The Grammar to Glamour Pipeline

If I took a straw poll of which planet most closely corresponds to the concept of glamour, I imagine that the two top candidates would be Venus and Neptune. I’ve written about glamour and Venus in the past, calling out Venus’ counter-clockwise rotation and association with art, finance, and love; malleable constructs whose definitions shift with cultural tides. Venus IS a culture-maker. It makes concepts that would otherwise be taboo socially acceptable. Venusian sex appeal is sanctioned because Venus is a thing to covet. Is this a spell in itself? How come Venus gets to move all weird while Uranus’ sideways-rolling is highlighted as evidence of its transgressive nature?

Associating Neptune with glamour also makes a lot of sense. Fantasy and illusion and glamour go hand-in-hand, especially when coupled with media, as in “Hollywood glamour”. Deception is implicit in glamour. Although we may wish to live a charmed or enchanted life, glamour smacks more of bewitchment. The inference is that glamour is something that is done to us. Because it is not within the scope of our control, glamour leaves us vulnerable to another’s wiles.

 But as it turns out, the etymological roots of glamour lead us to a different place: to grammar. Appropriately, Mercury is the true wizard behind the curtain.

Mercury and his Chicken Chariot from the Splendor Solis (Harley MS 1582) which is one of my Roman Empires.

In the Middle Ages, Latin was the language of the educated classes. Most of the population spoke whatever common tongue was native to the region. Then, as now, scholarship couched knowledge within speech that while on the one hand had a universalizing quality, on the other accentuated the class divide. Formal education was referred to as “Grammar” stemming from the Greek “Techne Grammatike” (Τέχνη Γραμματική) or “Art of Letters”. Here, art denotes the skillful or correct use of technique. The study of language, literature, and philology fell under this umbrella.

An understandable skepticism arose around the educated in this capacity, and a growing sense of linguistic nationalism contributed to the anxiety. Laypeople assumed that grammar not only included the study of language, but also fields like alchemy, astrology, and magic, marking scholarship with an air of suspicion. That words and letters and symbols could be manipulated to achieve certain ends or divine certain outcomes naturally invited wariness, and linked grammar with the exotic and occult. By the early 1700’s, glamer, derived from the Latin grammar, was coined in Scottish to refer to magic. This spelling evolved into the “glamour” that we know today. In French, grammaire, or “incantation” linked directly to grammar. You might see where this is going: “grimoire”, the magician’s book of spellcraft or invocation, is derived from grammaire.

Today, meditating on glamour has me thinking about the Mercury-ruled houses of the natal chart. These are the houses where Gemini and Virgo mark the house cusp (you may have more than one house each if your chart has interceptions).

These are my prompts: 

How might glamour be coloring my interpretation of these houses?
How might glamour be complicating the reality of these houses?
How might glamour be seducing me into experiences within these houses?
How might the Mercury areas of my chart obfuscate rather than enlighten?

There are no wrong answers to these questions, they are simply food for thought, conversation starters for the mind. Flipping our conception of what a planet “should” mean or how it “should” operate allows us to expand our relationship with that planet, and subsequently with our own psyches. Then again, if this approach arouses skepticism, I think Mercury would be equally pleased.

Example of Virgo kicking off the 2nd and 3rd houses in an intercepted chart.