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‘Mint is a green frost, a spring chill, a pouring of cold water on new shoots. Mint is a cleaning, a making way. Awake, awake!’
– Maeg Keane ‘The Freshest: Mercury & Peppermint’
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Plant: Peppermint
Planet: The Sun + Mercury
Dates: 23 August – 3 September
Tarot: 8 of Pentacles, The Hermit
Key themes: daily wonders, mundane magic, ancient traditions
Audio potion:
This atmosphere is guided by Mercurial movement, freshness, and clarity. As I record these words, I am drinking fresh mint tea, and tasting its clarity and coolness on my tongue. Mercury is a messenger between time and space; a symbol of new ideas coming through but those ideas are from traditions, dailiness and practice.
Clarity, comes from clara, or clair, meaning light. The Hermit, who rules this atmosphere, is known for their lantern – a light that shows new pathways, while guided by deep time and tradition.
In the Modern Witch tarot deck, the Hermit’s lantern is the glowing screen of a laptop. This is an internet hermit, with a dizzying amount of history at their fingertips.
The Hermit is in a safe container, one that expands their consciousness rather than numbing it, one that offers protection instead of restriction. The colours are deep and lovely, soft velvety black and greys that fall in swathes and feel so different from the jagged, abyssal blacks of some of the other cards such as the Ten of Swords.
Mercury is also connected to the Hermit in their guise as psychopomp; someone who can move between the living and the dead. As T. Susan Chang says of this decan, ‘into the lightless depths of the earth, Hermes guides the newly dead, for the Hermit knows even forsaken places well, and his ever-present lantern shows the way.’
Maeg Keane writes that mint is a herb of Mercury, and like many other aromatic herbs it is, ‘associated with the Underworld, perhaps because they are used in funerary rites for protection, blessings, sanitation, and to mask the smell of the dead […] For these reasons, you might imagine mint as drawing out Mercury’s psychopompic attributes.’
Mint is not only a plant of the underworld, but also of happier ceremonies. ‘Folkard (1884) recounts that mint was once called Herba bona and Herba sancta. It was traditionally used in ceremonial practices, such as weaving garlands for brides—referred to as Corona Veneris. Later, mint was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, receiving the name Herba Sanctæ Mariæ. It was also a common custom to strew churches with mint or other herbs or flowers.’
– Rossi, Andrea, & Corbett, Sarah. (2024). Peppermint Monograph. Rowan + Sage
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Virgo I syllabus
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The Sunken Hum is an artwork that exemplifies this atmosphere. It is a sound archive of every single day of one year. The sounds that emerge into the artist’s everyday life become a public project. This is a piece about what it means to be a hermit on the internet, steeped in technology, paying attention, and archiving experience.
Here are two of my favourite entries.
https://soundcloud.com/sunkenhumsounddiary/the-sunken-hum-broadcast-213?in=sunkenhumsounddiary/sets/selections-from-the-sunken-hum
https://soundcloud.com/sunkenhumsounddiary/the-sunken-hum-broadcast-69?in=sunkenhumsounddiary/sets/selections-from-the-sunken-hum
This book is about a single day in the life of a student working on an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Annabel has a meticulously planned routine for her day – work, yoga, meditation, long walks; no apples after meals, no coffee on an empty stomach – but finds it repeatedly thrown off course. Despite her efforts, she cannot stop her thoughts slipping off their intended track into the shadows of elaborate erotic fantasies.