Mercury in Scorpio

Lilly 1659 treats Mercury as a go-between, good with the good and ill with the ill, and his character changes with the company it keeps. Scorpio is cold, watery and a house of Mars, so the company here is both Martial and damp.

Scorpio is one of three signs Lilly marks as mute or slow of voice, and he says a hard contact from Saturn to Mercury deepens that. His table gives Mercury only degrees 22 to 27 as terms. The 1697 English Manilius, listing the sign's people as hunters, gladiators and soldiers, has no Mercury in view.

Ptolemy (Ashmand's 1822 translation) gives the fixed signs a constant, strict mind that remembers injuries. Modern astrology describes this placement as penetrating and private, a picture assembled from Scorpio's later reputation that nothing in the texts read here fixes to Mercury.