The Scold's Bridle

Some reflections on Mercury stationing in Cardinal Water

Before we dive into this Mercury stationing in Cardinal Water reflection, accompanying Saturday the 27^th’s video, can I ask you to stop what you are doing and focus your attention on your mouth, tongue, jaw and throat. Done it? Do you feel tightness of your jaw, or clenching of your teeth? Are you breathing or holding your breath? Now, say something! And return to reflecting upon your mouth. Did you notice that briefly held breath? It is there, as it is the thing you do half a second before you speak! Your tongue softens, your jaw relaxes, as you exhale, releasing verbal tones that arise from both your head and heart. You have done this so many times you no longer notice you are doing it. Yet, you may be in a place wherein you are free to express the entire contents of your head and heart. You may chose not to, but you are likely to be able to do it.

But did you know there once was an iron age that closed over the head of a women, an actual cage with a plate inside it that pressed flat against her tongue, so that to speak at all was to drive metal into her own flesh? It was punishment for the crime of – having an opinion. Seriously! It was not for theft or violence. Merely for talking. She who argued; she who said the thing in the room nobody wanted said; she who answered back when she should have lowered her eyes instead. That who was punished.

And they walked her through the town in it, on a chain, in daylight, and the towns people merely nonchalantly watched.

Okay, I know there are going to be some ‘blokes’ who would love to reintroduce this cage, but bear with me as I tease this torture device out a little more, and share with you the relevancy for this Mercury’s sojourn in Cardinal Water.

In the very same fields and villages, women were taken for knowing which root eased a fever, for living without a man’s name over their door, or for speaking truth. She was drowned or burned, called by a word that meant, underneath everything else it meant, uncontainable.

Contained. Sit with that word, because it was built for the Yin in general and women specifically. Like the energetics of Yin, women are expected to be custodians of the interior, that place where feelings roam. They are supposed to hold everyone else’s unspoken weather along with their own. Yet they, you, are expected to contain it and not let it out. You are supposed to let ‘it’ move you, flood you, nearly drown you, but keep it inside where nobody can hear it.

Do you recognise it?

The iron may be gone from the world now. But go and look at your own jaw in a mirror tonight and tell me the bridle has truly gone? Silencing still exists. It just has a different name. Perhaps you have been called ‘dramatic’ or ‘hysterical’ or ‘mad’ or ‘emotional’. Perhaps you are a little ‘too intense’? Your words are marked down, dismissed or not heard, not necessarily for what you are saying, but for who you are to the person that you are opening your heart and awareness to.

Lest this reflection is misunderstood as being the sole dominion of women, there was another cage, for men, made of entirely different material. A man who knelt in fealty to a king swore an oath and that oath was the whole of what he was permitted to say about power for the rest of his life. Speak against the crown and the punishment was made into spectacle on purpose, as his body was taken apart in the street so that every throat watching learned the lesson without needing the iron at all.

Different metal. The same hand forging it.

As Mercury prepares to retrograde in a landscape that has no dam erected to prevent the free flowing torrent of your heart-words, find where you carry this silence, whether in your jaw or in the half breath you take before telling the truth that might cost you the room, or in a knee that never wanted to bend.

You already know what I’m talking about because you have lived inside it, especially if you are the one person in a family who says the thing everyone else has silently agreed to leave unsaid.

Remember what happened? Remember how fast the room turned you into the problem rather than turning toward the thing you’ve spoken about. Remember how much easier it is to call you difficult than to let the house fall down around the truth you have just set on the table.

Scale that up and you have the bridle, the stake, the scaffold, the closed file, the same hand wearing whatever century’s glove was lying nearest. And we still see it going on today, all over the world. Whether it is a woman who has spent years as one of the loudest voices naming a man’s crimes against girls, enduring being called unstable or a man who spoke out against the abuse of system towards his art and creativity, and having to live with the public derision and claims of weirdness. Yet she and he was right.

So feel it again, that place at the root of your tongue, the rounding-off you do before the true sentence reaches the air. It is old, forged before you, handed down like a ring nobody asked if you wanted to wear. It belongs to your history rather than to any failure of your own character. And because it was made, by hands protecting power, it can be unmade the same way.

The unmaking is this: you speak while the fear is still moving through you, you let the inside out before it has finished asking permission. The room may turn toward you, or it may stay exactly where it was. Either way, you do it because some part of you has been waiting your entire life to hear, from your own mouth, that you are worth speaking up for.

The kairos is ripe to speak from your heart on matters that truly need to be spoken about, and not just opinions for the sake of them or words that will consciously hurt another. But words that acknowledge a conspiracy of silence, when injustice hides the truth, and when lies paint a perfect picture, when beneath the canvas lies Dorian Grey’s true character.