When the Sun enters Gemini sunlight becomes the undisputed protagonist of the season. In the previous air sign of Aquarius, we experience the dawn of the year, celebrated at Imbolc or Candlemas. There, the pale white light of winter breaks through the expanses of snow and ice.
Gemini instead announces the return of the light in all its power and glory, leading us little by little towards the summer. The sunlight begins to hurt the gaze here, or at least that’s what usually happens.
Here in Europe, we are living a kind of second autumn. Temperatures are still very low, and when the sun pierces through the rainy clouds it feels like having an epiphany of sort. They all complain about the weather, that’s able to change the mood even to not weather-affected people. We all need more sunlight, we all want spring to come back.
(CUT & TUrned Upside down)
A lot of things are happening during the Sun’s stay in Gemini. As we discussed in previous articles, Jupiter has recently entered Pisces. On top of that we are already in the shadow zone of the second Mercury Retrograde period of the year, happening right in Gemini. And lastly Eclipses first season is going to open with a Total Lunar Eclipse in Sagittarius, taking place on May 26th during Vesak, a Buddhist festival.
In this article we are going to continue our journey through the Virtues of the Zodiac as described by Rudolf Steiner, talking about the qualities of Gemini.
Perseverance becomes Faithfulness
Gemini is all about change and exchange. Without any doubt Perseverance isn’t something that comes easy to this sign. Its purpose is indeed to connect things together. Not surprisingly, its ruler Mercury tends to jump from one thing to another with a light step and a light heart. Like the wind, he comes and goes easily and carelessly.
For this reason Perseverance becomes something precious to this sign. We can see how much children with a sanguine temperament (Air Element) struggle with being consistent. The Spirit has to intervene in order to bring balance, turning a weak spot into a strength.
But how is it possible? How can a flaky person become more consistent? Usually the virtue of the month matures into a quality, or Power of the Soul. Perseverance becomes Faithfulness. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that Faithfulness is not only the result of this process. It is the moral strength that allows Gemini to become better in the first place.
On one hand, being Faithful to something or someone comes with a sense of integrity. It’s like a compass, pointing to a a stable reference. On the other hand, persevering for a long time turns into a sort of psychological investment. We don’t want to loose it, we now see the results of our efforts.
Perseverance becomes Faithfulness, and being Faithful helps us to persevere. All this when the Soul takes a material perspective. But let’s now talk a little bit more about Perseverance from a spiritual perspective.
Loving what you Do
The Spiritual Way to Be Consistent
“I acknowledge no external principle of my action, because I have found in myself
the ground for my action, in other words, my love of the action”
— Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom Ch. X
In our everyday life, we can persevere in our actions by drawing our motivation from many different things. We can be driven by ambition, fear, desire, and so on. All these things are basically focusing their attention on a goal, on something we want to achieve.
And there is nothing wrong with that per se. However in my opinion we really need to recognize that this way of looking at things belongs to the Physical World and not to the Spiritual World. Setting goals and moving towards them is part of our earthly existence. It follows a materialistic logic which everybody has to deal with on a daily basis.
I’m not blindly condemning materialism by saying this. Being in the Physical World we need to fit to its laws. And that implies that the soul has to set goals and follow them. It’s normal, and it is completely justified since we have to live in the Physical World. But we also need to be honest to ourselves.
From a spiritual perspective ambition and pursuing goals have no value. Even if we are setting high spiritual achievements and we are dedicating our life to them, it doesn’t matter. If we are trying to pursue them as, let’s say, a career we are not tuning in with the laws of the Spiritual World. We are continuing to assume a materialistic mentality, without realizing that we are simply directing it towards a different, “more spiritual” object. So what does it mean assuming a spiritual mentality?
Love of the Action
The only thing that has value for the spiritual world is loving what you are doing. When we love what we do, we stop focusing on results. We become completely identified with the action itself. We focus on it and we dedicate ourselves completely to it. Simply because we love it.
This means that we are getting our reward from the process itself, not from its result. Being aware of this is extremely important, especially if we want to understand Perseverance from a spiritual perspective.
Only if we love what we are doing we are going to return to it, over and over again. Perseverance really becomes Faithfulness, but we are going to be faithful to ourselves, to our own spirit. We become faithful to the Love of our Actions. And this is precisely in Anthroposophical terms what makes us free spiritual individuals.
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I consider myself a free researcher in western spiritual disciplines, in particular Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy and the Neoplatonic Hermetic tradition. I have a three-year training in Astrology at the CIDA delegation of Trieste, the Italian Center for Astrological Disciplines. I graduated in Computer Engineering from the University of Trieste.
