Mercury in Cancer
If you have Mercury in Cancer, your mind is connected with your memories, feelings, and emotions from the past. You tend to hold on to the memories of things because they give you security. You are highly interested in inner, subjective, and personal issues, and your thinking is based more on feelings, intuition, personal experiences, and prejudices rather than reason or logic. Intellectual abilities and accomplishments without heart or soul mean little to you. You are a sensitive listener and deeply interested in a person’s feelings and inner life. In addition to psychology, you are probably drawn to education, art, poetry, music, or mythology.
You are shy and somewhat reticent about speaking in public, but you will open yourself up and share your thoughts in small, intimate, little family-type circles of people you know and trust. You perhaps enjoy keeping a diary or chronicle of your thoughts and feelings regarding your day-to-day happenings. Your mind retains and absorbs knowledge easily. You are intuitive, psychic, and sympathetic, yet may become depressed over your own problems and the problems of the world. You may have difficulty in getting to the root of the problem because you so easily become involved emotionally with the people instead of the problem. You may have difficulty in making decisions or you may simply change your mind constantly. Mental focus and control must be developed.
With Mercury in Cancer you have an emotional, impressionable, imaginative, sympathetic and very changeable mind. You’re receptive and sensitive to other people, but your reason can be swamped by your feelings and senses. You learn easier by listening to others than by studying. You’re more easily swayed by an appeal to your sympathy than by a rational argument. This is a good placement for a psychologist or psychic.
Mercury is neither masculine nor feminine but neutral: it is silver, reflecting all that it contacts. Mercury in Cancer is therefore similar in energy to Mercury conjunct the Moon, where the emotional, changing, feminine energy of the Moon emotionalizes and makes changeable your speech, thought, and communication patterns. The more aspects you have to Mercury in your chart, the greater and more complex your consciousness.
The reflective mind needs aspects for its expansion, and the closest aspect is the most important. In the physical body it rules the nervous system, the arms, hands and shoulders, the lungs and the respiratory tract. Its position by house in your chart is where your mind or attention is focused.