Hi there and welcome this is Amanda the founder of Astrology Hub and you're listening

to our week ahead snapshot with world- astrologer, historian, and author of the

cosmic calendar Christopher Renstrom. This show is designed to give you a quick

overview of the week ahead, enabling you the gift of choice and how you navigate and weave these energies into your daily life.

Enjoy.

Hello. Hello, my name is Christopher Wrenstrop, and I'm your weekly horoscope columnist here on Astrology Hub. And this week, I wanted to talk to you about Mercury, the planet of thought and communication, entering the Zodiac sign of Virgo on August 11th.

Now, this is a pretty important transition that might not strike most people as being like that

because most people have a tendency to sort of give Mercury Short Shrift. It's a very fast moving planet, changes signs on a pretty regular basis, and it's entering the zodiac sign of Virgo, which is kind of like, hmm. I mean, when people often think of Mercury and Virgo they often think of someone who might

communicate in a way that's critical, overly analytical, nagging, parochial, and obsessed with technicalities and details. But boy, do they have that wrong?

First of all, Mercury in Virgo is an extraordinary placement and it has a placement in that sign that no other planet repeats in the entire zodiac.

Not only is Mercury in domicile, meaning at home when it's in the zodiac sign of Virgo, but it's also exalted. That means celebrated in this sign. Now technically why is Mercury exalted in the zodiac sign of Virgo?

Well, it's really quite simple. Mercury rules the two signs that bookend the luminaries in the planetary

in the astrological lineup. So in other words the moon rules cancer, the sun rules Leo, and Mercury appears in the two signs that that flank these signs.

Mercury rules Gemini on the Kansarian side, and Mercury rules Virgo on the Leo side and so this is where mercury becomes exalted because it's closest to the sun here. And so it speaks the mind of the sun and is

and is educated in its ways, which then lends itself to the idea of being a planet of education, training, and teaching,

but we'll get to that in another talk. What I really want to focus on here is Mercury in Virgo and how so much of its placement there is misunderstood.

First of all, we need to talk about the zodiac sign of Virgo. Virgo is the only zodiac sign that is portrayed as a woman.

This is coming out of 2,500 years of astrology which spent most of its time in a civilization that was more patriarchal than it was matriarchal.

So it doesn't come as any great surprise that there would be one zodiac sign attributed to a woman,

which is quite remarkable in that even one sign was attributed to a woman.

Now, it could be debated that, well, you know,

we don't really know the gender of the crab

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