If I had to pick an archetypal embodiment of Gemini, it would be the Bards, those ancient and modern storytellers and wisdom-keepers who inspire their people with imagination and hope. Bards understand what people are going through - they create, paint, dance and communicate what they see through stories and songs to help people connect to the great Mystery of Life. This is Gemini's soul task -- to experience, learn, remember and share cultural wisdom. The Beatles are modern Bards, passing along to the rest of us music and stories which embodied the new vision of life we were exploring in the 60s. They gave us a new template for life.
What happens when our collective wisdom no longer serves life? What happens when there is a split between our beliefs and our actions? That's when Bards and their stories become important. They take us to the archetypal realms, to the rich storehouse of ancient wisdom that can help us accept and embody our individual purpose and power.
Something new arises. A new perspective achieved. Growth. Consciousness.
The Sign of Gemini
The sign of Gemini, the divine and mortal
Twins, not only speaks to how we learn and perceive the world, but also
symbolizes our dualistic world, the 0's and 1's of our binary code. Our fifteen billion year old universe gave
rise to the dualities of life and so we perceive things through the lens of day
and night, sun and moon, good and evil, life and death, conscious and
unconscious, right and left, male and female.
In Tarot, Gemini is represented by the major arcana card, The Lovers. When we look at the possible meanings of the Lovers, they all hint at the union of opposites, the great alchemical transformation which gives rise to the Self, the Divine consciousness within us. Gemini and The Lovers seek synthesis, combining the head and the heart, feeling and intellect. And they represent male and female coming together as two equal, complementary and yet opposite energies. And of course, this bond includes sexuality, which is the most intimate form of bond between these opposites. What forms the real bond, though, is Love, the divine connector.
Unfortunately, patriarchy through its religious institutions has marginalized the truth of love at the same time as it has glorified it. How can it be otherwise when the only god-image we are allowed is masculine? Our old patriarchal paradigm of partnership is innately imbalanced, giving greater weight to masculine, rational, solar consciousness than to feminine, imaginative, lunar consciousness. Love and relationship are the most sacred experiences of Life, and yet as we see in the myth of Psyche and Eros , we are most often left to stumble into love without any real knowledge of how to act and what it means. Our world is sorely in need of a new paradigm of partnership, an equal and balanced union of masculine and feminine consciousness, of left and right brains, and of men and women.
This imbalance between the sexes and modes of consciousness has given rise to a dominator mentality, regarding life and love. Raine Eisler's Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth and the Politics of the Body, lays out how important it is to understand the way society uses pain or pleasure to motivate human behavior, which determines how it evolves. Traditional Christian imagery, which is the basis of western civilization, sacralizes pain rather than pleasure, especially in choosing Christ Crucified rather than the Risen Christ as their central god-image. Women's bodies and sexuality have been demonized by Christianity and therefore rigidly controlled. And so, we have a society where there is mistrust between men and women and control issues in our sexual relationships because of this longstanding religious mistrust.
Ms. Eisler speaks about two different models of sexuality, the dominator model and the partnership model. In the dominator model, men dominate women and other men through fear and force. They equate sexuality and pleasure with pain and domination -- i.e., violence and pornography -- and block the natural bonding that the giving and receiving of sexual pleasure brings. The partnership model is based on equality between all people, but especially between men and women, and the bonding through sexual pleasure is held sacred.
When men and women work together, nothing can stop us. But we've been separated for a long time now by religious belief, domination and violence, genetic inheritance and soul history. The power generated in equal measure by masculine and feminine spirit can enliven the re-birth process we so desperately need for ourselves and our world. Conscious women and men working together can re-birth the world.
So for Gemini's movie theme of the union of opposites, we'll let the story of LadyHawke enchant our minds and open our hearts to the possibility of breaking this ancient curse between the sexes and reclaiming the most powerful gift of life -- LOVE.
