Intelligence

Intelligence in this scheme is narrower than mind. Where mind covers everything a person's attention does, intelligence is the rational faculty proper, the part Ptolemy assigns to Mercury alone, and this entry exists to keep that distinction visible.

Mercury is the smallest and fastest of the seven classical planets, never far from the Sun, and the tradition reads all of that as significant. It has no fixed nature of its own. It is masculine with masculine planets and feminine with feminine, diurnal when it rises before the Sun and nocturnal when it sets after it, benefic with benefics and malefic with malefics. No other planet is described this way. Mercury is the faculty that takes the shape of whatever it works on, which is a reasonable image of reason itself.

That adaptability is also why Mercury is the hardest planet to judge in isolation. A reading has to establish what Mercury is with before it can say what Mercury is. Mercury with Saturn gives a slow, deep and retentive intelligence; with Mars a sharp and combative one; with Jupiter a broad and doctrinal one; with Venus a graceful one; with the Moon a fluent and impressionable one.

The sign matters in the ordinary way. Mercury rules Gemini and Virgo and is exalted in Virgo, and the tradition counts it weakest in Sagittarius and Pisces, the signs opposite those.

The most consequential thing about Mercury in a chart is where it stands with respect to the Sun, because it can never stand far. Mercury's greatest elongation keeps it within about twenty eight degrees of the Sun, so it is always in the Sun's sign or one of the two adjacent, and often inside the Sun's beams.

The tradition builds a whole vocabulary on that fact. Mercury rising before the Sun is oriental, the morning star condition, and is read as a mind that runs ahead of the will, quick to formulate. Mercury setting after the Sun is occidental, the evening star condition, and is read as a mind that follows and reflects. Mercury within about eight and a half degrees of the Sun is combust and held to be badly weakened, its light swallowed. Mercury within about seventeen minutes of arc of the Sun's body is cazimi, in the heart of the Sun, and is held to be at its strongest of all.

Those two extremes sit less than a degree apart in the sky and opposite in judgement, which makes them a good test of whether a reader is following the tradition or improvising. There is no smooth gradient here. The doctrine holds that a planet destroyed by proximity is exalted by absolute proximity, and the authorities state it that way without softening it.

Sect enters again. Mercury takes the sect of whichever side of the Sun it falls on, so the same degree in a day chart and a night chart is not the same placement, and a description of intelligence that ignores this is describing half of what the technique claims to see.