Ask Jeanna | on gemini & sagittarius: the axis of information

Earlier this year, I received a gorgeous question from someone in the astrology for writers Discord:

I’ve been really interested lately in what we can learn from polarities between signs and how working with the energy of a sign’s opposite can help us move toward healing. I’m thinking especially in terms of nodal placements but also generally. Could you talk through a little about what opposing signs can learn from each other? I have a good handle on Virgo-Pisces, Cap-Cancer, and Aries-Libra (tho would love to hear your thoughts), but Aqua-Leo, Scorpio-Taurus and esp esp Sag-Gemini are a little opaque to me still.

This question has inspired a series devoted to each of the six zodiacal pairs, because to explore the polarities/axes of the six zodiacal pairs is to understand the whole of human experience. We began this series with on aries & libra & also the nodes, which articulated Aries & Libra as The Axis of Positionality as well as my more academic/theoretical take on the nodes and why I’m not especially considering them for this series. We then explored Taurus & Scorpio, which I frame as The Axis of Desire & Control.

Before we dive into our third pair, Gemini & Sagittarius, permit me to repeat myself, since some folks are new here, or haven’t read the prior installment(s):

There are 12 zodiac signs. Of these, there are 6 pairs of opposing signs, called “opposing” because they are 180* away from each other. The pairs always come in complementary elements (air and fire; earth and water), and they are always of the same modality (cardinal, fixed, mutable).

We each, all of us, have every sign in our birth chart. Personally, I find that the signs folks are most uncomfortable with, or critical of, are usually reflective of the part of their chart they are most uncomfortable with and critical of. Understanding the axis on which these signs reside deepens our understanding of not only the signs, but also of how the chart works together as a whole.

With all that said, let us proceed further into the zodiac — with a more in-depth analysis than usual that includes digressions on queer history.

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Gemini & Sagittarius: The Axis of Information

Air & fire; mutable (signs that come at the end of, and so transition, seasons)

The poet and the philosopher. The gossip and the zealot. Both, collectors of ideas and people. Information is the shared central concern of Gemini and Sagittarius, although the way they share insights and data with their respective networks is quite different. Ruled by Mercury (Gemini) and Jupiter (Sagittarius), we have strong contrast here between the specific and the universal, the local and the collective.

It’s long been notable to me that a higher-than-average number of prominent rappers and poets have sun signs on this axis. The Gemini sun club is mind-boggling: Kanye, Kendrick, Tupac, Biggie, Ice Cube, Andre 3000, and Macklemore alongside barrier-breaking Gwendolyn Brooks and similarly single-named luminaries like Emerson, Whitman, Yeats, and Ginsberg. The Sagittarians are also strongly represented by rappers like Jay-Z, DMX, Nicki Minaj, and Mos Def and poets such as William Blake, John Milton, and Emily Dickinson. Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, lauded for their poetic songwriting, have Sagittarius suns; so do the boundary-pushing Janelle Monáe and (late, great) Sinéad O’Connor.

Language and image as information. As historical record. As what is available to slip in and out of the margins. As what is possible to braid into hair or sing in a spiritual, or to signal to others with a handkerchief in your back pocket or a blue star tattoo on the wrist.

Six years ago (what is time?!), I reported on the “Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50” anniversary exhibit at the New York Public Library’s main branch. I was given a guided tour by the team that had put the exhibit together and attended the opening night party, where well-connected New York City gays danced and drank, their energy so similar to that captured in the exhibit photographs. I was stunned at the exhibit’s breadth and depth of our history, shown materially. At the zines and flyers and texts of an underground people, creating culture in the moment and of the moment.

Queers are folk born without a history — or at least, without a direct connection to it. Any queer or trans person knows you have to go looking for queer ancestors. You have to learn to see what is subtext, what is unspoken, what is hiding in plain sight: “Your great-great aunt never married, but lived with her best friend all her life.” Something a relative quite literally wrote in one of my own family genealogies. “They were roommates” is a joke among queers rooted in a painful history of relationships and desire between same-sex couples being de-fanged under the auspices of friendship in a society where sodomy was actively criminalized. Oscar Wilde is the rare literary ancestor we can unequivocally claim as one of ours, without historians hemming and hawing, precisely because he was prosecuted and imprisoned by the state for his sexuality. Ultimately, to discover and then participate in queer culture is a process of intention and self-education.

And education, and the networks that enable information sharing, is the purview of Mercury and Jupiter, especially in their guises of Gemini and Sagittarius. Mercury delights in the slippage, a queer they/them trickster defying rules of gender and sect. Jupiter, I sometimes imagine as a big bear daddy, like Nick Offerman’s character in The Last Of Us, a wisdom-keeper who reminds the mercurial twinks in P-Town or Fire Island to take prep while also laying out queer theory for his undergraduate students. To Mercury and Jupiter, information itself is neutral. Mercury and Jupiter are more interested in the court record, the debtors’ bill, the writ of divorce as a method of trace than as a method of moral judgment. In this, it is also notable to me that Mercury has long been the patron of the criminalized, while Jupiter has long been a patron of the legal system.

Gemini and Sagittarius invite us to ask, who is the criminal and who is the judge? (What is our internal critic criminalizing and/or judging? What information is being excluded from the public record this time? What philosophies and poetics are being pushed to the margin? How might you slip information through a fascist policy, or find a way to signal to Those Who Know amidst book bans?

I’ll leave you with this, from Gemini sun Walt Whitman, who once wrote in “Calamus,” published in Leaves of Grass in 1855, more than a century before Stonewall,

Or, if you will be thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I feel the throbs of your heart… /
For thus, merely touching you, is enough— it is best,
And thus touching you, would I silently slope and be
Carried eternally