syllogisms, Masters and algebras have been and still are necessary protections for men who are so insecure in their own individual identity, so close to the racial-biological womb of collective instincts, so easily swayed by the fumes of blood that the danger of "breakdown of personality" is always lurking in the shadowy darkness of the psyche.
Particular systems and set techniques originate in such a need which gave birth as well to all mythologies. The birth of full and free individual Personality is such a momentous happening in the evolutionary process of the universe that every phase of it must be prepared carefully. Words are safety devices; they reduce the unfamiliar to collective normality. Ethical systems and logic set limits beyond which catastrophe to the too daring person looms as a constant menace. All such structures are only fully developed as social factors during the Sagittarius phase of the cycle, but in Gemini the individual must originally create them. He creates them out of his vital personal need, with all the vividness of an imagination stirred by new relationships which can only be faced and related to past experiences if they are given names; he creates them as a poet. And originally every poet is a "Magician."
Gemini man is the bestower of names, thus the magician who can control nature-forces by uttering their "true names." Words of power, incantations, magical formulas are the earliest forms of poetry; and, in time, all culture flows from this first attempt at meeting with assurance and positive will the unfamiliar and the mysterious entities of the night. In Gemini, man feels already the incoming surge of the night-force. He knows he must face it. He prepares to build for himself a home to meet the stranger — who is also the Beloved. Personality in its fullness can come out only of such a meeting. And there are such dangerous possibilities to the self in that confrontation that it has to be circumscribed, walled in by more names and more tabus. Thus marriage, the home, monogamy and all the social-ethical regulations surrounding this meeting of the self and the other. However, the insecurity which Gemini feels is different in quality from that of the Aries period. It is not a vague fear of being drawn back into the past, but the very concrete realization that set structures and formulations must be built if what is being experienced is not to be utterly lost or is not to scatter the personality into a multiplicity of incoherent reactions to ever-new experiences.
A full understanding of what is implied in the activity of the human person during the Gemini phase of his experience should rest on the recognition of two basic types of organic relationships. It is because, during that phase, there is for every man the possibility of transferring the center of his consciousness from one type to the other that the psychological problems particular to Gemini arise.
The first type of relationship belongs to the realm of Taurus. It is earth-relationship, symbolized by the fact that every plant that grows on the surface of our planet is rooted in the same soil. As there is only one continuous crust of the earth (continuous even under the oceans) all plants are related to one another by their roots. The fir tree in the Rocky Mountains, the pine in Georgia and the oak in the European mountains all emerge from the same solid and compact earth-surface. Such a type of connection characterizes essentially all relationships which come under the Sign Taurus: relationship through the "roots" of the being (physical contact, food, sex, etc.) — relationship defined by a common bondage to the earth, and in general to the factor of "fruitful substance" at any conceivable level.
The other kind of unifying relationship is relationship through the air; the air which all living organisms breathe — be they plants, animals or human beings. We are all, actually and in concrete fact, united with every breathing organism. However separate and proud we may be in our feeling of superiority and decency as we walk along Park Avenue, we take willy-nilly in the innermost depths of our being (lungs and blood) the very same air which a moment ago has been breathed by a very dirty peddler, a prostitute or a criminal in the slums nearby. We might not ever think of being in the same room with these people, but the air they have breathed is now in our lungs. We cannot escape the relationship; for to do so would mean swift death. The narrow circle of our conscious relationships to other human beings is thus extended, against our will, by the air we breathe.
Air likewise unites us in our basic mode of expression, speech; for sound travels by means of air-waves. Air-waves relate us in our home to the airplane soaring a mile above, as we bear the sound of the engine. Air carries the pollen which gives us hay fever. However thick the walls of the fortified castle we build around our precious ego, however proud or selfish our "isolationism" — air laughs at these childish fancies of ours and compels us to be related, to be one with the very things we wish to escape. Air is therefore truly the element through which man may experience a basic "extension of relationships." And Gemini is known as the first of the "air signs" of the Zodiac.
A vivid extension of being through the constant search for ever new relationships: this is the essence of human experience in Gemini. This extension began at the biological level when the human hand emerged as a new evolutionary factor in the realm of living organisms. Indeed the hand — "ruled" by Gemini — is the primordial symbol of the human kingdom at the level of organic life. Through the use of the hand, man became a maker of tools. The variety of his experiences increased enormously as these tools enabled him to control and change his environment. New associations led to new patterns of relationship and to the progressive refinement of nervous reactions and nervous sensitiveness. From hands to nerves and to brains: this is a Gemini-controlled process of personality development. Along its course, man, the thinker-progeny of — man, the maker — is born.
In Aries, man does not experience thinking as an associative process based on the raw materials of his personal experience. He experiences "Ideas" — which strike him from above, or germinate within him as seeds from the past, seeds which belong to the phase of the previous cycle when the Night-force was dominant. Through Taurus, these ideas or inspirational revelations of meaning sink themselves into the substance of human feelings and organic reactions. Only in Gemini does thought really occur as a consistent and functional process of organic behavior under the direction of the Day-force.
Thinking controlled by the energy of the Day-force is quite a different thing from thinking dominated, in Sagittarius, by the Night-force. Gemini thinking is, on one hand, related to the needs of the personality, and on the other, it is something absorbed from the environment. It is learnt. At whatever level it might be, Gemini thinking is transmitted thinking; thinking which brings into concrete expression the impulses and inspirations experienced during the Aries period. It is verbal thinking conditioned by language. The Gemini thinker selects from the treasure-house of past civilizations words and concepts as means for him to grow as a personality. He thinks psychologically; whereas the typical Sagittarian thinks socially. And this is why Gemini is poet rather than philosopher. He builds with words, as the hands build with clay, stones and wood. But he builds because he personally must grow through that experience, because in that building he trains himself to function as an autonomous and consistent personality.
. . . College years; years of apprenticeship, of wanderings into new worlds, of being drawn and repelled by touch and smiles, deeply uncertain yet aggressively sure, the more set the less the flow of life seems seizable by hands and brains, projecting symbols, images, words to reassure oneself that one is knower and master — such is the Gemini phase: the entrance into the wide world of human society, the gates to the great experience of union with the Beloved.
