Part Two:
Twelve Phases of Human Experience
GEMINI - Page 1 of 3

With Gemini we come to the last phase of spring experience. The Day-force, which we saw rushing and bubbling in adolescent impetuosity like a mountain stream (Aries), has reached in Taurus the quieter level of plains fruitful with the work of man. The dynamic energy of nature has become organic power — energy put to use and made to assume a function in the economy of living. The adolescent has met his first loves. He has learnt to feel his way and to establish himself as an individual entity among his kin. He has learnt to give a somewhat formed expression to the ancestral forces welling up from his tradition. His now is the task of extending his capacity for human relationship — indeed, for all kinds of relationships, within himself and outside of himself. His whole being now yearns for a vivid extension of the sphere of his experience. Perhaps college life gives him full opportunity to meet many new comrades, to delve into many new kinds of thought, to experience new facets of himself in scattering the energy of his feelings among a multitude of unfamiliar objects and personalities.
      The Night-force, at this Gemini stage, reaches its lowest ebb. It represents then the power of the family womb, of collective tradition, of all the subtle ties and habits which cling to the youth eager to emerge from every possible kind of bondage to the past in which he nevertheless has his roots. He refuses, as a rule, to acknowledge such a bondage; yet his buoyant and cocksure feeling of independence is mostly a negative reaction against things which still bind him in his subconscious depths. He gains his illusory freedom against the ancestral collectivity; while true liberation is freedom from that which has been consciously fulfilled, then dismissed as bondage while retained as substantial sustainment. The power of the Night-force is thus almost entirely negative in Gemini. It is inverted; it energizes more or less subtle psychological complexes which the youth, unaware of their existence, will project unwillingly upon the sensitive plate of his future homelife.
      But the youth has no time to bother about complexes or to analyze the manner in which his eager desire to emerge from the set relations of his family life operates. All he seeks to do is to extend into new fields whatever means he has of associating his as yet uncertain sense of personality with a multiplicity of new factors. At the purely biological level, the raw materials of associative activity are impressions, nervous sensations, immediate reactions to impacts reaching the senses and the consciousness. At the level of the mind, remembrance, comparison, analysis, and the formation of mental images to be expressed through words, are phases of an activity which develops the intellect through the use of language. This development is originally contained in the sphere of the near environment and constantly referred to the individual who, through it, relates himself with an ever increasing number of facets of human nature.
      In Gemini we see language in its incipient stage, mind being born with the creative fervor of the Day-force in springtime. We see the poet, the artist in words expressing his self for the sheer joy of building his own personality through the extension and the memorizing of particular experiences in relationship — the poet, not yet the philosopher; words that are rooted in images of the living and in personal experience, rather than in the search for universal meanings conditioned by social experience (Sagittarius).
      In Sagittarius the Night-force operates with great intensity, and, as always, it manifests as a tendency to gather in many and distant factors through generalization. But, with the Day-force so vitally active in Gemini, the basic trend is one toward particularization and personalization. Thus the process of "vivid extension" which Gemini represents deals with extension in terms of particulars, of concrete experience; and the aim of this extension is the building of a personality and of a basis for the operation of personality: the home (Cancer).