★ GEMINI ★

21 May – 21 June

Key phrase: “I think”.

The Gemini sign is always the centre of attention at any social gathering. Geminis are extremely articulate and know exactly what to ask, say, and do in any given situation. They are people-pleasers, and are very intuitive when it comes to reading others. Since their interests are spread over a large number of topics and issues, Geminis may find it hard to commit themselves to one particular passion. This is why they often fail to meet expectations at certain times.

Gemini signs are always interested in learning new things and meeting new people. They believe that committing to only one pursuit will result in missing out on other experiences. They can carry on a conversation with anyone about any given subject, and have the uncanny ability to argue their way out of any situation.

Since a Gemini is a people-person, he or she is always surrounded by a large number of people, which can make it difficult to attract the Gemini’s attention. They do not appreciate individuals who are frivolous in nature or overly conservative. Because they are so intelligent, if you cannot keep up with them in a conversation, a Gemini will quickly lose interest. Those ruled by the Gemini sign are often known to be shallow and superficial. Since their interests lie in a variety of topics, they find it hard to specialise in one particular field, both academically and professionally. This trait is also reflected in their personal relationships, as they are often unable to commit to just one partner. Ruled by the element of air, Gemini gets along best with fellow air signs such as Aquarius and Libra.

Gemini people are very curious and are well-aware of subjects that interest them. Therefore, if you enter into a debate with a Gemini, make sure you know your stuff well. Otherwise, a Gemini will shut you up before you can even say “but”.

Characteristics of Gemini

Your Sun Sign Revelations

Origin/Representation

Gemini is symbolised by twins. In Greek astrology, those twins were Castor and Pollux, twin stars in the sky and heroic brothers in myth. Castor was a great horseman, and Pollux was a champion boxer (ironic, because Gemini is not normally a violent sign). More commonly, the twins are thought of as bright children, which gives Gemini a sense of mirth, innocence, and great wonder.

Gemini is ruled by the planet Mercury, which symbolises great intelligence, communication (Mercury was the Messenger of the gods), eloquence, inquisitiveness, diversity, travel, speed, and changeability. If you are a Gemini, Wednesday is your lucky day (Mercredi in French), and your best colour is likely to be silver or grey.

Positive Qualities

First of all, you’re a great thinker. Many of the world’s intellectuals are Geminis. Your mind is insatiable – it’s so quick on the uptake that you can’t understand why everyone else is just now grasping what you got in a split second. In fact, by the time it takes them to catch up with you, your mind has become bored by the inactivity. You’ve already turned and twisted the knowledge around just to see what would happen, and to keep your mind active.

Some people mistake this playful brilliance as deception or dishonesty, because they can’t keep up with you. But you’re just trying to keep things interesting. Your mind needs to be fed with new ideas on a constant basis. Having recognised this at an early age, you’ve become remarkably adept at satisfying it. Wit is your forte. You love to laugh, because you’re so good at sharp humour. You’re particularly fond of puns and wordplay – Mercury rules writing, language, and a love of words – so you’re quite the social charmer.

You’re popular, and you know it. You enjoy people, and you love to watch them to keep your mind busy. You’re at your best at parties, bars, the office water cooler – anywhere you can find people with whom you can laugh. You thrive on gossip and news – you need information constantly, more even than food.

You’re an avid reader – again, because of your need for ideas and your love of words. In fact, you’re one of the few people who can read a book, watch TV, and talk on the phone all at the same time – you relish thinking on several levels at once.

You have a natural affinity for word puzzles – you’re unbeatable at Scrabble and a regular crossword solver – but you should consider using your language talents for more useful purposes. Learn a foreign language, or read more constructively for knowledge that will help you in the real world. You certainly have the aptitude for it – it’s just a question of applying yourself.

Many Geminis are multi-talented. The great thinker Jean-Paul Sartre (21 June) was a poet, novelist, and philosopher; John F. Kennedy (29 May) was not only a great president but also a respected author (Profiles in Courage) and one of America’s most gifted intellectuals. The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (5 June) showed his precocity by penning his most famous pieces at a young age, then, like a true Gemini, not content to rest on his laurels, continued to innovate and experiment to satisfy his own mind, at the expense of confusing the public. He even lectured on poetry at Harvard.

Trouble Areas

Since Gemini is represented by twins, some people believe the sign has a tendency towards schizophrenia, or at the very worst, a dishonest, two-faced character. The truth is, you’re probably just misunderstood. To you, it’s natural to think on two levels at once, but others can’t understand it. Similarly, your playfulness is easily misinterpreted as deceit, so be careful not to overdo it, and try to be more aware of others’ reactions to you. Quite often, you’re so busy entertaining, charming, and theorising that you don’t stop to notice the effect of your words – you’re too preoccupied with the next thought to see where the last one went.

As brilliant as your mind can be, you have to work to rein it in. Your attention wanders off a lot, as does your train of thought. Sartre can be lucid and penetrating on one page, then wander off on an errant tangent the next. If you organise your thoughts with more patience, your words will have more power. Otherwise, people are likely to react to you by saying things like, “That’s very interesting, but who cares?”

You tend to be careless in many ways. Gemini is an air sign, ruled by Mercury, both of which represent thoughts and ideas at the expense of feelings and sentimentality. So you are not easily hurt, but you can hurt others without even realising it. And since you have little patience, you have difficulty spending a long time with one person – you grow bored too easily – so your chances of settling down are limited unless you can tame this instinct and learn to appreciate a slower, richer experience. For this reason, divorce rates among Geminis are exceedingly high. (Even in Kennedy’s case, his wife Jackie was seemingly ideal from our perspective, yet she was not enough to keep his interest from wandering to the likes of Marilyn Monroe.)

Other signs of carelessness in Geminis include chronic unpunctuality, a tendency to change jobs as soon as the current one loses your interest, and a penchant for leaving projects unfinished. You are a sampler of everything, but a master of very few. You just can’t seem to devote yourself wholeheartedly to one area of expertise, so you never acquire the thorough depth of knowledge required for success in that field. You bob on the surface of life, but rarely dive into it too deeply.

Physical Qualities and Activities

Gemini is an air sign, and the fact that it’s ruled by Mercury also indicates speed. So you are most likely to be light and airy in many ways, including physical stature. You are slight and small-boned, but your most distinguishing features are your expressive eyes. They’re busy watching everything, so they react a lot, moving from side to side, even expanding and dilating.

You love music, and if you play, it probably involves finger work and air – the flute is a natural choice for you. Your favourite sport is likely to be tennis – it involves lots of movement and action, yet not so much that you have to work incredibly hard at it. It’s also social – not only as a way to have fun with a friend, but to see others at a tennis club.

Your sign rules the chest, lungs, arms, and hands, so these areas are particularly susceptible to ailments. You’re more likely to get a common cold than other people, so take extra measures to avoid it. You’re also prone to nervous disorders, so don’t overwork or overdo the caffeine. Light exercise – tennis, walking, skating, anything involving ease of movement and companionship that doesn’t demand hard work or extraordinary skill – is highly recommended for you.

Preferences

Variety is truly the spice of your life. You hate to wear the same types of clothes all the time. You prefer separates, so you can mix and match them.

Also, plain prints are boring to you – you’ll take a pattern of some kind, any kind, any day. Since movement is important, they must be light and comfortable. You don’t like dark colours, only wearing them when you absolutely have to, and you quite like grey.

Your home belongs in a populated area, with lots of windows, so you can see people. You hate missing out on what’s going on or being isolated. You also can’t stand being confined, so you must have lots of room to move around. You do tend to have plenty of books and magazines, though, thanks to your need to feed your mind and your love of words.

You like to change the interior layout often, because you think it’s boring for things to look the same all the time. You can also be quite fussy about where everything should be and how it looks – each room is colour-coordinated and arranged just so, and neatness is important. This is because your home is often the center of activity socially – you must entertain a great deal, so it’s vital that your home is impressive.

Food is not terribly important to you, except as a means to interact with people. You prefer to go out to lunch and dinner with company – eating alone is simply out of the question, because mealtime is your prime social hour. As a result, you do more talking than eating. You do enjoy lighter meals, and you especially like the variety of a buffet or salad bar. Heavier foods like steaks and roasts are definitely not your first choice you get bored chewing so much – but chicken or tuna is okay. Fortunately, overeating is not one of your chief concerns, unless it’s due to overstress – that’s when you have a tendency to abuse food, so be careful there.

Occupations/Financial Profile

There are many Geminis in the communications field – radio, TV, journalism, publishing, and the like – for several reasons. Mercury, your planetary ruler, presides over communications and your skill with words. And you demand variety in your job: if you’ve met its challenge, and it becomes routine, you feel the urge to move on to the next project. In the communications field, people move around constantly. It’s part of the deal. And in journalism, no day is ever the same twice- the hunger for information, the “newness” of news, keeps the famous Gemini restlessness content.

Geminis are also prevalent in the acting profession. The dual nature of the sign of the twins means that you can be yourself and a character at the same time. Plus, it allows your creativity to flourish, and you can move from project to project. Perhaps the only undesirable role would be in a long-running stage production, wherein you would have to repeat the same performance over and over for an extended period of time.

Famous Gemini actors include some of the best – Sir Laurence Olivier, John Wayne, Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks, Bob Hope (who used the Gemini way with words in his joke-telling), Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Tony Curtis.

Your other talent is social. Anything that involves lots of human contact is up your alley, be it sales, promotion, or buying. Your way with words is an asset as an account executive, salesperson, or marketing rep. This might get you a promotion, but you’re likely to get bored sitting behind a desk and long for the day-to-day human contact again.

Your love of words also can lead you to a career in literature, or perhaps even songwriting. Cole Porter, the master of clever wordplay in popular song lyrics, was born on June 9th. Literary Geminis include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the great poets Walt Whitman and William Butler Yeats.

You would be best served by finding a job that makes full use of your ingenuity, imagination, and love of ideas. Anything that requires quick thinking is also recommended, as long as it’s not repetitive. You do not want a job that’s static, or one that requires serious responsibility for the welfare of others (you’re approach to people is light and social, not heavy and responsible), or one that involves manual labour.

Financially, you’re as compulsive as you are in other areas. You are prone to capricious whims, so spending can easily be excessive. You’re the type of person, for instance, that doesn’t plan holidays – if you feel like flying off to Hawaii for a small vacation tomorrow, you’ll slap down a credit card and do it. Later, when it comes time to justify the bills, you’ve got a problem, and then you’re likely to avoid it and hope fate intervenes somehow. You think you’ll get a promotion later, or win the lottery, or inherit money, and pay it off later. Pretty soon you’re spending more on a shopping spree and getting further into debt, rationalizing it the same way. Obviously, this is not right. Your biggest challenge as a Gemini, in fact, could be keeping your financial binges in check. Train yourself to be more conservative with money.

One great way to turn this pattern around is to make your ingenuity work for you financially by creating money, not spending it. Think of new ways you can make money. Your mind is full of ideas – use them constructively. Perhaps a hobby can earn you money; if you’re a writer, as so many Geminis are, find new publications to sell your work to; if you’re in sales, think of a new approach that will generate new clients. You get the idea.

Love and Relationships

You are famous for your restlessness, especially in romance. You get bored easily, and as with other things in your life, you like to sample everything and everyone. Your best match is with Libra, who has just enough in common with you and just enough that’s different. Your whims and fancies will be much appreciated and understood by the sign that loves to love. You also fare well in long-term relationships with Aquarius, who also is just capricious enough for you. You may find yourself attracted to Leos at first, but this pairing is ultimately unstable.

Those you should avoid are Taurus (too slow for you), Cancer (too stable and domestic) and Pisces (too emotionally needy – you’d hurt them far too often).

Conclusion

Many people mistakenly believe that astrology only concerns the Sun. This is due to the Western world view of astrology, which has taken on the popular form of zodiac horoscopes. However, in truth the study of astrology goes well beyond Sun signs. The planets found on the astrological chart are the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

The purpose of this article is to introduce you to zodiac signs, to perhaps raise an eyebrow or two, and maybe make you smile. Zodiac Sun signs are based purely on generalisations and should NOT be confused with accurate birth chart astrology derived from your date, time and place of birth.