The 3rd House – How Do You Communicate?

How do you express all that stuff swirling around in your mind…

How do you share your thoughts, views, perceptions, observations, your thought out feelings, etc, with others…

How do you blog, or tweet, or instagram, snapchat, email, text, or do Facebook?

And how would you answer those questions, how would you communicate your answers to me or anyone else who asked you questions like that?

If you were using astrology you might refer to the zodiac sign on the cusp on the 3rd house, or the planets placed therein if you had any there, because in astrology the 3rd house gives you an idea of your communication style…

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and may also show which vessels of communication you prefer – pictures, words, movement, etc.

The mind and mental process is also shown by the planet Mercury in astrology, and when delving into the system of astrology and the system of your mind it is usually a good idea to start with your Mercury, the sign it is in, then the house it is in, what it aspects… and once you feel you’ve got a grasp of that, you then look at the 3rd house, what sign is on the cusp, where the ruler of that sign is located, and what planets reside therein (don’t worry if you don’t have planets in the 3rd house – this does not mean you’re any less of a thinker or communicator).

As I was pondering how to do this astrology series which I seem to be doing…

(I’ve kind of forgotten why I decided to do this…

I have Neptune in the 3rd house and it can cause quite a bit of confusion and confused thinking, as well as forgetfulness which is a useful thing if you want to be confused…

and a couple of astrologers have linked its placement in the 3rd house to ‘learning disabilities’ such as Dyslexia – which I have. I put learning disabilities in inverted commas because I’m still not convinced having Dyslexia is a disability, it does affect learning in the conventional view of that practice but most people with Dyslexia aren’t stupid in the conventional sense of that word so we must be learning something – like how narrow minded people can be with their interpretations and thus the labels they slap onto others. Frankly when I tell people I have Dyslexia, and I often do this if I’m trying to ease communication between us particularly if they’re teaching me something… the blank expression on their face and awkward pause informs me that they have no idea what Dyslexia is, and this means what I just shared with them will most likely now cause them to speak slower and louder, which isn’t helpful).

…one of the thoughts which swirled in my mind was that since I’m not an astrologer I probably shouldn’t be writing astrology posts. What I’m sharing in my astrology posts may only confuse people seeking astrological information because I’m not being precise, I’m not sticking to the format which astrologers tend to follow, and I’ll only gum up the results of someone’s search (which is something I find frustrating when doing a search and getting loads of results which are not about what I’m seeking)…

this particular pondering was dismissed by my Mars in the 3rd house who tends to say – Do you want to do it? If yes, then fuck it, just do it – whenever I’m confusing myself by undermining myself, doubting myself, getting lost in how perfect and precise I imagine everyone else to be (even though I know from experience that most of those people I thought were perfect and precise… aren’t) if they were to do it, and generally making a Neptune mess in my mind.

My Mars can make me seem like an arrogant know-it-all who will forcefully flatten anyone that decides to question me and what I’m communicating, and with Mars in Scorpio (and Scorpio on the cusp of my 3rd house and pretty much hogging the whole house to itself, with a smidgen of Sagittarius at the tail end of it) other people may experience my mind as a knife-wielding assassin (or is that just my experience of it).

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If Mars and Neptune in Scorpio in the 3rd house were a fictional character they’d be River Tam from Firefly – she is both dopey and dangerous, incredibly naive and piercingly clever, sweet and spicy, docile and fierce, sensitive and ruthless.

If you’ve never seen Firefly… WHY!?!

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But – fuck it, just do it – only has so much power to persuade me to pursue a course of action, and its energy often peters out before the action has completed its course.

My Mercury is in Aquarius in the 5th house (of creative play) and one of the things it does is leave things unfinished… although to be fair to it, it has finished with whatever it is so the unfinished thing is finished as far as I am concerned… it’s just not finished finished (according to conventional interpretations of finished).

This particular tendency of mine caused a lot of friction between me and my mother (who had Mercury in Virgo and definitely leant towards the picky perfectionist who has impossibly high standards and will judge you harshly for not living up to their vision of how things and people should be and will criticise and nag you relentlessly to try and make you live up to your ‘potential’ side of that placement). She was the sort of person who breaks you to fix you. Her frustration with my never finishing anything drove her nuts (albeit she was already nuts so she was being driven home) left me with an issue about my natural tendencies and for a long time I tried to fight what came naturally because I learned (learning is connected to the 3rd house) that who I was naturally, the way that I was as is, was wrong and had to be fixed so that it would be right… but doing what was supposed to be right never felt right and because it wasn’t right for me I ended up doing things wrong anyway.

While I could lay all of the blame on my mother for screwing with my mind and how it works… her influence and effect can be seen in my chart (particularly if I use transits – Pluto and Uranus would have been transiting my 3rd when I was growing up and they are often harbingers of trauma). My Mars squares my Mercury and my interpretation for this aspect is – I argue a lot with myself. So my mother’s constant criticism was something which affected me because it tapped into something I was already prone to being affected by, to doing – picking on myself – and therefore I simply added her problem with my mind to the problems which my mind has with itself. She just echoed what was already there.

If you look at the typical astrological interpretations for Mars square Mercury (which in my opinion tend to describe how others experience a person with Mars square Mercury more than it describes how someone with that aspect experiences it) you can see why someone like my mother would feel compelled to ‘put me in my place’, criticise me, and generally tell me that the way I’m doings things, thinking, being, etc, is wrong (although she did that with everyone – her chart had a strong Leo/Virgo signature). Mars square Mercury people tend to be rather bolshy and bolshy people tend to inspire others with the need to crush the bolshy.

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excerpt via Astrology King: Mercury Square Mars Natal and Transit

The last bit of this interpretation made me chuckle… apparently I could become a skilled knife thrower. How cool is that! Which reminds me… I used to sleep with a knife under my bed (I won’t explain why and instead will leave it to your imagination) until I became paranoid (a Mars in Scorpio tendency) that I would sleepwalk stab my mother and while that would have been satisfying and would have resolved some issues which I had with her, it would have also been problematic… I mean it would have been a very bad thing. Killing people is a bad thing to do (filed under notes to self a long time ago) even if they’re killing you bit by tiny bit every day in every way…

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When exploring your natal chart, it’s important to keep in mind that:

1 – Your natal can’t tell you who you are.

It can’t tell you who someone else is either by looking at their natal chart.  For instance my partner also has Mercury in Virgo (you’d think that after my experience with my mother I would have avoided Mercury in Virgo people… but we’re sometimes drawn to the familiar and unfinished business) and while his mind can be a picky perfectionist he does it in a manner which is completely different from the way my mother did it – he channels it into his work and it works very well for him. He doesn’t pick on people the way that my mother did, he is incredibly sensitive towards others and is sometimes far too soft on them (he has a Cancer Moon). My experience with him has been almost the exact opposite of my experience with my mother – thanks to his encouragement I blog (so it’s his fault I’m online cluttering it up with my rambles and babbling).

What the system of astrology gives you is a set of parameters which you can use to figure yourself out, get to know yourself better. It’s basically a way to have a conversation with yourself about yourself.

You can use systems like the MBTI in a similar manner.

Sometimes reading an interpretation for a natal placement which is completely NOT YOU is far more useful than reading an interpretation which seems to nails you on the head (OUCH!), because reading something which is OH SO ME can make us mentally lazy – someone else has said it all, done all the work for you, you don’t need to do anything yourself and you just accept it because it captures you.

You know who you are, but sometimes that knowledge needs a system to help it take shape.

2 – A natal chart is an interactive drawing – you interact with it, an astrologer who reads your chart for you will interact with it (and with you too unless they’re a computer program) and their personal astro will play a part in how they interpret your personal astro (even if they claim to be neutral – that’s most likely their astro talking and making that claim), and all the placements interact with each other through aspects, rulerships, angles, the relationships between signs and whole host of other things.

So when reading what my Neptune in Scorpio in the 3rd house means for me, about me, about my mind, my thinking and communication style… after I’ve explored the basics of Neptune in Scorpio and Neptune in the 3rd house, and Scorpio in the 3rd, I will also need to look at where Pisces is located (as Neptune rules Pisces) and what’s going on in the 12th house (the home of Neptune and Pisces on the Zodiac wheel). In my chart I have Venus in Pisces and Moon in the 12th house and these planets aspect my Neptune in what is known as a T-square (even though it’s a triangle).

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My natal Neptune is rather busy spreading its tentacles of illusion, imagination, delusion, daydream, and diffusion (or did I mean defusion) everywhere in my chart. I did a quick search just now to find an astrologer’s interpretation of a T-square involving Neptune, Venus and Moon and of the two which popped up first in the results one wouldn’t load (typical Neptune glitch) and the other spoke of how hard Neptune can be to pin down because it is so nebulous… in my chart it looks like Neptune is pinning itself down with aspects.

An interesting aspect is the one it makes to the MC (midheaven) – the MC (and the 10th house of which the MC is the threshold) is what astrologers look at to pinpoint possible career and vocational options. Mine’s in Gemini so an astrologer would probably tell me that I should pursue a career in writing, publishing, communication related work of some sort. With Neptune in opposition to it… me writing an astrology post for my blog even though I’m not an astrologer and may muddy the waters with what I share is… exactly what I should be doing, maybe, perhaps, or something like that.

Neptune in the 3rd spreading itself by so many aspects (as though giving a piece of my mind to other placements in the chart) explains for me why I regularly have a hard time concentrating, why time is never of the essence because time doesn’t really exist, why things get scrambled in my mind often creating interesting shapes and patterns as though the confusion is revealing something hidden which would not have been noticed if everything was neat and tidy and unscrambled… I sometimes have to feel my way through the dark, swim through the nebula, fall into the abyss and keep falling until it spits me out…

If Mars and Neptune in Scorpio in the 3rd house were a sign, they be this one…

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… and it would either make you want to come in, join in, test your mettle by running the gauntlet or make you stay out, run away.

That’s enough now… this post is finished.

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The series thus far:

How To (probably NOT) Read Your Astrology Chart

The Rising Sign and 1st House – The Face of Me, me, me

The 2nd House – What is Mine, Mine, Mine