Gemini Double Rainbow
New Moon notes
Gemini “My mind is …”
The Twins, Double Rainbow or Double Goddess, the Curious One, the Magician
Listen and be heard
Fine tune the vibration of your communication
Find stillness in the buzz, calm the nervous system
Allow your song to take flight
Be with friends, befriend yourself
Cross-pollinate
Quicksilver
The Magician
Gemini is like a magician, seeking to occupy the space between fixed realities. Gemini is air, mutable, and changeable. They are the trickster embodied as Mercury - that defies definition and keeps people guessing. Gemini has a youthful curiosity that also keeps people on their toes, not always knowing what will come next.
A society that operates from domination and control, likes to have things fit into tidy boxes arranged in a hierarchy. Gemini disrupts this confinement. Gemini reminds us that we contain multitudes.
The archetype of Gemini realizes that where there is two, there is also three. This refers to a third space illustrated by the Vesica Pisces of two overlapping circles. Something unique is created through the relationship of two beings that is not solely one or the other. This can also refer to the polarities within the individual self.
Image credit: Unknown, message the author to update credit
Beyond the Binary
Dualities come in pairs.
A binary way of thinking perceives reality in categories such as: good/bad, black/white, right/left, man/woman, heaven/earth, body/mind, day/night, logical/intuitive, light/shadow, etc.
These dualities do not allow for the full prismatic range of experience and expression. The binary leaves little room for nuance and complexity, and can trap the mind into either/or ways of thinking.
Even though Gemini is a pair of twins, there is a fluidity that encompasses the whole range of possibilities. Just like with the moon and the extremes of New and Full, there is another space that encompasses the whole range of possibilities between the two. Gemini knows that the approach of both+and is more expansive and leads to new discoveries.
GEMINI AS Double GoddesS
The book The Double Goddess, Women Sharing Power by Vicki Noble looks at sculptures and depictions of two figures, not in their duality, but in how they complement and support each other. There is an intimacy in the two-ness, a kind of bonding and relationship based in multiplicity.
Twin Idol from Alacahoyuk (Turkey) - 3rd Millenium BC
[Credit: Ankara Museum of Anatolia Civilizations]
These sculptures take the power back from the idea of being "two-faced" to actually being valued for being able to occupy the polarities and still be whole.
Noble writes: "The image of the Double Goddess is a vital missing piece for modern women, as it portrays the exquisite and unique bipolar existence in a positive, healthy way."
This has been pathologized and even demonized in modern society, but the figures of the Double Goddess make it appear that this wasn't always the case.
Noble describes this polarity as the innate back-and-forth mystery of ovulation and menstruation. Just like the extremes of the new and full moon, women* encompasses all the phases in-between.
"The Double Goddess in all her various forms depicts women in relationship with ourselves and one another... It is not so much about difference, but rather a mirroring of the differences within each of us.
At best, our twin selves are met and mirrored back in complexity and an experience of fluidity, a subtle shape-shifting dace, a kind of graceful "taking turns." Each of us is always oscillating between the yin and yang of our own individual internal polarity; although we may tend towards one pole or the other, we are actually both, and constantly changing."
Greek Myth of Gemini the Twins
Gemini communicates from the space of complexity and possibility. Gemini is divine and mortal. One of the many ancient stories of twins that informs this Gemini archetype comes from Greek myth of Castor and Pollux.
These Gemini twins were a part of a fourfold quaternity all born from Leda, the Queen of Sparta. Leda produced two eggs that each contained a pair of twins: one egg had Pollux and Helen (divine twins from Zeus); and the other egg had Castor and Clytemnestra (mortal twins from King Tyndareus).
Image of Castor and Pollux known as the Dioscuri (sons of Zeus)
In the book Mythic Astrology, Ariel Guttman and Kenneth Johnson write: "Sometimes the Gemini process involved the challenge of having a soulmate on another plane. Like Castor and Pollux, the mortal one having died." The Magician sees no separation between life/death as a binary, but rather as a continuum.
When Castor was killed in a fight with another set of twins, he had to go to Hades as a mortal. His half-brother twin Pollux was grief-stricken and asked Zeus to bring Castor back. Zeus took pity on his son and offered to give half his immortality to his brother. The twins were reunited and transformed into the constellation Gemini, but had to divide their time between Hades and Olympus.
Gemini can teach us to integrate the part that feels missing - the “other half” - as already existing within the self. As we learn how to transmit ideas and communicate between the realms, we can expand beyond the binary to acknowledge and integrate the polarities within.
Article composed and compiled by April McMurtry for THE MOON IS MY CALENDAR
Sources: Mythic Astrology: Archetypal Powers in the Horoscope by Ariel Guttman and Kenneth Johnson
Zodiac Myths: The Story Behind Gemini Jessica Davidson Blog Post
The Double Goddess, Women Sharing Power by Vicki Noble
