Thoughts at the Crossroads
Gemini Season, Hermes and the Power of Attention
In the run-up to Gemini season 2026, I decided to begin consciously working with the Greek Pantheon. I already had a weekly devotional rhythm in place where several of the deities I honoured belonged to that world, and gradually I felt myself being drawn deeper into it. I’ve been reading and researching the myths, reciting Homeric and Orphic hymns out loud, and immersing myself in the old stories. My husband and I even started reading the Iliad together. We are slowly making our way through Pope’s translation, and my AuDHD hyperlexic tongue is relishing the opportunity to “taste” the deliciousness of the language as I read it aloud.
My first deity crush was Persephone. I was eight years old, listening to a Swedish radio series about the Greek gods. I still remember sitting on the kitchen floor in my grandmother’s cottage in the north of Sweden, utterly spellbound as the stories carried me deep into the mysteries.
For many years, the idea of working with an entire pantheon felt daunting. It seemed to require a more dogmatic approach than the intuitive “cherry picking” I had gravitated toward in my own spiritual life. On the surface, the myths themselves often struck me as strangely childish compared to the monotheistic framework I adopted in my late teens. The gods appeared volatile, jealous, impulsive, deeply entangled in human drama. I struggled to reconcile that with the transcendent spiritual ideal I was seeking at the time.
Over the years, however, my understanding has gradually begun to shift. I’ve come to realise that there is no single way of approaching the gods or the old stories. Some people approach them through careful reconstruction of ancient religious practice. Others through revivalist devotion, psychological inquiry, archetypal work, or ceremonial and magical traditions. Some experience the gods as autonomous intelligences; others as profound symbolic realities woven through psyche, nature, culture, and cosmos. Most, I suspect, live somewhere in between.
Rather than trying to force myself into one rigid framework, I’ve slowly been allowing my own relationship with the mysteries to unfold more organically. The deeper I go, the less interested I become in defending a fixed metaphysical position, and the more interested I become in participation, attention, reverence, and relationship.
One of the things that has surprised me most is the sense of wholeness that emerges when working within a pantheon rather than relating only to isolated deities. The gods begin to reveal themselves not merely as separate figures, but as part of a living web of relationships, tensions, harmonies, and complementary forces. Hermes feels different when understood alongside Apollo. Persephone changes when seen through Demeter. Athena becomes more complete beside Hephaestus, Zeus, or Hera. Even apparent contradictions begin to form part of a larger symbolic ecology.
There is something profoundly connective about it. The myths are no longer flattened into moral tales or literal events, but become mirrors of consciousness, nature, psyche, culture, family, power, love, grief, conflict, creativity, and transformation. The pantheon becomes less like a collection of disconnected gods and more like an attempt to map the fullness of reality itself.
Hermes
Yesterday, on the fourth day of the lunar month according to the ancient Athenian calendar, I honoured Hermes according to this tradition for the first time. I started my day by reciting hymn 4 from the Homeric Hymns, the hymn to Hermes. It felt strangely natural, as though I was not so much beginning a new relationship as finally recognising one that had been quietly present all along.
The more I reflected on Hermes, the more I realised how deeply his current already runs through the work I do. Hermes is a god of language, interpretation, transmission, crossroads, symbols, trade, wit, travel between worlds, and the movement of meaning itself. He governs thresholds and connections. He carries messages between realms that do not always easily understand one another.
In many ways, that is precisely the space I have occupied for years as a metaphysical writer and blogger. Much of my work has involved translating symbolic systems into living language, weaving together Tarot, astrology, mythology, psychology, mysticism, and everyday experience in ways that help people orient themselves more meaningfully within their own lives.
Hermes is also deeply connected with pattern recognition, ambiguity, double meanings, and the fluid intelligence required to navigate liminal spaces. As someone with an AuDHD mind that naturally forms connections across seemingly unrelated systems, I can see now why his presence feels so familiar to me.
What struck me most strongly yesterday, however, was the realisation that Hermes is not merely a “messenger god” in the simplified modern sense. He is a mediator between worlds. He governs movement between the conscious and unconscious, mortal and divine, and the known and unknown. He presides over interpretation itself.
Perhaps that is why Gemini season feels like such an appropriate threshold for this deeper exploration. We are entering a Mercurial current collectively: a season of language, multiplicity, information, curiosity, contradiction, perception, and mental movement. The question, however, is whether we are using this current consciously… or simply being carried along by noise.
Gemini Season Tarot Reading
Doing a Gemini season reading for the collective, I first pulled the 2 of Swords from the Mythic Tarot (sponsored link). In this deck, the card portrays Orestes caught between his mother, Clytemnestra, and his father, Agamemnon. His eyes are closed, and his hands cover his ears, reflecting a state of paralysis in the face of irreconcilable tensions.
This feels especially relevant with both Mercury and Uranus now in Gemini. The collective mental field feels increasingly charged: information overload, competing narratives, ideological polarisation, and nervous system exhaustion. Gemini seeks perspective and movement, but Uranus destabilises fixed certainty and accelerates fragmentation.
The 2 of Swords speaks to the temptation to shut out complexity when reality becomes too uncomfortable or contradictory to process. Yet Orestes reminds us that avoiding the conflict does not make it disappear. Something beneath the surface is already shifting.
Rather than reacting impulsively, the Mythic Tarot 2 of Swords suggests the need for conscious observation. Gemini season may ask us to tolerate uncertainty long enough for deeper clarity to emerge.
The Tarot de Marseille cards reveal the energetic movement unfolding beneath the paralysis of the 2 of Swords.
The 2 of Batons shows tension contained rather than resolved. Two opposing forces cross in a stable structure, suggesting that Gemini season may initially feel mentally noisy, divided, or overstimulating without completely descending into chaos. Something is still holding.
The 3 of Batons shifts the dynamic by introducing a central axis. The scattered tension of the Two begins organising itself around a clearer direction. The challenge is to sort the central themes and lessons of the discourse from the chatter.
For many of us, that may mean becoming more intentional about where attention goes. What conversations are genuinely illuminating? What media diets are dysregulating the nervous system? What ideas create clarity rather than fragmentation?
The 7 of Coins slows the pace considerably. After the mental acceleration of the Batons, this card asks what is actually worth cultivating over time. Not every spark deserves fuel. Not every opinion requires engagement.
Taken together, these cards suggest that Gemini season is not asking us to eliminate contradictions or arrive at instant certainty. It is asking us to become more discerning about where we place our attention.
Coming Up Next Week
On Sunday 31 May, we have the Full Moon in Sagittarius, illuminating themes around truth, freedom, expansion, and soul-aligned opportunity.
I’ve created a new article and Tarot spread for this lunation here:
Full Moon in Sagittarius 2026: Truth, Freedom & the Goddess of Opportunity
Next week’s newsletter will include the horoscopes for this Full Moon, along with further reflections on the symbolic currents unfolding through Gemini season.
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Thank you for reading and for walking these crossroads with me.
Lisa | Tanit Iris LeFay 🌹
angelorum.co