Sun, moon and stars

I should qualify the following as pure entertainment... I don't believe in horoscopes. I am, however, very good at suspending disbelief temporarily for the purposes of fun. Patterns and systems are my life, and I always enjoy dissecting and reassembling structures just to see how they work; that holds true for myths and belief systems is well as techinal or logical ones.

In the same way that I can discuss Dagny's shooting of the guard as inconsistent with the larger philosophy of Ayn Rand, I can comment on the self-consistency or lack thereof in destinies determined by the movements of cosmic entities as perceived from Earth. The despairing fact that either is taken seriously by large numbers of people is a topic for another time.

My birthday is June 28th - that's Stonewall for the uninitiated - but I was due June 4th. Yes, I was 24 days late, and was only born the 28th because the doctor induced labor (he picked a Tuesday because it would be a slower day for the hospital). I may not have been a planned pregnancy - my mother was actually told she'd never be able to carry to term after my sister's difficult primi birth and her subsequent miscarriage if she could get pregnant at all, which was doubtful - but I was a rigidly scheduled birth.

Because of my doctor's concern for hospital regimen, I was born under the sign of Cancer. The full chart is here. Most people would say this fits me to a T. I probably wouldn't argue much.

Interestingly, though, my hobbies, interests, and whimsy have always focused on Hermes, the messenger in Greek mythology and their incarnation of the trickster god (like Loki, Coyote, etc.). Hermes represents the synchronistic - the patterns that seemingly emerge out of chaos - and also contradictions: as the patron god of both travelers and thieves, he embodies a dichotomy with which I identify heavily (most people don't know this, but as a youth my serious and silly sides were so distinct that one therapist considered a diagnosis of schizophrenia).

In Roman mythos, Hermes is Mercury - and Mercury is the ruling planet of Gemini, which would have been my birth sign had I been born "on time." Of course, the dualistic nature of Gemini embraces the fact that I could be Cancer as well, but maybe that's going just a little too far down the rabbit hole.

The upshot of all this if that, whenever I'm presented with horoscopes, I always read both Cancer and Gemini to see which "fits" better. Interestingly, it's almost always Gemini.

Of course, now I'm going to be working at an institute that fights cancer. Maybe Gemini isn't so accommodating after all.