Seven years or so in each sign makes this the property of a birth cohort. The most recent group arrived in the early 1940s and the next is due in the 2030s; the eighty-four year cycle keeps the pattern recurring. Such windows coincide with abrupt changes in communication, from wartime radio and cryptography to the schooling and print of earlier passes. Everyone born in those years carries the same restless mental signature.
The collective temperament is quick, sceptical and hard to indoctrinate. These cohorts question the curriculum, invent slang their elders cannot follow, and take to new instruments of communication faster than the institutions that own them. What they rebuilt, in the twentieth century instance, was the speed at which ordinary people could learn things without an authority mediating. The corresponding weakness is a scattered attention and a taste for novelty over depth.
In an individual chart the trait localises by house. In the third it shows as unconventional schooling, disrupted early study, or an unusual relationship with siblings; in the ninth, a rejection of orthodox doctrine; in the tenth, a career built on new media. Aspects to Mercury sharpen the whole thing into genuine originality of mind, often accompanied by a nervous system that runs fast and resents being made to sit still.
What It Gives
- ◆original and rapid thinking
- ◆early command of new media
- ◆resistance to indoctrination
- ◆inventive use of language
What It Costs
- ◆attention that scatters
- ◆novelty preferred to depth
- ◆nervous restlessness
This is one line of a whole chart. The rest of it — every placement, house and aspect at once — is a birth date away.
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