Have you ever beheld the sight of someone riding on the back of a horse?

There’s the prestige of height—people who ride horses seem immeasurably tall. They tower us, ready to knock us over. There’s the speed. Before we had things like cars and motorcycles or even bicycles, I reckon we were pretty impressed with the speed of a horse. There’s also the sensitivity of horses. Horses are leaping beings who startle at the sight of a fallen tree, who seem superstitiously attached to their landscape.

Now, imagine Hermes riding on the back of a horse. What kinds of things would he see? What would he get up to? How might he direct or refuse to direct the horse that he is riding?

Now, Mercury is in detriment in Sagittarius. This is not a home for Mercury. Hermes doesn’t know how to ride a horse. He’s never been taught. Or, rather, he doesn’t know how to domesticate a horse. When Mercury rides a horse, Mercury doesn’t merely walk or patrol or drag a package out to its destination. Mercury gallops. It listens superstitiously.

Mercury in Sagittarius is a Mercury that starts talking about one thing in order to get elsewhere. It starts talking about cacti and it’s really talking about the end of the world. Mercury in Sagittarius lives in outer space. It doesn’t know how to come down to earth.

You feel the height of Mercury in Sagittarius when speaking with one. You feel the bewilderment of faith, of believing in things that no rationally cynical person would ever believe in. Mercury in Sagittarius has a way about itself. You find one speaking about the power of friendship and the potential to change the world not in the trite way that mass produced classroom posters demanded of children but in a whiplash way that moved the inspiration that you once thought you killed.

Mercury in Sagittarius isn’t satisfied with what is. No, it believes too strongly in potential. It seeks to understand what has yet to be understood.

Mercury in Sagittarius looks at someone, at something, at the world and it sees the potential to become something different, something better, something more loving and more beautiful. Don’t speak to Mercury in Sagittarius about being stuck in your small ideas of what things are and what they are not. Mercury in Sagittarius has no time for all of that. They have no time for personal drama, for pettiness, and they have no time for balancing the weekly checkbook. They see the boredom of things that have already happened and it bores them. They are obsessed with a world that is in the process of becoming.

This is what falling in love feels like for Mercury in Sagittarius. There must always be potential in love. Their lover must look at them and be willing to, with them, glance at the person who they have yet to live as.

Mercury in Sagittarius is a Mercury that creates itself through humility. It doesn’t need to know everything about a thing. It doesn’t identify with expertise. It believes itself to be somewhat of a hack and it is also willing to fully enjoy itself as a hack. It loves the feeling of piecing something together that it really doesn’t know how to do. Mercury in Sagittarius loves learning.

Like some kind of unashamed pupil, Mercury in Sagittarius asks questions. It asks questions about fucking everything. It asks you questions that you never thought a single moment about. It asks questions that you hoped someone would ask. It asks you questions that you hoped no one would ask. It asks questions as though it knows absolutely nothing about the world we live in.

If you ask a Mercury in Sagittarius who knows the least about a subject in a room, it will most likely give you a big, warm roar of laughter and point its finger at itself. This, again, is not permission for you to underestimate Mercury in Sagittarius. This has to do with Mercury in Sagittarius’s ability to see potential. It cares little for the things that it already knows. It has all the time in the world for the potential to know more and it feels the immensity of that potential like a boat feels the beckon of the wide sea.

This Mercury needs no lighthouse. It needs no map. It needs no direction. It just goes. It sets off. It goes as far as it can go. That is the point of it. It wants to see how far we can go.

Have you ever stepped off a very fast moving vehicle such as a car or a plane and thought to yourself “Where the hell am I now?” That’s the feeling that Mercury in Sagittarius chases.

Mercury in Sagittarius is a laidback Mercury. It doesn’t give the appearance of knowing anything at all. It’s the Ashton Kutcher of Mercuries. It leans back and asks you “Dude…where’s my car?” It’s goal is not to move us all into a place where we know everything there is to know about the world but a place where we know absolutely nothing. That is where Mercury in Sagittarius, with all of its stories and metaphors and questions, is heading.

Mercury in Sagittarius is a Mercury that heads everywhere because it is trying to go nowhere. There’s something that comes very easily to Mercury when it is in Sagittarius and that is the ability to unlearn something the way other people might accrue facts. This is why it seeks to disturb, why it overlaps the heart wrenching with the hilarious. It so easily unlearns the proper way to conduct oneself and it is always, always left with the task of making everything new out of everything that was never there in the first place.