Every 20 years or so, Jupiter and Saturn meet. Every 200 years or so, that meeting changes elements. And roughly every 800 years, the whole cycle comes back around to where it started. On December 21, 2020, one of those larger shifts occurred: the conjunction landed at 0 degrees Aquarius, opening a new Air cycle and closing out the Earth cycle that had shaped the collective mood since the early 1800s.
The air signs, Aquarius, Libra, Gemini, govern the movement of data and ideas: networks, communication, education, trade, mobility, collective coordination. It seems almost too fitting that this Air cycle opened in Aquarius, the sign modern astrology most associates with technology, distributed systems, reform, and the shape of things to come. The current Air-cycle conjunctions began in 2020; the last time astrology saw a comparable shift into Air was roughly 800 years earlier, around the 12th or 13th century. The next conjunction in this series arrives in 2040.
No planet speaks to this Air-cycle territory quite like Mercury. Swift-footed, androgynous, forever moving between worlds, Mercury rules speech, writing, signals, learning, travel, cognition, curiosity, and thought itself. The Greeks called him Hermes and made him messenger to the gods.
I’ve said before that I find astrological language remarkably elegant, but the symbols themselves may be even more so, a handful of lines, circles, and curves somehow carrying enormous depth of meaning. Here’s the glyph for Mercury:
I’ve led a meditation group since 2013, and if you’ve spent time with the practice, you know its central aim: turning attention inward. Over years of sitting, I’ve watched something shift, you stop being swept along by every thought, and start observing them instead, almost from a distance. My theory is that this reflects a deepening connection to the soul, and a loosening grip on the mind’s more mechanical habits. In silence, I believe we brush up against something older than thought, the place where everything begins. My favorite question to ask people is simple: “Where do your thoughts come from?” No one has ever given me a real answer. Mostly just a shrug, an “I don’t know.” As it turns out, the glyph for Mercury has something to say about that very question.
Look closely at the glyph and you’ll see three shapes fused into one. At the bottom, a cross: matter, incarnation, the physical world. It rises into a circle: spirit, consciousness, the solar principle. And at the very top, a crescent: soul, receptivity, the lunar or psychic principle.
crescent + circle + cross
Soul, spirit, and matter, are linked in a single symbol. The result of that linkage is thought itself, which we then translate into speech, writing, commerce, technique, action. It’s a small miracle, really. And doesn’t that crescent at the top look a little like a satellite dish perched on a roof? Both, fittingly, mark the point where something is received.
Another way to say it:
consciousness + receptivity + physical form
Barely a week goes by now without a new headline announcing that science has discovered consciousness might exist outside the brain, that it’s nonlocal rather than manufactured by neural tissue. A 2025 paper by Uppsala University materials-science professor Maria Stromme makes this case directly, proposing consciousness as a foundational, universal field, with individual awareness as a localized expression of it.
I’ll resist being too snarky about it, but welcome to what astrology has understood for millennia.
Astrology has always treated the human form as a receiver: each of us a unique satellite dish, tuned to our own frequency, picking up the endless stream of archetypal energy that flows through the collective unconscious. We take that signal in and, through our Mercury filters, turn it into image, emotion, story, and the situations through which we make meaning.
Our souls are eternal. When they choose to incarnate as spirit, they remain tethered to that same collective field as the satellite dish, again carrying knowledge into this life as we move through matter and grow toward a higher level of awareness.
soul’s impressions → spirit’s meaning → material expression
So, the next time you see the glyph for Mercury, pause on it a moment. A simple stack of three shapes and in it, a bigger answer to where our thoughts come from, and who we really are.