Although this is something I rarely do, sometimes it can be best to illustrate a point with personal examples. In attempting to enumerate the effects a Black Hole might have upon a personal planet, such as Mercury, perhaps the best device is to take that old writer’s adage to heart—"write what you know."

And do I know Black Hole Mercury! My natal Mercury is at 19 Cancer, exactly opposed Black Hole Hel at 19 Capricorn, the seat of the first of the 1993 Uranus/Neptune conjunctions. I had begun to work with Black Holes and their effects about 18 months before the conjunction. When I saw it approaching, and realized it would highlight a natal Saturn/Mercury opposition (my natal Saturn lies at 13 Capricorn retrograde, a family Saturnine degree repeated in both my aunt’s and grandmother’s charts), I decided I had two options for working with that combined energy—I could write or I could go insane.

Fortuitously (though some might consider it a mixed manifestation), my first articles on Galactics came out in Welcome to Planet Earth and The Mountain Astrologer within weeks of the conjunction, and I haven’t looked back since.

Mercury represents the power of communication, as well as the ability to think and process data, collate and organize information, and express ourselves meaningfully to others. It governs, or "rules," such disparate areas as children and young people, early childhood development and education, teachers, neighbors, siblings and lesser relations, pets, cars and transportation, mail, and the nervous system and senses. As well, it rules any connecting or linking energy, such as plumbing, wiring, or cables. It governs the art of writing as well, and it is this area in which it has made some of its most obvious manifestations in my life.

Black Holes, on the other hand, represent the volte face, the sudden, startling, often unexpected change of the status-quo reality, where in the twinkling of an eye the conditions which had pertained previously are overthrown, and wholly unrecognizable circumstances are left in their place. They represent points of energy drain as well as energy attraction. They can be compelling, evocative, and overwhelming. Black Holes connect us to visions of parallel universes and alternate dimensions where we can envision, not the ways things are, but the ways they might become. It can be very difficult for the native with Black Hole contacts to communicate his or her reality to others. Such individuals are more than usually susceptible to misinterpretation, misrepresentation, and misunderstandings.

One common difficulty for Black Hole Mercury natives is learning disorders, such as dyslexia. It has been my experience that this is most common for BH Mercury natives where Mercury is also retrograde. I was fortunate enough to be born at a Direct Station of Mercury (and in exact balsamic semisquare to Pluto), making it a very powerful and potent force in my life. Although I have never suffered from any reading difficulties, I do have a form of minor "numeric dyslexia," with a distressing tendency to transpose numbers, often with quite unpleasant, though sometimes comic, results.

Mercury has always been my solace. Reading was especially important to me as a child, when I became immersed in the literary works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and, later, Dorothy L. Sayers (my Scorpio rising doubtless has its effects on my choice of reading material). It was with the introduction of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic, The Lord of the Rings, into my life at age 13 (gifted by a cousin, a Mercury-ruled agent) that I became truly aware of the power of Mercury/literature to transport one into another reality and to experience that parallel dimension as in some sense real.

This is an important lesson for the BH Mercury native—distinguishing between fact and fabrication, reality and fantasy. With true Black Hole focus, I became perhaps even more fixated on Tolkien’s extensive appendices to The Lord of Rings, which detail the history and culture of the world he created. My Virgo Moon (in exact sextile to that BH Mercury and itself square to Black Hole Ereshkigal at 18/19 Sagittarius) delighted in the minute detail he provided.

I began my writing career at age 10, with some poetry which was published in the school paper. It became important for me to give back to Mercury something in exchange for all it had given me. Short stories (horror and detective, with that Scorpio rising still pronounced) followed in the high school literary magazine, which won Keystone Awards from the state of Pennsylvania’s competition. But my real focus was shifting, as is common with BH natives.

At about the time I began writing, I also discovered a deep and abiding love for history—perhaps "obsessive" would be a better term. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I had acquired a private library of over a thousand hard-bound volumes of European history, much more extensive than that of the local small town library. In all those tomes my favorite subjects were royalty, and royal, as well as family, genealogy became a passion for me.

My Leo Sun, Virgo Moon and Scorpio Ascendant all found perfect fulfillment in mapping out huge charts of connections between royal houses. The Leo reveled in the royalty, pageantry and panoply of it all, Virgo gushed over the intricate details of the inter-relationships, and Scorpio had truly found a home, for without sex and death there would be no genealogy! I plunged into this field of study with all the fervor and focus a Black Hole Mercury is capable of, which is considerable.

Classic Black Hole Mercury manifestations have pursued me throughout my life. Cars, in particular, have been a constant thorn in my side, draining me of financial resources, time and focus, until I gave mine up in the early ‘nineties. I cannot tell you the number of times my car has left me stranded at the roadside, usually in the most inconvenient circumstances possible (like a raging thunderstorm late at night in the middle of a rural expressway, with no traffic to flag down and not a house or farm for miles). Oddly, the car worked perfectly on the only long journey I attempted with it. Short trips are Mercury-ruled, long ones come under Jupiter’s bailiwick.

I have always had a rather unusual relationship with pets—the first family dog had to be returned because his boisterous enthusiasm startled and unnerved me at age 4. His replacement survived nine years until, while my parents were away on a vacation, she suddenly developed intestinal tumors and I had to make the decision to have her put down. I had been mauled rather badly by some cats when I was very young, and had always had a dread of them, until a roommate moved in with one (about the same time I decided to get rid of the car; Black Hole events often clump together and "trade off," as it were).

This cat and I became fast friends, and for eight years she was a pivotal part of my daily life, until my friend decided to move on, taking her cat with her, and I was pet-less again (this occurred within days of the passing of the dearly-loved cousin who had first introduced me to The Lord of the Rings). A couple of years later another cousin gave me one of the stray cats she periodically acquires, and this animal and I truly bonded. More like a dog than a traditional cat, Grimalkin would come to call, answer to her name, and sought ought every opportunity to sit in my lap or share my bed. She passed away just recently, oddly enough, on the birthday of the cousin who had brought us together. This type of love/hate relationship with an individual or a facet of existence, either simultaneously or in rotation, is common with Black Hole energies—in this case the loathed and feared species providing the pet that has given the most solace, only to be taken from me again.

The mail is another area rife with problems for the Black Hole Mercury native. Either I gravitate to clusters of such ill-fated individuals, or else my own Mercury is so powerful as to affect all those around me, for on the small street where I formerly lived we regularly had what were jokingly termed "mail free" days. At least once a month, and sometimes more frequently, the postal service apparently took an unscheduled vacation from our neighborhood—no one on the entire block got ANY mail.

That is perhaps the least annoying manifestation of the postal energies. Frequently, at least two to three times per week, I received mail that was not addressed to my home. I would get mail for the neighbor to one side of me or the other, or for the same house number, but on the street a block or two away, or for the same address on north 26th Street, instead of south 26th Street. If the delivery was a near miss, I redelivered the mail myself; otherwise I would try to snag the carrier next time through or redeposit the mail in the box with a note that it was misdelivered. But if so much of other people’s mail came to me, dared I hope that none of mine was misrouted to them? I dared not. I have had letters and packages misdelivered which have taken weeks or even months to reach their proper destination. My personal record is a brief note from my folks, with a check enclosed, that took almost 13 months to arrive!

Plumbing has been a constant headache as well. The drips and leaks are continual; the plumber fixes one only to have another begin, or the same leak needs attention just months later. Not to be outdone, on the other end of the Mercury plumbing spectrum there are also clogs, and just as frequently.

Although computers, like most high-tech gadgets, can be seen to lie under the purview of Uranus, printers are undoubtedly mercurial in nature. Perhaps in no other area are the frustrating, delaying tactics of Black Holes more in evidence in my life, as well as their renowned propensity for sucking the energy out of any situation they contact. Printers have been an ongoing issue for years. I got my first computer in 1991, but couldn’t afford a printer at the time (difficult to imagine in these days of complete packages for $500, computers used to actually cost real money!). Initially my housemate did the printing at her office, from 5" disks containing my files. After a few years, her office converted to the new, smaller 3" diskettes, which were no longer compatible with mine, so I had to invest in a printer.

All went well for about two years, when my printer began to develop some unnerving glitches. It wasn’t long before I found myself unable to print even a simple letter with any guarantee it would be legible. I was attending computer school at the time, and one lab there had the old 5" ports, so I would backup my files at home, take them to the lab, and then, if the files were small, print them there, or, if larger, covert them to 3" disks for my housemate to print at her office. Needless to say, it was a round-about process which created much stress and turmoil, things the Black Hole covets for the energies they raise.

When my schooling finished I was unable to find employment immediately in my new field, so I still had no money to invest in a new printer. The round-robin of backed-up files continued for over a year, becoming increasingly less convenient, as the school was a mile and a half from my home and I no longer had any reason to visit except to print or convert my files. A year later I received an ancient hand-me-down printer from a friend, but that, too, developed inconsistencies within a few weeks which made its performance less than reliable.

At length I heard of a friend-of-a-friend who was upgrading his system and desired to sell his old one—just two years old, much more powerful than my old dinosaur, and complete with a color ink jet printer. I was thrilled; for me the particular enticement to the package was that I would be purchasing a system which had been functioning perfectly for two years without a hitch, and all I had to do was unplug it there and plug it back in here.

Unfortunately, I had reckoned without my Black Hole Mercury’s ability to function at a distance. The week before I was to acquire the system, its current owner decided it would be "nice" for me to have it in its original condition, without any of his files or add-ons. Instead of removing these separately, one at a time, he wiped the hard drive and reloaded it with the Windows ‘95 recovery CDs that had come with it, but which had never previously been used, as it was factory-loaded. It all went off without a hitch, except for one thing—you guessed it—the print driver files on the recovery disk were flawed, and I had no connection with my new printer! What should have been a one hour set-up and transfer took over two months to straightened out, until I was finally able to print again at my own home, after over three years of farming out my printing to anyone who’d help me.

That printer lasted about 18 months, until it literally fell apart. I went another two years without a printer, helped by the Internet, where I could email files, articles and letters without having to print, until last year I finally got a full, integrated system, with a combination fax/printer/scanner. So far so good, but with BH Mercury you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop...

Black Hole Mercury also wreaked its havoc on those persons in my life which it rules. I am an only child with no siblings, the cousins of my generation are all but one considerably older than me, and I grew up in an isolated, rural neighborhood with one child my own age, and a grammar school class of less than 50. So siblings there were none, and neighbors and lesser relations were in short supply.

I have been fortunate in aspects of early education, however, and had some amazing and gifted teachers, persons whose powerful impact on my life molded and guided my intellectual development. Throughout school my grades had been excellent, due to the stability of the Stationary Direct Mercury and the Black Hole’s ability, or rather, need to acquire and accumulate all the facts it possibly could (Cancer Mercury is noted for its retentive abilities as well).

But what the Black Hole giveth, it also taketh away; as a grammar school student, I got all "O’s," for "outstanding," on my Report Card, except for penmanship, which was the only "U," for "unsatisfactory." I felt the need to redress that inequity, and in junior high became a skilled and respected calligrapher, though my own penmanship remained as illegible as ever. I continued as a straight-A student, graduated seventh in my class with very little effort (the Black Hole likes to retain what it acquires and loathes expenditure of energy), but the tide was about to turn. I was shifting from Black Hole Mercury and early education, to Black Hole Jupiter and higher education.

My natal Jupiter is retrograde at 24 Sagittarius, conjunct the Black Hole at the Galactic Center. It is to the retrograde that I attribute the ensuing difficulties in education, for, while the stationary direct BH Mercury worked for me, allowing me to acquire and collate the vast amounts of data necessary to succeed in academic endeavors, the retrograde BH Jupiter worked against me, creating unstable manifestations in higher education, and shutting off outlets for that education, to the extent that to this day, most of my formal education has never been put to use. But that is a tale for another day.

For now, suffice to say that Black Hole Mercury has been, and continues to be, a leading influence on my development. From the complicated metaphysics and physics required to understand Black Holes and decipher their meaning in my own life and the lives of others, to the coke-bottle-thick glasses through which I view the world, Black Hole Mercury, as both an intellectual component and a physical agent, has largely created the person I am today. Its impact, perhaps more than any other, has set my feet on the Path I now tread, and, by whatever tortuous, twisted byways of its choosing, will lead me Home.

Other individuals with Black Hole Mercury include Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein, Timothy Leary, and Mahatma Gandhi.