☿Mercury

How you take information in and how it leaves you. Mercury is the interpreter — the pace of your sentences, what you notice first, the kind of sense you make. Two people with strong Mercury contact never run out of conversation.

Overdone, it is cleverness as evasion — talking circles around the thing instead of saying it.

Hermes was hours old when he climbed out of his cradle, stole Apollo's cattle, walked them backward so the tracks lied, and then invented the lyre from a tortoise shell — and talked his way out of the whole affair so charmingly that Apollo traded him the herd for the instrument. The gods made him the messenger because he could cross every border: Olympus, earth, even the underworld. That is Mercury in a chart: the border-crosser — the wit that connects rooms that were never supposed to touch, and a tongue quick enough to get its owner into and out of the same trouble.