Building Bridges

Mercury in the Minors

Let’s continue some exploration into the astrology of the Minor Arcana. I’ve been enjoying finding a common theme amongst the cards that share the same planetary influence. Previous posts have looked at the Moon, Mars, and Saturn. Today, we’ll talk Mercury. The cards associated with this planet are:

3 of Cups (Mercury in Cancer)

10 of Pentacles (Mercury in Virgo)

8 of Wands (Mercury in Sagittarius)

6 of Swords (Mercury in Aquarius)

5 of Pentacles (Mercury in Taurus)

The theme I’ve landed on with these cards is ‘Building Bridges’.

Mercury, in mythology, was a messenger between the gods, and also served as a psychopomp, guiding the dead to the afterlife. He was the god of communication, travel, and commerce. Mercury moves to connect, and has an ability to straddle worlds. In the Major Arcana, Mercury corresponds to the Magician, an archetype of creation that bridges thought and reality.

Photo by kyler trautner on Unsplash

So, let’s dig in a little to each of these minor cards with these theme of building bridges in mind.

3 of Cups

I like to think of all 3s as ‘welcoming’, and another common keyword for 3 is ‘expansive’. We welcome in experiences and people and encounters that will grow us. In 3 of Cups, we grow our circle of belonging through relationship. We build bridges towards other people. And we build bridges towards other parts of ourselves, so that no part feels ostracized or unwelcome in our own hearts.

10 of Pentacles

You’ve likely seen 10 of Pentacles talked about within the context of family history, genealogy, and inheritances. The ‘building bridges’ energy is strong here, in that we are connecting past and future with the work that we do. Sometimes that work is the creation of wealth in a literal way, which builds a bridge for future generations. But we build those bridges through inner work, too, with our ancestors and bloodlines: by connecting our wounds with theirs, and committing to healing them, we create a bridge that transcends time, and allows that healing to extend into the past and into the future.

8 of Wands

This is a card that often very literally represents messages being sent and received (as in emails, etc), and we could leave it there: to communicate a message is to build a bridge between one mind and another. I have seen this card come up many times to represent messages from the Divine—however you conceive of it. It comes up in readings when people are tuned in to communication from ‘beyond’ or ‘elsewhere’, so the bridge being built feels very classic Mercury, connecting two worlds.  

But there is more here in the deceptively simple 8 of Wands. Arthur Waite said this card could represent “arrows of love”, and I’ve adapted that for my own interpretations as ‘arrows of hope’: the 8 of Wands shows us building a bridge towards a future that is hopeful because we are seeding it with hope from the present moment. This card corresponds to Sagittarius, so think of the archer, sending arrows of hope towards a far-off horizon, where they will alight and grow (Wands are fire, of course) into a warm glow to welcome us when we arrive there.

6 of Swords

6 of Swords is another bridge being built between past and future: it is the liminal space of crossing and being far from either shore. It is the inbetween-time, and while we are crossing the bridge, we are also tasked with constructing it as we go: in 6 of Swords, we don’t know our destination. Our bridge to what’s next is built moment-by-moment, in faith.

There’s a bridge of communication in this card, as well. 6 of Swords often has a sorrowful edge: the passage in this card is away from something difficult, and while it’s presumably moving us towards something ‘better’, we often cannot see it. We see only the pain and the echos of the past we still carry with us. So, this card can come up because we need to call on someone else to hold the hope for us, who can see up and over our tale of sorrow towards the next chapter, and then tell us what they see. Ultimately, perhaps the bridge being built in this card is one between pain and healing.

5 of Pentacles

There’s always a ringer in the group, isn’t there? And this is the one that gave me pause when I was working with the idea of bridge building. First, we have to expand what 5 of Pentacles can mean. While it often shows up to represent struggle, lack of resources or energy, etc., there is a lot more to this card.

I remember when Roe was overturned, I did a lot of readings around what would happen, what the future would look like. I had a very significant moment when I drew 5 of Pentacles for what we’d be experiencing, and it felt very strangely comforting. I couldn’t quite explain it, because honestly, it probably would’ve been quite accurate to interpret it in a more ‘traditional’ way, as hardship. Certainly, my anxiety-brain was really attached to that interpretation. But something wiser was telling me that hardship wasn’t it: or, it was it, but it was what would be born of that hardship that I needed to focus on.

I was using the RWS at the time, and it’s a really important depiction of 5 of Pentacles. It shows two people in the cold, and in that moment, I was really encouraged about that, because it’s not lonely. There is a sharing in the hardship. The fact that these two figures are outside of a church could read as exile, and a condemnation of institutional religion, but here, I think of it as spiritual teachings finally doing their work, out in the real world, in the struggle. The bridge is built here, between spirituality as a feel-good thought exercise that happens INSIDE the sanctuary, shut away, and the boots-on-the-ground spirituality of being WITH one another in the struggle. 5 of Pentacles takes our purported beliefs and puts them to the test. Will our spirituality be an island, separate from the mainland of our everyday life, or can we build a bridge?

So, this card as representative of our post-Roe future, and of what we’ll encounter as we face all manner of struggles together, makes sense. It’s hard, AND we do it together.

I hope this bridge building theme makes some sense to you, and helps deepen your relationship with these cards. If you’d like to do an exercise around this that’s NOT Tarot-as-therapy, you can take out these 5 minor cards, and then for each one, draw 2 cards that represent the “shores”: what is this card building a bridge between? See how it aligns with what I’ve talked about here, and with your personal experience and understanding.

And for a more personal prompt:

I am building a bridge

From what is unhealed in me

Towards what can heal it  

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