Then I found out that Che’s date of birth may have been moved up a month to save embarrassing his young parents, who were married  only eight months before his birth. (Freud’s birthdate is I believe a similar case; see my True Nativity of Sigmund Freud, Journal of the British Astrological Society, March-April 2000). The fact is (call it a fact) that other than taking a good picture, I’ve noted little definitively Geminian about Guevara.

But I already uploaded the iconic Che photograph, so I decided to leave it there because . . .  we need a touch of red? . . .  but also as a reminder of the pitfalls of this endeavor. And it gives me further time to warm up for the Gemini monuments I mentioned like Marilyn Monroe and the Twin Towers, two subjects not easy to do justice to.

old brother Cecil and they were scared witless. They were staunch brothers-in-arms, both professional progressive literary journalists in London, supporting and editing each other, co-editing journals, even sharing in libel trials, until Cecil’s death in the Great War. The tendency among prominently paired literary siblings, for one of them to be a Gemini is marked: the Corneilles, the Goncourts, the Manns, the Hitchens, the Wolffs, the Collins (Joan and Jackie), Byatt/Drabble.

Benjamin Cardozo

Juergen Habermas

 A weighty column by Habermas appears now on Arts and Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com) about the current European Union crisis. There are few public intellectuals left who express enlightenment ideals as forcefully and opportunely as he. (www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,560549,00.html)

He of  the “Two Americas”,  with the inherent duplicity of the Twins, called LIAR in 4 inch letters on the front pages of the tabloids. Months ago he was caught by YouTube preening in a mirror. Narcissus, a Gemini without a brother, yearns after his own image, never matures. Dowd in the Times made merciless fun of him for hiring his lover to make videos of himself (“His self-diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic . . . ”).  The other op-ed ballbuster, Gail Collins, said she always thought he was two inches deep. Poor Geminis. Don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are Geminis, I have a thing for Geminis, but they can be easy to diss.

Mentally fluent Twins fill the ranks of Edwards’s profession, lawyering,  fascinated by the dynamic of justice’s two-panned scale and the power of the word.  As a Gemini, the lawyer enjoys  in-betweening and pairing off in so many ways: as an advocate, a mediator, a communicator, a representative,  an opponent whose strength lies in the ability to argue either side;  also,  she exploits to the hilt her network of personal relationships and inter-obligations, contacts and introductions.  Some prominent  attorneys immediately come to my mind: F. Lee Bailey (10 June 1933, with the Geminian lightness of the aviator/playboy), and Palm Beach’s Robert Montgomery (9 June 1930, who died last week),  a tort litigator like Edwards, a Democrat with occasional Republican clients, and the man responsible for the multi-billion dollar finding against the tobacco industry. Closer to Edwards’s current dilemma are two recent New York Attorneys General: Eliot Spitzer (June 10, 1959), who projected an image clear as a bell, then suddenly proved schizoid, two-faced; and Rudolph Giuliani (28 May 1944), whose idiosyncratic infidelities and cellphone antics are the least of his Geminian displays.  (Marilyn Monroe & Donald Trump are also Geminis.)                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Two six foot red hearts, sculpture by Jim Dine (b. 16 June 1935 )                                                                                                                                
   

                                            Raymond Pettibone (26 May 1957), 

                                         Untitled (Meet  John Doe), detail                 
 

Here's a couple of interesting Gemini images from Gemini artists. The one on the right is by M. C. Escher. The one below comes from "The Arte of English Poesie" of 1589, an influential compendium of rhetorical and poetic techniques. The column on the left is to be read from bottom up, the 

The Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham. $5

Another image of pure Gemini from Saul Steinberg (june 15, 1914). The obvious limitation of Steinberg as an artist might be described as a restriction, both technically and thematically, to purely Gemini matters. (Other Gemini artists similarly self-limited are Ellworth Kelly, M. C. Escher & Raymond Pettibon.)

Scientists usually feel left out when the topic of astrology arises;  they should not. For instance, a clearly disproportionate number of the seminal names in sub-atomic physics were born under Gemini:

William Gilbert, author of De Magnete, ("the first great English scientific work") was born May 24, 1544. 

Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736). In seven papers on electricity and magnetism published between 1785 and 1789, he explained the mathematical laws of attraction and repulsion between magnetic poles and electric charges.

James Clerk Maxwell (b. June 13, 1831), author of the 1873 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism demonstrating the identity of the two phenomena, "the most important physicist between Newton and Einstein".

These three men established the theory that the material world is essentially constituted by the interplay of two immaterial forces, opposite and mutually exclusive. Perhaps on a level with these three belongs the British technoscientist Oliver Lodge (b. 12 June 1851). He extended and applied electromagnetic theory to wireless transmission, the bipolar electrical cell, the study of lightning, automotive engineering (the spark plug), and fog-busting. He might almost be the man in Steinberg's drawing. Oliver Lodge is also remembered as a president of the (British) Society for Psychical Research.

Mention must also be made of another researcher associated with a form of magnetism, so-called animal magnetism: Franz Anton Mesmer (b. May 23, 1734) who, applying the principal of universal immaterial polarized force to medicine, psychology and sexuality, was the progenitor of dynamic psychiatry and the experimental approach to subjectivity.

Another quote from gemini Ralph Waldo Emerson:

How slowly, how slowly we learn that witchcraft and ghostcraft,  palmistry and magic, and all the other so-called superstitions, which, with so much police, boastful skepticism, and scientific committees, we had finally dismissed to the moon as nonsense, are really no nonsense at all, but subtle and valid influences, always starting up, mowing, muttering in our paths, and shading our day.          (Journals, September 1842)