So, Mercury is very prominent in my chart, associated with how I show up in the external world, and very happy and effective in its home sign of Gemini. My Sun and Venus placements – just “before” Mercury in my chart, in the previous house – are also fine.

Right after Mercury, though, there’s a section of my chart that’s much less comfortable. Mercury likes to be in Gemini; Jupiter doesn’t, and my Gemini Jupiter is the apex planet in a yod, or perhaps two. I don’t yet know the correct way to describe this configuration, but Jupiter is making a yod with both a Pluto-Neptune sextile and a Pluto-Saturn sextile at the bottom of my chart. My Neptune and Saturn are in strong conjunction.

Aspects are an area where I still have lots to learn – if I haven’t made it clear lately, this is a good time to emphasize that I’m a learner, not an expert! But I do know roughly what a yod means. Sometimes called a “finger of God” or a “finger of fate,” it’s thought to represent a unique “spiritual assignment” whose fulfillment involves a lot of challenge and friction.

I am planning to devote the upcoming Full Moon in Sagittarius to connecting with my Gemini Jupiter, like I dedicated the New Moon in Gemini to Mercury. I probably won’t write it up in the same way, but we’ll see.

Just before that full moon this year, Jupiter will be moving into Cancer – the sign of its exaltation, a place where it tends to be very happy – and that seems like a good time to seek support in unpacking some of my natal Jupiter’s challenges. It’s also a sign where I have some more uncomfortable stuff in my birth chart, namely the wound associated with Chiron (the wounded healer) and my Mars, which functions much better these days but is still in its fall in Cancer.

Naturally I’m going to spend time researching yods as preparation for that exercise, but before I get too far with that, I thought it might be fun to make some semi-educated guesses based on what I know right now. So here we go!

Pluto represents death and rebirth. Potent transformation. Mine (like my whole generation’s) is in its domicile of Scorpio. In my case, it’s in the third house, which is the house that corresponds to Gemini.

In my chart, Pluto is down there sextiling both Neptune and Saturn – both in Capricorn, but in the Fourth and Fifth Houses respectively. That’s the “base” of the yod’s triangle, with Jupiter in Gemini as the point of the triangle at the top.

The sextiles suggest that in terms of the necessary transformation connected to Pluto, my Neptune and Saturn are potential allies. A sextile is a supportive aspect, but not as effortless as a trine; if you want to make good use of it, you have to make some effort to learn how. A conscious, intentional use of Neptune’s mystical visioning combined with Saturn’s grounding, supportive structure makes a lot of sense to me in this context; when I use these tools well, I get good results in Scorpio and Pluto’s spheres.

However, I can think of at least two notable occasions where things in that arena went badly wrong, and I think I can see the tension with Gemini-Jupiter in how they went wrong. The way things went wrong, in simplest terms, is “too much change, and/or too fast.”

On one occasion – facing a brief health scare as an agnostic in my early twenties, and reckoning unexpectedly with my childhood terror of going to hell – I could do nothing but fixate on visions of hellfire for a couple of months. The fact that I couldn’t categorically disprove hell, which was my very dominant Mercury’s preferred solution, became a real problem. I didn’t think the afterlife was like that, but… what if?!?!

This event remains my most traumatic dark night of the soul to date, and even though I did eventually come to a solution that enabled me to sleep and eat and work again, the solution wasn’t ideal in retrospect. Symbolically, I leaned very hard on the Saturn side and shut down big parts of Neptune and Jupiter’s domains completely; I decided that basically all religious, mystical, or spiritual thinking was well-intended-but-often-dangerous nonsense, and I stuck hard to that view for about 10 years.

The second time things went really wrong was mercifully much briefer – less than 24 hours – and it went very much in the other direction. It turns out that if you turn off the whole spiritual side of yourself for many years, and then try to turn that tap back on “just a little bit”…

Well, particularly right after getting big news that prompts you to question a whole lifetime of deep insecurities all at once – and particularly if you unwisely throw WAY more THC into the mix than you intended (cannabis is legal where I live, but for heaven’s sake check the THC content on the label EVERY TIME if you’re going to indulge) – you might not get just a little bit out of that tap. In fact, you might end up with a brief interlude of psychosis that starts with enormous delusions of grandeur, and then makes you think someone’s plotting to murder your family for a little while. Obviously, this is neither fun nor functional.

Unpleasant though both of these experiences were, they were certainly significant. When I see that yod in my chart, that’s where my intuition goes, and I really hope to be better prepared and more stable the next time some sort of intense spiritual reckoning happens – which probably means figuring out how to manage Jupiter’s influence better. As well as, you know, never smoking that much weed ever again, which I haven’t.

Come to think of it, not exercising that kind of restraint without the dramatic wake-up call of a psychiatric emergency might be a Jupiter problem too.