Watch out. What you know could soon become valuable. Even with entire disciplines encoded into software, what you carry in your head and heart could become more important than ever. Even if robots take over entire fields of work, what you know could be necessary if anything is to work.

For what you know goes beyond skill sets. Whether you are comfortable with it or not, you have a conscience, which discerns between right and wrong. In addition, you have an ability to see what’s important beyond considerations of power. You also know how to appraise value that has nothing to do with price.

In spite of being born into, growing up in and having to make your own way through a world in which death, profit and politics hold sway, you know the importance of a single human life. You can see the future in a baby. You appreciate kindness, treasure love, and comprehend grace. Such are the manifestations of human culture that have truly distinguished us from the machines and machinations we have created.

It is what you know that will ultimately make a difference if you do not allow yourself to forget it. It is what allowed small bands of our ancestors to survive in a big world. It is the same knowledge that will allow a huge global population to go on living in a world suddenly grown smaller.

In the same way we can see an encouraging implication of Mercury entering Capricorn seconds after 9:34 pm EST tomorrow (2:34:10 UTC Thursday). For among the things versatile Mercury represents is mind, where knowledge is processed. By the same token, among the realities Capricorn corresponds to are the cultural institutions that for so long have preserved, protected and passed on the knowledge that allowed our kind to get this far.

In the short period of time since Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008, many of those institutions have been revealed to have either decayed or otherwise betrayed their purpose. Whether it is organized religion, government, schools, justice, health care, public safety or any other of the large organizations that combine to create society on a large scale, dysfunction is undeniably more the rule than the exception. This, in spite of so many people just like you who devote their lives to serving in good faith, somehow holding on to what they believe in while holding things together in a system gone awry.

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Perhaps an elite few have hijacked cultural institutions for their own purpose. Maybe those vast foundations of social structure have somehow taken on a robotic life of their own.

Regardless of what is behind what can only be called a crisis, this foray of Mercury into Capricorn will implicitly require both your innate and acquired knowledge to both understand and address how we all came to this pretty pass, and also how to survive it.

That’s because most of the next Mercury retrograde will take place in Capricorn. Yes, Mercury’s apparent reversal will appropriately begin in the second degree of Aquarius, the sign of groups (especially those in service to the group) on Jan. 5, 2016.

But most of Mercury’s thorough review will be emblematically moving through the hallowed halls constructed for — and the sacred ground set aside for — a common good. This at a time when the cause of serving all of us in common appears to have been set aside in favor of power, profit and politics — particularly as practiced by those who have forgotten what made them human. Which is how you are being called upon to remember and express your humanity while acting on your conscience. It is nothing less than the symbolic imperative of Mercury’s impending ingress to Capricorn.

If not you, who? If not now, when?

Offered In Service

By Amanda Painter

Last week, two major volcanoes put on impressive shows with their eruptions: Mt. Etna in Sicily, which is regularly active, and Momotombo in Nicaragua (for the first time in 110 years). Unsurprisingly, they serve as fitting illustrations for this week’s astrology — and the way that creative and destructive forces coexist, even within the same event.

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By Sarah Taylor

There have been a lot of Sword cards in recent readings. That means a lot of “mind”: your thoughts, your beliefs, your self-talk, the rules and regulations — official and unofficial — you set up with yourself and others.

Stay with me here as we move into Qabalah 101 — this reading gets a little technical, but I believe it’s worth the time spent on it.

Two of Swords, Ace of Disks, Ten of Swords from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

Swords govern the plane of the intellect and how you express that in words. Exercised with grace and elegance, you get insightful observation, discernment, negotiation, and wisdom. In other words, when it’s informed by your creative capacity (the Wands as an initiating force), and delivered with heart (the Cups that follow on from Wands), then Swords as the third suit is an expression of your inner alignment.

But, being the third suit along, there’s so much more to reckon with when you arrive in the land of the blade: the balancing act gets more demanding. It asks you for skillful precision if you are to keep that alignment of creativity, heart and mind. Think of the shift between juggling with two balls, and then adding a third. It tends to up the stakes a little.

Today, that balancing act is expressed in these three cards. The first card and the third card are the first and last active Swords cards: they run the range of experiences you can have with your mind, Two through Ten. They also flank the Ace of Disks: the potential that is birthed from your thoughts, as the first card of the fourth and final suit, Disks — the one that deals with material reality.

Disks are “earth”; they are the descent into matter. All of the other suits are the ingredients that you’ve mixed together to be able to experience yourself as a body interacting with a world.

So. You know that saying about your thoughts creating your reality? You are slap-bang in the middle of being able to see this, to understand this, to live it out. You may not know it, but you are the magician of your own life. And as a magician, you are not simply passive: you have agency.

And you’re being asked to assume that agency. As the third suit in the tarot deck, Swords are denser, and so they are more obvious. You can access Swords much more easily than you can Wands or Cups. And there’s a downside to this: it is far easier to neglect the presence of Wands and Cups in your life than it is Swords. Mind seems to rule if it is left unchecked. It can dampen your energy; it can interfere with your heart. To take back your agency, today’s reading is saying this to you:

Stop relying exclusively on your mind. You cannot think your way into this one, or out of it. You can go for “Peace,” you can go for “Ruin.” Or you can choose not to identify fully with either, and understand that they are simply one part of a far larger experience.

The possibility exists that you can acknowledge and embrace every aspect of your mind without holding it as the only thing that matters.

Where is the energy that moves through your body, the initiator of everything? Can you let it run free, knowing it moves with its own wisdom? Where is the space that you give to your feelings — the ones that make themselves known before you have time to label and pigeon-hole them? Can you feel them without needing to know what you’re feeling?

And then, finally, can you use your mind as a collaborator with your creativity and your heart, to express the truth of both without distorting them? To honour their integrity with no need to second-guess them out of existence?

To speak your truth, even if it makes you tremble?

To give shape to your world, even if it asks more of you than you thought (note: thought) possible?

There is a time for Peace and a time for Ruin. But no creation of yours needs to be caught up exclusively in either. That’s not what your mind is there for. Your mind is there to sift and make sense of something that has already been called into existence. Your mind is there to discern and then to direct, not judge and coerce.

The Ace of Disks holds a significant amount of potential. It is no less than the sum total of what was called into existence through you some time ago. The mind has its role to play, but it is by no means the headlining act. This is an ensemble piece rather than a star vehicle for your mental gymnastics.

When your mind grasps because it absolutely has to know! — step back and see if your heart has something to say. If your mind wants to turn on you, and tell you that you’re a failure, disengage if you can and track the flow of your energy.

When that moment comes that everything falls into place — when it not only makes sense, but you feel sense — you don’t have to be moved into action by a fear that you have somehow missed out or that you’re letting things slip through your fingers. No. Find a higher ground; a higher vision. Find that star that has been calling to you through space and time. You can’t command it to come to you, and you don’t need to.

You, and it, are one and the same thing. Separation has only ever been a mental construct.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Two of Swords (Moon in Libra), Ace of Disks (the pure, limitless potential of earth), Ten of Swords (Sun in Gemini)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.